Stop...I want to stop.

I can't stop eating. I don't want to.

I don't want to what? Well, I don't want to eat compulsively like this. But I also don't want to stop the comfort that comes from it.

It's a bit like skin picking, a way to zone out, a lack of engagement in my surroundings. Just a simple action of moving hand to mouth & back again. Eat eat eat eat.

I lost nearly 2st a couple of years ago. Most of it is back on. Piled on slowly at first, but the last 1/2 stone was a rapid increase this year.

I'm so unhappy with my weight, yet I can't stop the eating. I can't help myself. I don't mean to buy the bad things, but I end up picking them up thinking I can control it, because in the past I've been able to. But not now. Entire big bars of chocolate are devoured in one sitting. No real enjoyment in them. The night before last I had eaten so much bad food & drunk so much wine I had those unpleasant sick-burps, minor regurgitation, yet still I kept putting things in my mouth.

I play a sport I love. I ADORE it. It's taken over my life over the last 4 years and consumes me; my partner shares in this sport (something I'm so happy about), my friends are all from the community, my holidays are planned around my games or so I can go and watch games abroad, huge amounts of money are spent on the equipment I need (and want!) yet the one thing that will actually make me BETTER at the game, give me even more enjoyment is my weight & fitness being the best it can be.

But I can't stop eating, can't get healthier and thinner and stronger. I can't find the motivation to work out at home & develop my strengths.

Frequently I excuse my lack of motivation; that I'm in a transient place in my life; no stable home, no job, not living with my parter. Not much is on my terms at the moment and that certainly makes it difficult to find the mindset to be positive. But it's a weak excuse.

But then again I ask myself; is it? I'm mentally unwell? I can't help it? Or can I? Should I not just pull myself together and sort it out? But how can I, I'm mentally unwell? Saying that just feeds the fire of the scrounger, the lazy, invisibly ill person. What a vicious cycle.

I'm taking Venlafaxine for my depression and anxiety. Generally I find it helps, I'm less.....random. I'm still low and I'm terribly detached from life and its experiences, but I don't feel like I'm trapped & drowning like I have done before. Just a lot of hopelessness and frustration. But adding to that frustration is the lack of side effects I experience; Venlafaxine is meant to restrict your appetite. So why am I still eating? Or is it that my appetite is gone, but the compulsion to eat is so strong that I'm ignoring it?

Help. Stop....I want to stop.

...and what about failure?

I quit my job this week (note...this is now 3weeks ago). I've been there less than 3 months. I don't have another one to go to.

There's a bit of my brain that's telling me I'm a failure.
No real surprise there.

But remarkably, there a whole lot of my brain that doesn't think that. And I'm curious about that. As a pretty un-posi person, you'd think that quitting a brand new job & a shiny new career opportunity would make me feel pretty crappy.

I still don't know where I'll end up. At the moment I feel like I'm very close to the bottom of a very dark hole. I hope I can find my way out.

Depression explained

This is one of the most incredible descriptions of depression that I have ever seen written down and illustrated.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/depression-part-two.html

Please, please, PLEASE take a few minutes out of your day to read this; whether you suffer from depression or not. There are hundreds of comments on this blog about how accurate the author's description is, about how "they relate" to it. For once it doesn't seem cliched. I relate to it too.

It describes me, right now. This week, this month. Today. But not just today, it's been like this for so long. On and off. Up and down. I searched through my old blog and came up with this; written a little over 3 years ago, trying to express my being:

For all intents and purposes, iHuman looks, acts and behaves like a real person. It can hold down a steady job and be good at it, it walks, talks, eats and drinks like a real person. But iHuman, because it is just AI after all, doesn't quite get it right. A.I. can't feel emotions. It can observe and learn and then attempt to replicate what it sees, but all it can replicate is the visible outer signs that make up emotions; the expressions and physical details that SHOW emotions, but without actually FEELING it. And as such, iHuman merely exists. So in a social setting iHuman struggles & it becomes clear that something is not quite right, because it is in these settings, amongst friends, that emotions are so important.

The parallels between that and Allie's post are obvious to me, at least. These are her words:

Months oozed by, and I gradually came to accept that maybe enjoyment was not a thing I got to feel anymore. I didn't want anyone to know, though. I was still sort of uncomfortable about how bored and detached I felt around other people, and I was still holding out hope that the whole thing would spontaneously work itself out. As long as I could manage to not alienate anyone, everything might be okay!

However, I could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.