Empty

It's been a month and I've gone from feeling like a squishy invertebrate to feeling like a caged animal.  There seem to be 2 choices for me right now: pace around maddeningly or sit and do nothing.  I sit.  There’s no purpose to a caged animal, it cannot fulfill the measure of its creation.  There is no purpose in me, I do not know what the measure of my creation is.

My depression has worsened over the last month.  I feel empty and cannot find meaning to my life.  I feel like a story-teller who can no longer see stories in the world around me.  I am finally medication-free and now looking at alternative therapies like nutritional therapy.  I met with a nutritional therapist yesterday.  The skeptic in me doesn't think it will make much difference, but I will give it a shot.  She started me out on a dysbiocide to balance out all the microbes in me.  And she wants me to eat veggies at every meal.  That will be a challenge, especially since eating isn't high on my priority list.  But it can't hurt.  I'm also trying to exercise every day.  Again, it's a challenge.  I guess I'm not completely hopeless, because I am trying a few things to counter the depression.  But it all feels like a feeble attempt.

My entire life was spent with the feeling that I was supposed to get my PhD.  Now that I have it, it doesn't seem to matter.  The only difference it's made is to make me question what I thought was a true part of myself, one of the defining parts of myself--the academic.   Now academia seem pointless.  My life seems pointless.