I don’t know why, but I am feeling pretty depressed right now.

In this case, it’s the depression that comes in the form of a great heavy sadness of no identifiable origin. (Other forms of depression include the kind that comes as a feeling of constriction and frustration, and the kind that comes as a vast emotional nullity. )

I have felt it on and off all day, but it seems to be at its worst right now. I figure, I should probably document this in my blog, so that maybe later, I can track what things affect my mood and maybe cut down on these kinds of episodes.

Being a fairly ill person, there’s a number of possible culprits.

When I feel especially bad, I always think of low blood sugar first. There is absolutely nothing, in my opinion, to compare with the horrible cold deathly feeling of very low blood sugar, or the kind of depression that comes right before that state, where all stimulation hurts and the world seems hostile and you feel hostile right back.

But no, it’s not that. I just had a hearty pasta meal. My blood sugar should be on the way up, not down. Still, I will keep it in mind, because my appetite has been poor lately and hence I have been eating lighter meals than I should.

As I have mentioned before, there is nothing quite like trying to force yourself to eat when you know you should but have no appetite. The body is very insistent on not eating when it doesn’t feel like it. Usually, my last-ditch strategy is to eat an apple.

Apples are a friendly food. Can always eat an apple, or even half an apple. And if the problem is low blood sugar, usually that will get the blood sugar going up again and I will suddenly be incredibly hungry, and then I can eat.

But right now, we’re out of fruit, and fruit juice does not seem to have the same effect. Possibly because it lacks the substance of the fruit to slow down the absorption of the natural sugars of the fruit. I don’t know.

I’m not a dietician.

Or it could be a sleep thing. I have been having trouble sleeping today for some reason. I try to relax and go to sleep, but what sleep I get is very shallow and unrestful. I don’t know if that’s the cause of my problem of just another symptom, but it sure as fuck ain’t my idea of fun.

Or maybe it’s just random brain shit. I am a depressive, after all, and that mean bad chemicals are always lurking to make my own personal universe a shittier place.

To be a depressive is like being a rat in an inhumane experiment where the rat is given painful electric shocks at completely random intervals. At first, the rat runs around, frantically trying to figure out what it’s doing wrong so it can find a place of safety in its little cage. Maybe it looks for a pattern in the shocks… but there isn’t any.

So eventually it just lays there, defeated, getting shocked randomly and not able to do any damn thing about it.

Depressing though, I know. But that’s the way it is in my little cage.

Oh well, this too shall pass. I am in therapy now, and that is my lifeline of hope towards getting out of the deep dark hole I have been living in for most of my adult life.

And I am freaking 38 years old. Sigh.

But I am working on building a wall between my mood and my sense of reality. There is no need to draw any conclusions about the nature of myself, my life, and the universe simply from the fact I feel like shit right now. So what? It is just a meaningless chemical reaction of one form or another, as irrelevant to my sense of self as the temperature in Tokyo or the cube root of today’s closing NASDAQ.

This cloud will pass through the sky of my soul, and trying to fight it is futile. I can’t control the weather, inside or out.

All I can do is pop my umbrella and wait for the sun to come back out.

Might be a while, but it’s OK. I have snacks.

OK, not really. I don’t have snacks. I can’t afford snacks.

Hey, maybe that’s the real problem. I’m living on less than $8,0000 a year.

Turns out, that’s pretty fucking depressing.