Day 17 - Returned after an exhaustive holiday

Got back from the 3-nights during city trip. I feel totally exhausted, my entire body is aching and I'm having a very negative mood.

I forgot I didn't like watching buildings and stuff like that when I booked this holiday, but this was not the only problem: The first night in the bed&breakfast I had a very bad sleep. After this I was extremely tired. It became very hard to just walk for 15 minutes. My legs felt like lead and tingled all the time. I had to sit down a lot and grabbed a beer when I did. The beer did give me some positive mood-swings but when time passed it became harder and harder to behave normally. I looked like I had been walking for days. I couldn't understand conversations, kept forgetting what I was talking about etc. In addition to this I was very grumpy, which of course was not very easy for the friend I was on holiday with. This lead to irritations and minor conflicts.

I was irritating myself a lot of the time but tried constantly not to act on it too much.

As a result of my trouble dealing with the city we stayed in the hotel more then other people would.

I returned in my own clean room and unpacked the suitcases in a very slowly fashion. In a wave of despair I decided to call my parents in order to gain some emotional support. I didn't receive what I was looking for but got a bunch of advice on proper sleeping schedule instead.

I find it also frustrating that my mother can not deal with the emotional load of having a depressed burn-out son. I felt a bit guilty when I called my parents to talk about the holiday and the problems of my life, cause as a result my mother will have a bad sleep the rest of the week cause she is busy worrying about me. Not very nice when people around you are too weak to deal with your problems.

It's an understatement to say it's not easy to be optimistic. I really don't like the speed at which "healing" of my symptoms is taken place. I thought I took a lot of rest lately and made some positive changes. As it turned out, I still don't have the resilience to cope with a night of bad sleep, nor the energy for a day of walking through the city without having pain all over my body. I don't like this. I'm skeptical towards the upcoming changes I would like to make: stopping drinking/smoking and starting exercising/meditation. I just don't believe this can have an impact big enough on me so I can be "normal".

I even was thinking about staying in some mental institution for a few weeks. But I don't believe this is a good idea, since I don't want to take antidepressants. Maybe there are institutions I could go to that offer a program without medication. I could check it out.

For now I hope my upcoming holiday (a week with 1 or 2 friends in a remote house near the water) will offer me more energy and relaxation then the one I returned from today. Before that (6 Augustus) I hope I can give up smoking and take care of the clutter in my room.