My experience with this is a bit different although still holiday blues. I'm dealing with the post-holiday crash. I want the joy of the holiday to return and am beyond devastated that it's gone. I want things to look forward to. I want to feel like smiling again. I have so much change coming up in the next year and so frankly I'm not looking forward to the new year either which isn't helping. I've tried a shower, anxiety med, eating, napping and talking it out with a friend. So far nothing has really worked and since all the kids are home for the holidays I've struggled with trying to be "happy" and "on" for them. Plus on top of all of that I have to go to work tomorrow and deal with a stressful job where over 1/2 the budget for my company is dependent on my job and it's my first year there so I am terribly worried that I'm not doing a good enough job and am going to be fired. I mean they say they like me but really it's the work that will bear it out but I stress that my work isn't good enough. I just feel like nothing I do is good enough. Not as a mom (kids are no longer little babies and I realize I've simply missed the little kid years and can't get them back - something else that overwhelms me) or as a worker or as anything else for that matter.

I just feel like the joy is gone and the same old stress has returned but worse. I don't want to crack in the coming year (getting divorced, moving, dealing with stress at work, managing kids being in two homes - meaning I won't see them for half their lives - and trying to rent a house near my children's dad's house so I can see them more often while trying to overcome bad credit and little savings) and end up dealing with hospitalization. I haven't been hospitalized but I'd rather not have the experience. I have a good psych but she just keeps saying i need to learn how to deal with the negativity. Instead I'm just wallowing in it and I don't know how to get out. My girlfriend just tells me I need to find my "happy medium" and even though she is also bipolar she still can't see the folly of that suggestion. Happy mediums assumes there are hidden pockets of happy...and right now there just isn't. Even surrounded by the debris of the holiday and listening to the kids play their games, none of it is enough right now.

For details: I have biploar 1 (dx in 2005) and take lamictal and abilify plus clonazepam as needed.