I'm an almost 49 year old female who is disabled. I live with my 30 yr old single daughter and have two other grown children out of the house.
For the past several years since being put on disability I have just gotten more and more depressed. I've gained weight, hardly ever leave the house (maybe once or twice a month if I'm lucky) and go for literally days in pure silence with no one to speak to and no one around.
Because of my disability I can't go anywhere on my own and have to rely on someone - I can't even shower on my own because my legs are so bad. Dr's don 't help - they just tell me to lose weight and become more active. I wish they could feel what I feel (or DON'T feel) in my legs and then they could see how they'd react.
I'm afraid to take 2 steps outside without someone with me because I won't feel a difference in the ground and can fall at a moments notice. I'm normally not a negative person...in fact I raised my 3 kids on my own, we had our own home, I had a good career, and then BOOM! Here I am.
I could bore you with details from now till sunrise but suffice it to say, I can't seem to pull myself out of this one this time. I can 't pick up the pieces and put them back together anymore. I can't sleep, my stomach is always in knots, I have no energy, I can laugh at something one second and be weeping buckets the next.
So many negative things have happened over the past 10 years that I'm afraid to make a decision because I don't know if I'm making the right one anymore. And I'm afraid to take the chance at something else going wrong. I feel lost. I never thought I would be at this place at this time of my life. When my children were grown I was supposed to be able to work, have a social life without worrying about children first, come and go as I wanted, be the independant, free spirit. That's not where I'm at. I'm dependant on my daughter for most things, I'm angry all the time it seems, and I'm wondering if this is all there is to life!
Most days I get up, have a cup of tea or coffee, work on the computer for a bit and usually fall asleep in my chair. Then I wake up, do some more work, try to do a few things I CAN do around the house, then lie down in the later evening and watch tv until I fall asleep. I can't fall asleep without some type of noise or my mind just runs rampant.
I've started using the over-the-counter sleep aids because I'm tired of tossing and turning for hours. Even those don't work. I'm awake till 3 or 4 a.m. then finally fall asleep, get up at 9 or 10, try to get active but really don't have much to do, so I start working on the computer and end up falling asleep at the keyboard for an hour or so. My daughter leaves the house around 10 or 10:30 most days for work and isn 't home until 9 or 10 at night, so I'm alone most of the time....just me and the dogs. When my daughter gets home I talk to her for an hour or so then try to leave her be so she can have some "down time" and go to my room for the night. Each day is just a repeat of the one before.
