Everyday in a life of the depressed

One thing about D is that you cannot pretend not to have it when you have it.

Everyday is like a war waged against D. You prepare your army. You train your weapons. You win. Oftentimes, you lose. It's not very easy to train everyday for this. It's always a conscious effort to fight and be better, as what I always say.

Being happy doesn't come so easily. You have to pull it closer to you. And when you have it, you gotta keep it close to you and embrace it while it lasts.

You can always appear cool and calm outside, but inside, there's always that struggle to show all's okay when there's that powerful force pulling you back to a state of desperation, hopelessness, and depression. It seems so easy to be in that state. It seems like you're made for that. It seems like it's home. It's that kind of home that ruins, destroys, and crashes you into pieces.

Pre- anniversary special

In less than a week, I will be celebrating the first year anniversary of the marriage of my body and this pill called Fluoxetine.

I remember the date so well. I remember how July 17, 2012 was written casually on a piece of a prescription paper that doctors use. I remember how the doctor just seemed so calm about her prescription of an anti-depressant to a woman who I had known as someone strong and happy. I remember so well how I wished she would have second or third thoughts on prescribing medicines to me. I remember so well how I wanted her to ask more questions just to make sure she is prescribing the right thing to me. I remember how I shivered and felt utter disbelief on what she told me, it's Clinical Depression.

It's almost a year. It's almost a year that I have been dependent on these pills. It's almost a year of dreaming living my life without these, to feel I can be happy without the help of any pills. It's almost a year of hoping that my family would finally have peace of mind, confident that their daughter, sister, and aunt can get on with her life "normally".

It'll be the first year anniversary. And I'm not looking forward to more years.

Thankfully busy

The last week of June provided me a vague picture of what it will be like for me for the next four months. B-u-s-y. Busy as a bee. Last time I was working, it was only 12 hours contact time with my students a week. This time around, I would have 30 hours of facing my students.

I am both thankful and humbled that I am given this much trust to help form the minds of our young Filipinos.

With this much responsibility and pressure ( "to be fun", as how most of my students put it in their expectations), I feel that I gotta have extra consciousness to take care of myself. So how do I do this? (Well, I haven't really come up with strict rules to live by) . But these are the ones I have been consciously doing:

1. Eat on time. Eat healthy. This one I'm struggling with since I got no cook and I am no cook. And given the sked I have, it doesn't allow me to cook my food.
2. Take regularly fish oil and vitamins every night. Taking these medicines has remarkably made me more energetic and stable. It is weird how I feel so positively different when I am taking these that I started thinking that I have become so dependent on them.
3. Take the other pills at the same time everyday. I do not know what's with the timing of taking meds but it's been doing me good. How? I am not very sure. But I think my body has started to imbibe a system when meds are taken, when I am awake, and when I am sleepy. And that kind of system, the body seems to like it!

These are just really simple ways I do, but I know that these are far from truly living a healthy lifestyle.