Screw Bipolar with a Rusty Chainsaw.

It was literally the day after the solstice when my depression began to rear its head. Here I am a few weeks later, I feel exhausted, burned out, and like I'm a complete failure as a parent. It's clearly my depression talking. It's clearly the fact that my screwed up brain chemistry is cycling my mood downwards again and complex emotional trauma is spurring it on. I had this weird thought that I was going to be able to write again and get myself a bit of work going doing readings. After all, I was sort of managing it in April. I didn't plan for my brain to say "Fuck this shit, I'm done."

It's been nearly two weeks since I have written in my daily journal. My planner is all a mess because I haven't been keeping it updated all month. My daily routines are screwed up, even the new ones that I established with the attempt to keep the kids on top of their academics. I need some time that is relaxing but that's impossible to find. I need some time to get housework done, but it's hard to juggle that compared to the need to monitor what the kids are doing. Since school's been out of session, boredom has been driving Snuggle Bug to making some reckless decisions in an effort to alleviate his boredom. That's made it harder to keep track of things.

I don't know what to write. The longer I go without writing, the more readership I lose on my blogs that are work oriented. But I'm stuck in this  mental fog that makes writing relateable content really hard. I'm at this place emotionally where I feel like no one wants to read my work because it just isn't any good. I have all of the garbage that my parents said about my career goals ringing in my ears right now and it's pretty damn awful. (Thankfully, I'm not hallucinating them haranguing me about how I'm a failed investment because of my college debt and the fact that I don't have a career that's making big money right now. It's just all memories getting triggered.)

I was less a cherished child and more a potential meal ticket if I made it big in my writing when it became clear that I actually had some talent for it. That was when they started to 'sorta' support me when it came to my writing. Before that, it was made very clear to me that my value as a person was weight against what I could materially contribute to the family and that I owed them a debt of 15k because of the cost of my birth. I was told that I was an investment and that I had better pay out well or I'd have hell to pay for it. When I went off to college, they expected me to leave Beloved and marry a doctor or lawyer (and thereby become their meal ticket because I'd have married into money). When my mother wasn't working to sabotage my relationship with Beloved, she was trying to get me to consider leaving him for an arranged marriage with some rich guy in Texas who was looking for a young, pretty wife who could cook. (The bitter irony that my mother who spent all her time in my youth telling me that I wasn't ever going to find a husband because I was a bad cook in her eyes and a lazy housekeeper wasn't lost on me in her efforts to arrange this union.)

So, I'm depressed and having all of that garbage come up while I am trying to deal with kids who are about at their limit for staying home all the time. The park is open, but if we go there they'll want to use the playground equipment. I don't have the supplies to clean it all off before they use it. So, we haven't gone over there since last autumn when the weather was nice. They're beginning to wear a rut into the front yard as they ride their bikes around it. My attempts at gardening are going poorly. Some of it is the heat and some of it is just ... Well, I've been depressed and the weather's been awful for gardening, so I haven't been doing much outside with it.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I have to figure out something to get me out of this spiral before it gets bad. I just have no idea what it is going to take.