But when the blahs become continuous and disabling, then you're in the soup.
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been struggling against what I thought was something physical--hypoglycemia, gut malf, my usual winter stuffy head and inchoate sinusitis--and this morning it occurred to me, Dude, this ain't right, and you know it's not.
What got me thinking was when I interrupted my viewing of last night's ep of House, MD to get on the computer and go to monster.com, to look at job openings in the area. Scanning the list (and seeing virtually nothing I'm qualified for) I realized that I was actually experiencing pain while trying to find some job leads. Stepping away from the computer didn't help any. Real pain, in my chest--not cardiac pain, not a sign of heart disease, but simple old-fashioned heartbreak.
Seems that the last thing I need is to be reminded that "heartbreak" is not just a metaphor. I already knew it; there have been enough reversals in my life--hell, just in the last decade!--that I've experienced this feeling before, more times than I'm due. It's real pain, for all that it's psychosomatic, and it sucks.
Me having to find a job isn't the problem. I'm not afraid of work and I've never minded having to pay my own way. I expect it; it's fine--but I need a job because virtually everything else in my life is in the shitter.
Having to find work--and finding very little that I can do, since the jobs I'm seeing are all "X+ years of experience required"--when I need employment is bad enough; feeling anxiety and depression over it is worse. But the worst part is when no matter what I do, I'm suffering for it: looking for work hurts; not looking for work hurts worse. Remaining unemployed is not an option and there's precious little indication that anything else is going to go my way, career-wise; I'm right back at the basic premise of, "You're screwed!"
Of course, it's not just me obsessing over work and money that's the problem, here. It's all related to Mom's death; losing a family member is bad enough, but losing your last parent is worse. On top of that, there are the estate issues that I'm still dealing with: one of the banks doesn't think the kids are named as beneficiaries--we most assuredly are; I was there when the paperwork was filled out--and I can't find anything on file to prove them wrong, which means getting a lawyer and going to court.
Life sucks. Get a fuckin' helmet. Yeah.
But I'm increasingly finding myself being incapacitated...and that is, as I said above, just not right. I've had this inability to do anything for a couple of weeks at least, and it's taken me this long to realize that it's not just an unusually bad case of the February blahs: this is real clinical depression.
Identifying the problem is 90% of solving it. I've got the number of the office of the church I'm a member of, and I'm going to call about their grief support group. That ought to help.