Almost forty eight hours and I'm still here.

I keep reminding myself that basically the dividing line for me between "very stressed" and "suicidal" is a matter of unbalanced brain chemistry. All of my legitimate reasons to be depressed and stressed are essentially in the past.

Taking painkillers makes sense when you hurt like hell, as an analogy, but is stupid when the wound has healed and you're just upset because you still remember how much it hurt. That's kind of where I am now. I had some good reasons to want to die when I was growing up, but mostly I fought like hell to stay alive back then. Now that my reasons come down to "My brain doesn't work right", I seem to have stopped caring. It's irrational, and I know that. Surprisingly, reminding myself that my depression and my stress are largely irrational keeps me from doing irrational things about it. At least from one day to the next.

I've spent the last twenty years not deciding to live, but distracting myself from a choice every time I think about making one. The same part of me that reminds me that zombies aren't real so those must be hallucinations is what reminds me that logically, doing anything drastic about my irrational depression would be irrational.

It's weird, but you can get pretty damned far down a road by only looking down at your own feet.

So here's me again, not so much promising that I won't do anything stupid and irrational as determining that it won't kill me, so to speak, to hold off on doing anything stupid and irrational for another twenty four hours.

Mostly, I think, it's a combination of undermedication and PMS, which brings with it the traditional gifts of migraine and TMJ but also the bonus gift of nasty TMJ related toothache. Which could turn into a need for a root canal, I suppose, but that's kind of like renovating the porch on a house that's falling off a cliff.

Those should go away if I can just ignore them long enough, and maybe even take the toothache with it, who knows. The medication issue is something entirely different and involves finding a new shrink. Boy oh boy am I eager to do that.

What won't go away, though, is my genetic family doing stupid things again. I'd explain, but it would involve outing myself in new and exciting ways even for me. Hopefully once the PMS goes away and I get a little perspective, it'll all seem amusingly stupid rather than depressingly stupid.

Oh yeah, and it's my partner's 40th birthday. Birthday requests have involved no singing, no cake with black frosting and Over The Hill candles, and please could I not kill myself today. So, we're trying.

Happy birthday to my partner, a very long-suffering person who I can't believe hasn't fled the state to live under an assumed name in the hopes I won't follow.