So if I'm not already in the territory of depression, I'm certainly in the outskirts of the area. The symptoms are easily recognizable at this point: dazed, tired and distracted all day but becoming wide awake at bedtime, not hungry (but still getting that sugar drop when I skip meals), lack of sex drive, generalized anxiety and vivd, awful dreams. All in all, I feel like i'm just barely making it through the day and accomplishing all my commitments, but only just. Thank god I got that day planner. I honestly don't know what's going to happen if it gets worse- at this point my mistakes at work are few and easily explained, but there's no garantee it'll stay that way.

At this point I've dealt with depression enough times to know what needs to happen in order for me to pull out of it. I've actually got a standard set of "guidelines for people dealing with depression" that I tell my friends, when they're also feeling sad and blue: Exercise. Eat right. Get enough sleep. Depression is a condition with physical effects, and just as you wouldn't beat yourself up for not being to run a marathon with a sprained ankle, so you shouldn't beat yourself up for not being able to accomplish as much while depressed. Be kind to yourself. Depression's mechanisms feed itself, and unless you make a conscious effort to pull yourself out of it, it will likely get worse before it gets better. Even if you try, it may still get worse before it gets better. Check out medication and see if it's right for you. Check out therapy and see if it's right for you.

And even though I can look back and say, yes, this has been a long and deeply crappy year in many respects and being depressed at the end of it is a pretty reasonable response, it is still so frustrating to be back here. When I left Jlem I had finished off 5 years of therapy. I was going towards a fresh start, after having aquired new tools with which to deal with stress and anxiety. And here I am, back again.

It's not that I failed (and I have to keep reminding myself of that, since in my low state it's very easy to see it like that). But I had hoped that I would do better.

Marsa and I fought two days ago. It was awful- she uses exactly the type of communication style that presses all the wrong buttons for me. I start out trying to separate out what she's actually saying and what's dredging up bad memories but it's as though I'm participating in two fights at once, and I'm just exhausted by the end. It was just bad. I barely slept afterwords, I was so angry, and then I was angry because being angry is part of why I lose my hair and I just lay in bed churning and beating myself up for letting her get to me, and for letting myself be in this situation in the first place, for having to move in in the first place. There is more than enough pissed-offedness to go around.

I'm going to have to move out ASAP. I'm going to have to find a short term rental in which I will stay, all of my things in boxes, until Hill and I find a place. This is exactly the situation that I did not want to be in- I hate uncertainty, I hate temporary living situations. Of all the stressful situations I can think of, this is easily in the top five. And here I am, at the end of a year since I moved to Tel Aviv, and the entire year has been a temporary living situation, and waiting for it to be over. Little wonder my hair's been falling out. Little wonder I haven't been able to stop grinding my teeth.

I want to be angry at other people for this situation, and to a certain extent I think I'm justified in doing so. But yanno, it was me who allowed a lot of this stuff to happen. I took my sister in, instead of telling her to find a short-term gig. I moved out when the landlord started playing dirty, instead of putting my foot down and insisting she find her own place. I said that it was alright, that I would wait for Hill, even though his trip got put off by three months and I'm living with a pregnant lady. I put aside my frustrations with the way Marsa talks to me (and insists on the way that I live, as though I were her ward and not her boarder) again and again, because I told myself that her comfort zone (no matter how bizarre) was more important than mine. I have to take responsibility for that. I have to know when my boundaries are and be vigilant about not letting people walk all over them. Why is that so hard?

So I'm waffling back and forth between simmering-angry and wanting-to-cry upset, depending on who I'm blaming for my current situation. God help the next person who comes in the archive with some dumbass request.