Bored, tired, depressed

I passed the university test, and don’t know if this is just the aftermath of weeks of intense studying, or just the natural order of things for me but, as I could expect, my interest toward this blogging issue is inexorably dropped to the point now I feel like forcing myself to write, instead of writing because I want to. Generally, I feel tired, bored and unmotivated most of the time, with occasional bouts of depression.

So my guitar practicing routine is no more a practicing routine, and I just play random notes on the instrument for an hour or so until I get tired of that and stop, while my interest for fishing (one I thought I’d never lose) oscillates between obsession and indifference pretty quickly.

So I may have guessed right when I said my ability to get bored is growing with time, and I really don’t know what to do with that. Probably I’ll just start by asking my therapist what she thinks about this.

If things don’t get better, it’s unlikely for another post to follow. I’m not going to force myself writing here, and nobody is forcing me to do that, so there’s no reason for writing if I don’t feel like I want to.

Therapy: back

Actually I’ve been back since Wednsday, but Thursday I went fishing because I couln’t take it any more, the urge was too strong, as strong as the frustration from not being able to fish in that fantastic lake.

Yesterday I wasn’t in the right mood to write, so we have arrived to today and, as you may have guessed, the vacation has been somewhat disappointing.

Monday’s travel went fine, it was hot as hell on the road, but nothing I couldn’t tolerate (I’m much more sensible to cold temperatures). When arrived to the country inn, we unpocketed our stuff and spent some time in the pool, where I felt uncorfomtable due to the cold water and wind. Then we got ourselves a shower and traveled for about one hour to Montalcino, where we ate a pizza. Then we traveled for another hour or so to a lounge bar (yes, it’s not a typo! I went to a lounge bar! I wish Ozzy shall forgive me…) to drink a beer.
At that damned lounge bar the worst happened: our car broke and its owner, a friend of mine, lost for some minutes his wallet. When we found it, 150$ were missing.

We managed to get back to our inn without that car at around 5:00 am, but obviously the vacation has been ruined.

Thursday we had breakfast at 2:00 pm, then traveled for a couple of hours for swimming in a pool in one of our friend’s uncle villa, and then we got to this friend’s house to cook and eat T-bone steaks. That one was delicious indeed, but probably not worth all that hassle of a vacation.

Again we got back at around 5:00 am and got up at 8:00 am to take a train to get back at home, since our friend’s car was still broken. But as I guessed, while on the train our friends called to say they fixed the car, but obviously he wasn’t in the mood to go fishing.
The travel by train wasn’t bad, but I really coudn’t sleep, even if I badly needed to, so I wasn’t feeling very good.

Finally we came back home at 6:00 pm, and I immediately thrown myself on the couch and got some sleep.

Nothing much more to say about Thursday’s fishing session, it was calm and relaxing, but wasn’t enough to make up for the disappointment of not seeing with my eyes that lake.

This is more or less what I said to my therapist today, so that’s all for now, I got to get back studying.

Therapy: is this thing working? (part 2)

I’m mostly satisfied with today’s therapy session. As I thought, the psychologist seems to be taking a more holistic approach than mine, as she tends to speak more about self-consciousness and well-being than specific problems. It’s not a bad perspective, given the way multiple issues interact to create situations specific to each individual, classifying people by means of specific disorders is questionable at least.

As promised, I prepared some questions for her, and here’s what I can remember about the answers:

Q: What are we doing now? Speaking? Analysis? Therapy?
A: Analysis AND therapy. She still think of not knowing enough about me, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working on my issues.

Q: What are we working on? How long might it take? Is there something we can’t tackle with this therapy?
A: We are working on improving my general well being by tackling undesired beliefs and improving my self-awareness when it comes to feelings and how I (do not) express them. She doesn’t like to do very long therapies, but can’t say about how much it’ll take, not more than 3 years for sure she said (Ouch!). She’s not against medication, but we agreed over the fact that medication is for the symptoms, it doesn’t solve problems, nor teach you how to live without the symptoms. Then she said my physical and mental problems are all symptoms of psychological suffering, but we could make some memory and attention tests in a future sessions if I felt like that would somewhat satisfy my worries, and I readily accepted. I’m confident I’ll perform awfully on those tests.

Q: It looks like my drive to get better psychologically, as for most other things I do, is more a product of my worries about other’s opinions of me and feelings of inferiority instead of a genuine desire to have a better and fuller life. I suppose we’ll work about these feelings too, but if they are my main drive while doing things, what could happen if I lose this drive?
A: Since I’m used to exploit such feelings to fight apathy and depression, it’s normal to be scared of change. In any case, she’s not going to turn me into a cold, unconcerned and “don’t give a fuck about anyone” dude. We’ll work on reducing my current exaggerated worries, without eradicating it all.

After the Q&A, we talked a bit about how I (do not) interact with my family members, even when my dad is a complete asshole to my mother. But we agreed how my mother is mature enough to react to the verbal “abuse”, so it’s not the role of a son to interfere with what may be their established communication “standards”. What I may do is to eventually express my disappointment for their childish behavior, and not just go to my room as I always did since I was I child.

Finally we talked about my Bad night, and how my depression may be linked to memories of better times (nostalgia) and how my pessimistic view of the future makes them very unpleasant, reinforcing my negative thinking. I still think boredom plays a significant factor here, but she has nothing to say every time I mention it, probably because there’s no way to explain it in purely psychological arguments. We’ll see, if I fail the memory and attention tests like I expect to, boredom will surely add weight to a diagnosis of some kind of attention deficit disorder.

As a side note, I’ll soon receive those 6000$ from my car insurance, so I’m definitely going to make some more examinations to rule out any possibility of a non-mental illness.

Therapy prep: is this thing working?

I’m having another psychotherapy session soon, thought I don’t even know if I should call it like that, maybe it’s just counseling. Let’s just call it “therapy” then. Should I ask Ms. psychologist about that?

I have lots to ask in fact, because this time I plan to dictate my own agenda to the psychologist, and I need to be prepared.

First of all, I’m tired of living with my problems: doing things I don’t like to do (almost everything) takes just too much time and energy, and the few things I like to do get boring in no time. That not being enough of a hassle, when I like something it obsesses me so much that doing anything else becomes even more difficult and straining.
And this talk therapy has taken me nowhere in getting better, in fact knowing better my problems just makes me feel more and more the need to get rid of them, so I can’t get out of my mind the urge of doing something actually useful – maybe only temporarily – until we can find a way to address my problems through “talking”.

It’s not that I don’t trust the psychologist, I just don’t understand how this therapy should work, and I need to know how things work to put trust in them. But most of all, I need to know if this is actually therapy or just talk, if she’s still trying to know me and my problems, or if we’re already working on my problems. I think that after 8 hours or more of talk strictly focused on me, she should know me pretty well, I really don’t have much new to say anymore.

So if we are to be working on my problems, I’ll say her that I’d prefer a problem-centric approach, so if she says me that some problems can be addressed while others can’t, I’ll look at alternative strategies to deal with the ones she can’t address. And with a problem-centric attitude it’ll be easier to give at least a rough estimate of the time it’ll take to effectively get better. Because if I can’t get better for the time I graduate, the risk of me getting into alcohol or drugs to make a daily job tolerable is high, and suicide is not totally improbable too.

Whatever she says, I’m going to change GP (my current one sucks) and talk to him about both my mental and physical problems, discussing a possible hormonal imbalance as the origin of everything. I’m still convinced of that – even if my blood thyroid hormone levels are normal – because recently it came back to my mind how I was hit in my balls when I was around 8, and I’ve never been checked out, even though I occasionally feel a bit of pain in one of them. Additionally, I still lack a lot of facial and body hair a man at my age should have, as they’re still growing (very) slowly. In general, my body developed a lot more slowly in comparison to the average boy, my mustaches started to grow when I was 22, for example. So blaming hormones for that is not that weird isn’t? Given my thyroid hormones are fine, and given my balls precedents, I think Hypogonadism might be a serious possibility.

And unlike what I did in the past, giving up after a few negative examinations (mostly because my parents looked at me like I was some sort of attention-seeking hypochondriac), if the hormone theory fails to deliver, I’ll look into something else, because now money aren’t much of a problem! I won’t feel guilty toward my parents for spending money in examinations, now that I’ll probably receive 6000$ as compensation from the car insurance. Who may have thought car accidents could be so profitable?

So right now I’m hopeful, and I wish at least some of my expectations will be met, because right now hope is one of the few things keeping me alive.