My Nervous Breakdown

2004-03-30 - 8:24 p.m.

Last Five Entries:
The Party's Over
July 11, 2004
The Next Day
2004-03-31
My Nervous Breakdown
2004-03-30
True Confessions: My Life as a Female Impersonator
March 15, 2004
Bite Me
February 29, 2004

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Well, it happened. I had my first nervous breakdown today. I've read about them. Heard about them. Never had one before.

It's been building up. The past seven days I've been in a constant state of anxiety, mostly alternating between pacing the house to curling up on my bed wishing I were dead. I haven't eaten in the past seven days either. I'm really hungry, but I can't get food down my throat. I can't concentrate on anything. Thought vaguely about killing myself, or at least severely injuring myself, but never got to the planning stage there. Can't concetrate enough.

And today I broke. I started crying in a sobbing heap. I picked a psychotherapist out of the phone book at random and worked my way into an emergency appointment. I got my Dad to take me, because I didn't feel safe to drive, and that also meant admitting to my parents what a bad head case I'd become. They had noticed the not eating and the alternations between pacing and lying in as shaking ball, but I'd just been saying I'm a little sick.

I called Hoover to tell him that I'm ending the practice of law, effective tomorrow. It would be today, but I have a trial tomorrow. Don't worry, I'm not completely unprepared for the trial, because for the past week I have been obsessing about how incompetent I am and how I'm going to screw it up. So I've put a lot of thought into it. Hoover attempted to be helpful to me today, reminding me that not too long ago I was in fact a quite feared trial lawyer, and assuring me that if I wanted out of my current case load, it's done, one way or another he'll disentangle me from everything I'm involved in.

I'm not going to be able to finish my thesis this semester. I hope that it doesn't kill me. I have all of my other credits, but no thesis over the past two semesters. I don't want all of that work to go to waste.

The therapist I saw today was a good guy. He analyzed me pretty well. We didn't resolve anything. I guess I was hoping for direct admission to the hospital or something, but after determining that I probably wasn't a suicide risk, he set up another appointment with me and sent me home.

Mom will be coming home soon. She's going to want to talk to me about it but I don't want to talk. I don't want her to worry either, though. And she is putting up the money for me to go to therapy, important since that I'm not going to be doing any more law, I'm going to be having no money.

I want to eat something. My stomach hurts, and I know that tomorrow I may just simply collapse from malnutrition if I don't eat. My throat is so tightened up now.

I haven't been keeping up here at Diaryland, I just can't concentrate. Getting through this entry was hard, but heck, this seemed like the perfect place to announce my complete mental and emotional breakdown. This is the kind of thing I just have to post here.