Blue, baby, blue

So, I'm moving on from yesterday's silver-lining-seeking and entering the dwelling-on-it phase of this mood front. You know the stages of grief? I should document my own stages of falling-off-the-edge-for-no-freaking-reason. For example:

1) Denial (doesn't everything start with denial?). I get more preoccupied, more confused, more forgetful, but without really noticing at first. My world grows smaller and harder to handle, gradually and then faster and faster, until it's so small I'm forgetting the rest of the world and denial becomes impossible to sustain. I then move on to:
2) Determination to avoid, this time, the joy-sucking darkness of mind, the fear and anxiousness and paralysis of the next stage. Another stage in denial, really, where I look for things that don't suck (and sometimes post them in lists, see below). Inevitably, this does not work, and then comes:
3) Suck. The point at which I give up the pretense that life is livable under these mental/emotional conditions and wallow in the misery. Today, in other words. It's 8:45pm, I took 2 naps today, I'm still in last night's pjs, the kids have been left to the tender mercies of their father's loving but fairly distracted care all day, all meals have been leftovers, I've read an entire novel, and I just sobbed at a children's movie, prompting big boy to say "you're crying over a stupid movie?" Hello, daily-crying-about-school pot, I'm a kettle. Everything feels wrong, I feel wrong, words sound wrong, food tastes wrong, noises are loud and jangly and...wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
4) The stage that's hard to see from here. I know, intellectually, that stage 3 does not last forever. Believing it is tough at times. Medicine helps. Maybe this time it will be short.

So there you have it, falling apart in four easy steps.