My recovery progress

[Marla Singer]

The last time i was on here i was in a very bad place, I believed that things would never change, that i was crazy and i would never be able to feel anything, all i wanted was to fall asleep and dream and never wake up. It has been a few months now and a lot has changed, I wanted to give a brief update on my progress as i think it will be helpful to you all. 

I started councelling, from my first session i became suddenly aware of my issues, as the weeks passed i came to realise that i daydream to avoid thinking, to avoid remembering. Counselling forced me to think, to remember the sadness of the past, to focus on reality. It got worse before it got better, my daydreaming got so bad i could not stop long enough to read  a sentence, i would only stop to eat or drink on average once every 40 hours. I was a mess. I was unbearably depressed and in honesty i didnt want to live anymore. I went to the doctor and explained about md, he was very understanding, he prescribed me CITALOPRAM (anti depressant and anxiety medication) and arranged me a meeting at a psychiatric hospital. The medication began to work from the first day, my daydreaming cut down without any trying, after a couple of weeks i found myself barely daydreaming at all. perhaps for 10 minutes every couple of days. In my meeting at the psychiatric hospital i had a 3 hour long meeting with psychiatrists, they explained to me that i did not have a mental illness, I had developed a coping mechanism that had gotten out of control, they insisted that with counselling one day i will no longer need to daydream because i will have learned healthier coping mechanisms. 

I gradually started to fix my life, realising my problems and then beginning to fix them. As reality got better i felt less need to slip away into fantasy. Sadly, i was forced to postpone my year at uni because i had missed too much, my only real friend then tried to kill herself and my mum decided to move out of the country for 6 months, oh, my dad, who i told about my md and suicidal thoughts also decided to  forget all about it and stop bothering to contact me and focus on his girlfriend instead. All of these things and a few more have sent me back into depression and i have started to daydream a bit more again. but still not as much. Things are really bad, but i know now that i cant hide from my problems in an imaginary world, I have to deal with them, and when i deal with them reality will get better.