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.

"Why does this keep coming up? It's not like things are bad."
No, it's just that it doesn't feel like the inside of my head is getting any better, and it's been like that as long as I can remember. If you fail at something for years and years, don't you get to a point where you hate it and you want to quit, even if you're too damned stupid to?

Something kind of comforting about being awake in the middle of the night. I guess it's because no one's really expected to be sane or functional at four AM anyway.

I'm still here.

Funny that I forgot I wrote that. I keep thinking this is here just for me to make promises to myself to still be here tomorrow. Today's one of those days where I need to make that promise.

Less than a week after Tora died, we had to have Nagi put under for a five hour surgery on her hip joints. She came through perfectly. She's still half shaved, but it's growing back, and she's a lot less neurotic than she used to be. Amazing what an absence of chronic pain will do for your personality, I guess.

But I keep dreaming about petting Tora, and waking up sad.

I had another dream two nights ago which is affecting me, I don't know that I want to describe it, because that'll make it worse, I think.

My partner's got a new job. We can't really afford for me to find a new shrink. And I gave up on the antipsychotic on Veterans' Day, it's almost a funny story, I guess, in the way that you can pretty often make horrible things funny if you just don't care about them enough. It might be why my dreams are really turning on me again lately, but I've always had horrible nightmares, it's why I don't sleep.

Anyway, in addition to twenty-four-hour promises, I guess this can be my new shrink. I can't imagine anyone's reading it, but I can tell myself someone somewhere is so I'm not just promising myself. That makes it about the perfect place to be the mes that I try hard not to be in front of people whose opinions I care about. Lame, I know.

Anyway, I'll still be here tomorrow. Nothing's off the table, but it's not like if I don't in the next day, I'll never get a chance to. So I can spend a day saying I said I would wait, and who knows, maybe it'll get better.

My partner woke up and saw me this morning. "I'm glad you're still here."

Yeah, I said. No one's more surprised than me.

I felt like this after Cypress died. But then I was grateful that they'd given me an extra year with her. This time, I feel cheated out of ten years or more that we could have had with Tora.

I know it won't always hurt this bad. I know this isn't my fault. I know we took good care of Tora and made him happy. We even got him his own squirrel. He was loved, and I think he knew that. I know Nagi will sort it out eventually in her own mind, and we know now to be very careful with her if she ever needs anesthesia.

The thing is, logic can help you not do stupid things. But it can't make you feel better.

I know it won't hurt as bad as it does right now. But I don't know if it will get that much better, it's been so bad for so long. And sometimes one foot in front of the other seems like so much effort. But that I'm still even writing this has to mean I'm not giving up yet.