Stood up. And fatigued. But definitely not crying.

There are times in my life when I think I'm cracking up. And there are times in my life when I know I'm cracking up. Fortunately, at the moment I'm pretty sure I only feel like I'm coming apart at the seams.

There are a few stresses in my life at the moment - job hunting, family stuff, household stuff - that I'm managing to hold at bay with a combination of demented optimism and baking. I tend towards certain Pollyanna tendencies that keep me afloat where otherwise I might not be so buoyant. It's a rather grimly determined policy of looking on the bright side, and making a conscious decision not to worry about things I can't immediately change and to focus instead on the smell of gingerbread, or the feel of clean sheets, or figs finally ripening on the tree.

It takes an effort though, I guess, and occasionally that effort is just too much effort. Tonight it feels as though I'm leaking out everywhere. I know it's not polite to talk about one's mental health, but I might as well put it on the table that there have been periods in my life where I have been, well, not so well. I've been pretty stable for the last couple of years, and I can tell when I'm going to hit a bad patch and ride it out, but it's the reason that I couldn't get out of bed this morning until no-one else was in the house. It's the reason I go for long stretches without sleeping more than two hours a night, and why I bake banana bread at three in the morning. And it's the reason why, after a friend called an hour before he was supposed to come over for dinner tonight to cancel, I started to cry, discreetly, on the tram.

I do tend to do things discreetly - most people would never notice that I was going through a patch, because when I am going through a patch I would rather die than let on that I'm not coping. And people aren't all that perceptive, either. Anyway, I never really considered writing about it on the internet, either, except that I just read this and something in me broke a little bit. This was me two years ago, right down to the baking. It explains things better than I could, anyway, so maybe you should just read it.

And then you should go bake a batch of cookies, and then be thankful either that you're not of a depressive disposition (why is it so hard for me to write that I might "suffer depression"?) or if you are, quietly remind yourself that there are other people out there who know how it feels to spend every day in a haze - to have a great cloud of static hanging over your emotions, to not be able to make even trivial decisions, to find yourself despairing that nothing - no matter how dramatic or self-destructive - will ever shatter the bell jar.

Like I said, I know I'm not falling apart. At least, not tonight. I'm going to brush my hair and go to a friend's gig and maybe have a quiet sulk when I get home, and then I'm going to wake up tomorrow feeling better and berating myself for being a drama queen. I'm probably going to dump the food I bought to cook tonight in the fridge, because my housemates aren't home and cooking a feast for one seems kind of laughable, and eat pickles out of the jar and finish off the so-pathetic-it's-charming(?) Weight Watchers brand cottage cheese in the fridge. I'll be fine. And if not, the world could always use another batch of gingerbread.