Okay, quick recap. I am schizoaffective. The only medication we've found that decreases the depression increases psychosis, and vice versa. My symptoms are delusions (memories of colossal power, ancient atrocities, and millennia of reincarnation) and depression (Feeling mopey and tired, with very low self-esteem). The depression is post-traumatic, in that I tried committing suicide before displaying any symptoms of it, and for no explicable reason, and the depression manifested afterwards. I am high-functioning, intelligent, erudite, and aware of things being improbable or impossible even when I am in the unshakable death grip of believing them. CLEAR?
Okay, on to the crux of the matter. I have been almost entirely depression free for months now. And with an unclouded eye, I have begun to look to what makes ME happy, and you know what? It isn't what makes everyone else happy. Most people at my intellectual level go through school, specialize, and go off and get a high paying job which they profess to enjoy. School is a major stressor for me, with high volumes of makework, high cost, and low personal returns. I took a class recently where I didn't turn in any of the homework, didn't do the assignments, missed a good 6 solid weeks of class, and studied for a full and glorious half hour the night of the test. I got a 95% on that final, and then had to explain that yes, I knew the material and hadn't cheated, and yes, I knew I hadn't met the syllabus requirements for passing, and yes, I was willing to accept the consequences of that. The teacher gave me a final grade of a B.
So I looked back. I've been passed forward through the school system for years now, coasting by on my testing scores, because while I like learning I wasn't getting anything from the classes. I did my studying when and where I chose, and quite frankly the teachers, the classroom, and the homework were all useless to that. The (very) rare teacher would take me on side projects that were worthwhile, but that was always outside the curriculum. I've been passed on up the system my whole life because I'm "too smart to fail," and because I didn't have the guts to stand up and call the system on it's worthlessness and admit that I was bored and didn't care about the work. Well screw that.
What does make me happy? Learning things. I mean, ACTUALLY LEARNING. Writing, reading, problem solving. Talking to people. Building things, actually taking materials and tools and crafting stuff with my own two hands. So I thought about it for a while, and decided to leave school. I'm looking for a job where I can exercise one or more of these talent sets, and I'm doing some writing in the meantime. This is where the problem starts. To keep my parents from worrying, I started job hunting so when the time came I could let them know that even though I had departed, I had plans lined up. I was trying to set it up so they wouldn't have to worry and wouldn't think I was having a breakdown. Given the state of the economy, that hasn't worked out so hot, and I had to inform them before the deadline for withdrawal. They... panicked. And since I have self esteem issues (quickest way to actually give me a breakdown is to make me feel I've let someone down) and they have been having whispered conversations just out of earshot, I'm slowly turning into a nervous wreck BECAUSE they're worried about me turning into a nervous wreck.
Meanwhile I'm having more trouble relating to people. Or rather, I'm having the same troubles, but I'm getting more tired of pretending I understand other people. A full rant would be time consuming and counterproductive, but people have bizarre and occasionally disturbing attitudes from my point of view, expect me to actively embrace these things (or call me a bigot when I say "I don't understand that at all, but I accept the right to it as it hurts nobody else and will listen to any explanation you care to give"), and have a tendency to shove their emotional baggage down my throat. Relationship status is terrible and confusing and requires a flowchart to explain in full (for simplistic version minus recent events, I have a post a few weeks back in Relationship Woes and Advice), and my best friend's cell phone is down (computer was) so I haven't talked to him in weeks. Being back at my parent's home until I get enough coin to rent my own room, I have nobody local to talk too until I get some contacts. And when I have trouble relating, I go deeper into refuge in my delusions, which in turn makes it harder to relate to people. My antipsychotic never makes it so the delusions go away. I always carry those memories, it's just that the antipsychotic makes it easier to push them to the back of my mind.
And you know something? I'm not sure I want to push it all to the back of my mind anymore. It never impaired my ability to function, though I strongly suspect that mentioning it got me wrongfully fired once (can't prove it, though) and some folks see it as an excuse to play
All Of The Other Reindeer at my expense. There's a lot of character shaping stuff in my 8000+ years of probably fake memories. Stuff both subtle and sublime. Yes, there were terrible things, immense pains, and things I feel horribly guilty about. But there was also love, and happiness, and centuries upon centuries of life. Life that I can be proud of. And some things have even made me question if it was false. I did a record search the other week, and found that not only did one of my recent remembered personas exist, but so did her husband, and children, and I located a great-grandchild living about a hundred miles from me. I went and saw them, didn't say anything, and am not going back (how creepy would that be? It gives me about a 9.5 on my creepometer) but it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling. And I will never, never give up my memories of Ahma. I would sooner die then part with a single remembered second with them.
So, the short of it to recap is that I'm upset about my job hunt, worried the concerns of my family are turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy, upset that people are hard to understand and get ahold of, and feeling ambivalent about my psychosis, given that it never significantly impaired my functioning except when bastards worried it might and dumped heaping piles of crap on me. And in trying to be a happier person, things seem to be conspiring to throw me back down the road to depression. Which HAS significantly impaired my functioning before.