Leave a Message at the Beep

I hate my birthday.  It's the black hole of the year, the trigger for a million bad memories, and this year I've gone into it in a medium-level depression.  I hate the way I feel right now, I hate how helplessly self-centered I become as I slide down yet again.  I want to be loved but I want to be left the hell alone.  I know it will pass, but I'm always left wondering what I will have lost in the process.  How many friends will drift away, how deep will the piles of random crap in my house get, how many more times will I snap at and push away my children and my husband, how many pounds will I gain back, how many things will I fumble at work?

Me me me, my my my, poor baby.  What the fuck?  I desperately want to reach out, to say hey, there's something wrong, I'm struggling!  But the next moment I talk myself out of it.  No one wants to hear it anyway, and I sure as hell don't want pity.  I also don't want to hear that I should just snap out of it.  I take the medicine, it helps but doesn't really fix anything.

I want to go back in time and find that five year old me, that ten year old me, that fifteen year old me, and somehow find a way to fix things.  Because it just seems too late to fix anything now.  If my therapist is right, then what I need to do most is grieve, allow myself to finally feel all the disappointment and fear and sadness that I have pushed down my whole life.  I resent that.  Why is the answer to this unwholesome self-loathing and relentless navel-gazing supposed to be swimming farther into the sewage?

I'll keep doing what I always do, the only thing I know how to do:  keep putting one foot in front of the other.  Maybe some day some of this will start to make sense.