This, too, will pass

This week has been a bad week.

The Boy has been unsettled.  He has been sent home from school.  He has been unspeakably violent at home, spending one afternoon this week punching me in the face for two and a half hours.  

My ME has been a source of irritation, making me so exhausted that I had trouble moving around this week. 

It would also have been Ella's tenth birthday this week. 

I have been thinking of her often lately.  I wonder what she would have been like, what she would have been into, what nicknames she would have been given by us, what things we would have done together.  It's made me reflect on the terrible relationship I had with her biological father, and made me question why I stayed with him for almost four more years when I utterly and totally despised him.

It's sent me crashing into the abyss of depression, questioning what I am doing, if I am strong enough to keep doing this and whether I will be able to see all this through, before the stupid ME takes hold.

It's not a good place to be, this insular circulatory consistent questioning, but when the black dog catches you, it's hard to shake it off.  I have spent large portions of this week crying, sobbing piteously and unable to know what to do, where to go, how to help myself.

It shakes the delicate self confidence and esteem I have been trying to build to its core, and I have to start again.  It pokes at those old coping mechanisms until they try to pop up, but this time they have been resisted, they have been stamped down, bar five minutes of crass stupidity after alcohol that could have been anyone.

It hasn't been a good week. It has been fairly appalling actually, but this, too, will pass.  Remembering that makes it easier to bear.