More than half this day I was in a depressive funk, and when I wasn't, I was either spaced out or coasting, trying to distract myself from feeling like s***.

I get angry about feeling this way, because I look at my life, and my fears, and realize life is short and I don't want to spend my days and nights being depressed and nailed to my bed. On the other hand, I've gotten depressed because I've been in bed much of the past several years due to chronic illness and pain limiting my life as it is. Depression came with the territory after that, and with the string of events which followed because I was ill.

The outlines of what's happened, that I've been reflecting on today...

I'm in my 40's and I've been married and divorced, gone to college, worked, earned some good money for a while but then was forced to stop working, and lost a lot of friends.

I was told by my doctor to put off having children when I became ill, and to wait until I got better. I was in a relationship with someone I was seeing post-divorce when the doctor told me this. After a few years of not getting better -- and his own desire to have kids -- my boyfriend distanced himself from me and started a new relationship with someone else.

Someone else who already had kids from a previous relationship. When I had none. Now I'm too old to have any with anyone. And too risky.

Losing my job meant a loss of independence and many other things. Losing my friends was even harder, because I'd been estranged from my family and have brief, distant phone calls and emails with any of them.

I had built up a large circle of friends over the years as my support system because my parents were so dysfunctional, I never felt safe about even asking my folks if I could move back in with them temporarily if things ever got touch.

Now that support system is mostly gone, and I have a few close friends -- and two I can really rely on. I'm grateful I have the friends I have, really grateful, but I also find myself saddened that my old friends were less interested in maintaining friendships when I became ill and could no longer visit them or visited them far less often.

As I've said, I'm in my 40's. Part of me has trouble believing this because I fell ill in my 30s, and my illness affected my cognitive abilities including memory.

It has slowly gotten better in the past year, but only after years of being in a complete haze and not remembering conversations I've had with people only minutes after having them. Because of this, part of me still emotionally feels and thinks of myself as still being in my 30's, but the mirror doesn't lie nor does the fact that I'm 'waking up' to all these changes I'm learning about years later. It is disconcerting, like stepping out of a time capsule into the future like in some science fiction show.

I also don't know who I am. I'm trying to figure that out, slowly... When my ability to remember easily got lost, I couldn't integrate memories, and by extension, I couldn't build on top of the self I was. Personal growth was sacrificed for survival. Finding ways to cope with pain and do simple tasks became central to my life and everything else fell to the wayside. I as a person got lost, and I also have had to work hard to keep my emotions in check or the physical pain and fatigue worsens.

I write about all this, and in some ways I can intellectually detach from it and examine myself as an outsider would, and say what happened to me was interesting. I think doing so is how I've coped as long as I have without offing myself. But periodically there are cracks in the facade that break and my emotion pours forth, and I am in a world of pain. I wake up, and realize I spent months nearly bedbound, a block of time housebound, and a longer period of time getting out a little, but not really doing anything much before I'd be too exhausted or in pain and need to come home.

There have been little breaks -- trips I've taken out of town -- and these were mentally often good for me, initially. But physically I would eventually break down and sometimes end up in the ER in another state. Which is never fun. My girlfriend would tell me, "Well, at least you got a change of scenery". Yep. That I did...

I look back on all of this and at the same time, find out my friends I hadn't heard from in years went on to get new jobs, buy a house, have kids, and secondhand stories about how they did this or that with their kids and...

I lose it. I've been denied this. I can't have a family of my own. I will never teach my little girl how to bake cupcakes. I will never handsew a Halloween costume for my kid. I will never build a snowman with them. I will never sit down and make paperchains with them. I will also never bandage their skinned knee or take care of them when they have a cold. I will never help them with homework. Watch them go off to highschool. Go to college. Get married. Have kids of their own.

I am an evolutionary dead end. I have to come to terms with it. It hurts.

And what also hurts right now is that independent of this, I'm unhappy with my own life. It hasn't gone the way I thought it would. I was even open to it ending up somewhere different. But not like this. I would have been okay ending up working in a foreign country. I would have been okay with earning less for a while. Or going back to school. I would have been okay with a lot of things.

But the way my life is now... I don't see much hope. That's the difference, between now and when I was younger and got laid off from a job, or had a breakup with my boyfriend of the time, or had to move. I felt like when a door closed, another opens... that I would be okay regardless of what happened and good things would enter my life in the future.

I don't feel that way now. I don't know if I will be able to work again. The milestones so many reach -- kids, house, promotions -- do not appear to be mine to reach.

I've probably had my one big wedding in my life I'll ever have, and there hasn't been a reason to celebrate anything else in a long time. Last time I tried to have a birthday party with lots of friends, I was forced to cancel it because I was too sick. I try not to make a big deal of it now.

This is why I'm depressed. It isn't just the losses of the past. It's the feeling that everything is a flat, gray, field extending to the horizon with only small dots of color that represent a scoop of ice cream or a movie I'd like... but otherwise most of the color has been drained out of it. I scurry towards the crumbs, hoping to get something good...but I'm left alone, starving, when I can see people feasting on a distant hill through my binoculars.

Help. I'm hungry.