"Whoever digs a pit may fall into it..." (Ecc 10:8)

I came home last night from youth group, and had a minor disagreement with my mum (like, it was over something really trivial). And then I felt it happening again. Only this time I was vaguely aware of the process as it was occurring: firstly, feeling a tightness around your chest, so that you can feel every heart beat and you have to put in more effort to breathe; and then having your head start to think things: Why don't you just kill yourself now? You are so worthless. Do something to hurt yourself.

And then some other part of my head was thinking, noooooo, not this again. Don't be stupid. It doesn't make sense to think like this.

I've noticed that quite frequently I come home on Friday nights and feel like crap. Don't get me wrong, I love going to youth group and I usually feel great when I'm there. But there's just something about all the social activity, all these people, smiling, laughing, talking...it's almost like a buzz or a high...and then coming home to a quiet house....everything just plummets. What goes up must come down...? Something to do with loneliness? Or maybe just tiredness after a long week.

Of course it doesn't just happen on Friday nights. The nights before assignments are due. The night before an exam. During this semester, the nights before I had to go into the pharmacy to do my weekly externship placement, and the nights before pharmacy practice tutorials. I always felt sick going into those.

It must be to do with feeling a lack of control. Knowing you're wrong. Feeling like you don't know enough to do something. Having no time to prepare for something. Having to be rushed.

(So why don't I organise my time better? Prepare earlier? Hehe, I don't know. I put off what I hate doing...but then one of the reasons why I hate it in the first place is because I always feel so stressed at the last minute.)

So just little things like that...that push my mind over the edge again.

Now that it's happened so much over the past few months, I have to start getting some logic out of it all. Work out when and why it happens. So that I can control my feelings and not let them control me.

It's difficult to think about it objectively though. I feel like such a freak sometimes, but I know there's got to be other people who go through something similar, and probably even worse than what I feel. A few weeks ago, the women's group at church had an afternoon where the speakers talked about Christianity and depression...heaps of people turned up. The talks were helpful and informative...but for me, it still feels like you're doing something wrong if you personally admit to it. I mean, I have a really blessed life, and because I don't get it all the time, I'm pretty sure the chemicals in my brain are fine....so maybe it's my fault, a character flaw I just have to fix up?

We've been studying Ecclesiastes in our bible study this term, and one of the questions last night really jumped out at me...well, actually it was two questions. The first one was 'Where would you plot yourself on a scale showing attitude to life under the sun?'...and there was this scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being 'despair of life', 3 being 'balanced', and 5 being 'live life to the full'. The next question was 'Is it possible to experience the attitudes at both ends of the scale simultaneously? Which do you think is better: to have a balanced approach to life, or one holding two extremes at the same time?'

And I smiled at the second question, because I remember writing something like "is it possible to feel certain hope and the deepest depths of despair simultaneously?" (or something to that effect) in a post I did ages ago. I think we came to the conclusion that yes, it is possible to have both attitudes simultaneously - but how does that work? How should you live, if you are reconciled with both despair of the meaninglessness, and joy of the goodness?

We also learnt that "wisdom is living in harmony with reality" (not directly from the Bible but from an assumedly wise, Bible-knowing guy). If that is the case, then I am one of the biggest fools in the world, because I have spent a lot of my life trying to escape reality. It must be very hard to be wise because reality is ugly. Well, a large part of it anyway.

Thinking about the first half of Ecclesiastes 10:8, "Whoever digs a pit may fall into it..." - perhaps that is what I have done in my life. I've just let the pit get deeper and darker because I thought there was nothing I could do about it. Running away from your problems only causes more problems. If you dig your own emotional black hole, how can you expect not to fall in?

So, I've kind of digressed from what I was originally writing about, and this post is now very long. I don't know if any of this is going to help me, but at least it's a start. Of a long and very slow journey. I'm already predicting what I'm going to be feeling like on Tuesday night, before my first exam (the dreaded pharmacy practice subject, complete with oral component). Oh well, at least now I'm consciously aware of what will happen before it overtakes me.

It feels strange to be posting this on the internet - the world wide web of both interconnectedness and personal distance. The last thing I want is for people to think I'm more abnormal than they already think I am. But I had to write about this sooner or later. In a less cryptic way than I have been doing already. I've been thinking about it for a while. I think I've realised that I don't want to push people away anymore. It doesn't help. I might keep to myself a lot, but just because I don't talk to you doesn't mean that I don't want you to talk to me :)

Oh, and acknowledgements go to the person who drew attention to Ecc. 10:8 and how *profound* it is :P