Full disclosure:

• I haven’t done anything that even vaguely resembles a workout since last Saturday, when I swam 1/2 mile in the Schuylkill.  Even that wasn’t a workout so much as it was just mental work.
• I’ve had the same Jillian Michaels workout DVD from Netflix since early June and I haven’t done it one single time.  I haven’t even put it in the DVD player.  I haven’t even taken the disc out of the Netflix sleeve.
• I can’t remember the last time I kept track of what I was eating for a full day.
• I can’t remember the last time I did yoga.
• I feel completely disconnected from the training I have done for my triathlon (which is about two weeks away and for which I feel completely unprepared).  Even though I know I started out strong, I feel like that wasn’t me.  It’s like it was someone else entirely.  Someone with whom I have no connection whatsoever.
• Every day I wake up determined to break this streak of awful I’ve been going through lately, and every day I just feel defeated.

I know that there are approximately 0 people right now who are reading this and enjoying the fact that I’m whining.  And I apologize for whining.  But the truth is, I just feel so drained lately.  I wish I could do something to turn things around but I don’t know that I can.  I’m having a hard time feeling like I didn’t blow the triathlon.  I’m having a hard time facing the fact that things that I love have somehow become seemingly impossible tasks.  It’s hard for me to say, exactly, what’s going on.  All I really know is that I don’t feel like myself and I haven’t for a really long time.  I’ve been trying for months to keep my head above water and at this point I just feel too tired to keep treading water.

When I go through times like this, I tend to obsessively tell myself that things will work themselves out, that everything will be alright, and that this too shall pass.  This time around, though, I’ve been doing it for such a long time that the words have lost all meaning.  And it’s not like I’m normally a super upbeat, optimistic, and cheerful person…but this has gotten to be too much.

I guess I’m worried that I’ve gotten to a point with this depression where I’ve begun to believe that there’s no difference between it and me.  Finding myself unable to shake it has got me feeling like a failure.  Not being able to run and do other healthy things that usually keep me balanced and happy reinforce my feelings of failure.  Having suffered so many setbacks in my training is like a fail cherry on the fail sundae.

So what’s my point here?  I don’t really have one.  I’m just writing this because, for one thing, I’ve noticed that sometimes I feel better when I get things like this off my chest.  This is a lot deeper than what I’ve dealt with in the past, so I’m not really sure what the effect will be.  For another thing, I don’t talk about this much because I figure people don’t really want to hear about other people’s depressive thoughts.  I actually put a lot of energy and effort into concealing the way I feel about myself and my life, and lately that’s been catching up to me.  I guess I just need an area in my life where I can be straightforward and honest about what I’m dealing with and how it’s affecting me.  So that’s what I’m doing.  And there’s no point, really, but hopefully it helps a bit anyway.