“The best way to get over being sick is to act like you’re healthy. Take a shower. Get out of your PJ’s.”

It was a “magical” cure my Mom told me to take every time I was on the ‘verge’ of getting better from a cold or a flu.

It did help.

At one of the online hangouts I go to there’s a running joke.  “Look Normal!” is the call.  One person has a picture of a (normally) stunning actress faking a smile so comically it looks photoshopped into a Jim Carrey/The Mask-ish twist of her features (it isn’t, I’ve seen the scene the screen capture came from).

That…is what I feel like now.  I’m crying out “Look normal!”  I’m pushing myself into taking care of house and home, husband, kids. Getting into life-breathing activities like reading, writing, food.

But it’s a mask.

I don’t feel okay.

Archie has picked up on this…and in his current state of mind…he thinks it’s his fault or I’m mad at him.  I’m not a shiny, happy person right now.

I don’t know how to get back to that.

In the past few months life has been hard, my sense of reality has been turned on its head…but we’re all here.  We’re together, happy, nothing catastrophic is happening right this minute.

So I should be happy.

But I’m struggling to return to “normal.”

I went through a bout like this a couple of years ago.  I tried getting some anti-depressants from the doctor.

Let’s just say the treatment was worse than the problem.

Out of the handful of antidepressants I’ve tried (for different reasons, over the course of many years)…I haven’t reacted well to any of them.  From tremors to NOT sleeping (literally. I didn’t sleep for 1 whole week once – it wasn’t pretty)…drugs & I do not mix.

So, I’m afraid to try again. Terrified, actually.  I didn’t like not sleeping, and I didn’t like the way my brain felt on them.

Plus.

I’ve seen depression.

I see it on an almost daily basis. I support it. I live with it. I’ve seen what it is like to NEED medications.

That isn’t me.

I’m just in a funk.

A lousy funk that I haven’t been able to fake my way out of.

Remember that good cry I said I’d never had?

I think I need it now.

Otherwise things might get ugly.