Please forgive the deep irony in the title. I don’t mean to start my first post of 2014 laden with sarcasm. But it is a revealing sign of where I am on my bipolar journey.  Comfort and joy feel like a very long way away.

It has been a truly awful Christmas. Try as hard as I could – and despite the amazing love and support of my family – I simply could not lift myself out of the deep depression that has hung over me like a suffocatingly heavy blanket since I came home from hospital. And, of course, I beat up on myself for feeling this way – after all, I have everything going for me – but these truisms don’t help.

And the festive season really didn’t help. Despite not being particularly seduced by the commercialism of Christmas, there are a set of unspoken assumptions about embracing the jollity which simply wasn’t possible for me (and many other folk too).

The ‘silence’ of my last post became protracted and more debilitating. Now my sense of emptiness has developed into a blackness – like a deep, black void into which I have fallen, and am still falling, and from which there appears to be no escape.

And I simply don’t know what to do. My CBT tools still feel powerless to help. And I really don’t want to resort to more meds – I am already stressed out and paranoid about the concoction I am taking. Which leaves me in the void!

I’m beginning to understand what it is to feel hopeless.