Mp3 : (The Verve) The Drugs Don’t Work

Tonight, I figured I would spice up this diary entry by including the mp3’s I am listening to in the text. Who knows, maybe some time I am going to look back on this entry and it will be crystal clear how each mp3 change meant a subtle mood change in the writing.

We will see.

Made fried rice (with hot dog pieces and onions!) tonight for dinner. This is noteworthy only because it is part of my attempts at nudging myself towards doing more cooking. I like to cook, and cooking results in better meals than my all too frequency “peanut butter and jam sandwich, side dish of junk food, and a piece of fruit” meals.

At this point, anything, absolutely anything, that gets me on my feet and moving around and that keeps me from hotting that fast forward button of life known as “sleep” so much is a good thing. I have been living half alseep for a long time, and it’s time to wake up.

Mp3 : (Sister Sledge) We Are Family

It’s just that there’s so much to do, and I’m tired of sleeping.

I know why I have lived like that, though. It’s a subtle form of self-medication. If you life a completely sedentary life, very low key, barely every straining yourself at all, then you defeat your anxiety by never adding enough energy to your system to activate it.

Mp3 : (Violent Femmes) Blister In The Sun

It’s like being on tranquilizers all the time, except you are accomplishing it via lifestyle instead of via chemicals. And you learn to do it essentially by classic conditioning. When you do other things, you experience pain from the depression/anxiety. You are eventually conditioned by your illness to stay in the depths of dysthymia all the time.

It might not be healthy but it’s safe. And when you are stalked by enormous anxieties, you are looking for anything which makes you feel safe, whether it’s heroin, religion, or lassitude.

Of course, this means that depression is not merely a traditional illness, it’s also an addiction, and should be treated as such.

Mp3 : (Ram Jam) Black Better

People are not merely depressed, they are addicted to their depression. Like any addiction, it becomes the focus of their lives to the point where it becomes not just their life but their entire lifestyle while at the same time becoming the core of their identity.

Thus, the very idea of having to live life without the depression as a shield between them and the harsh realities of the world shakes a depressive to the core. It presents them with entering the unknown on a subjectively massive scale, namely venturing into the world without a established lifestyle or a sense of their own identity any more.

Mp3 : (Flaming Lips) Vaseline

This kind of existential fear cannot be discounted. A depressive might say they want to recover from the comfort of the feeling that said recovery is not going to happen any time soon, but if they were presented with the idea of an instant cure, one that means they forever give up their ability to become depressive again, they might well find themselves balking without even knowing why.

Mp3 : (Devo) The Girl You Want

Depression is, after all, a coping mechanism. It’s a highly maladaptive one, but it’s still a coping mechanism, and you cannot just threaten to take away someone’s primary coping mechanism and expect them to be perfectly fine with that.

Mp3 : (The Tokens) The Lion Sleeps Tonight

You have to give them a superior alternative, and you have to lead them to that superior alternative via steps they are capable of making. It’s no good to just point to the distant horizon and say “Your salvation is over there somewhere. ” There has to be guidance, someone to point the way through the maze, to help break it down into achievable steps and then beckon from the other side of each step.

Mp3 : (Jesus Jones) Right Here, Right Now

Of course, this approach takes a lot of patience and endurance, and requires the therapist to pan carefully in advance, something not many of them seem prepared to do. They tend to only think of you when you are right there in front of them.

Mp3 : (Maureen McGovern) The Morning After

Speaking of therapists, tomorrow is a therapy day. In fact, I will be in therapy around 12 hours and a bit from now. It should be an interesting session.

After all, last week’s session was basically one long argument, with my therapist getting his first taste of the angry, bitter, hostile, accusatory me that lurks below all the warmth and wonder and wit. It is a side of myself that I, myself, had not seen in a very long time and that I had more or less forgotten existed, but in retrospect, it was pretty obvious that these long banked embers would flare into brilliant searing light once we started poking around in my brain with therapy.

Mp3 : (Sonny and Cher) I’ve Got You Babe

I confess, I am scared. My urge is to play it cool and be all “this should be intriguing” and “I am looking forward to how he will react to the last session” but that’s bullshit. I am scared that I will have scared him away, and that he will tell me he doesn’t want me as a patient any more, and all the other stuff I wrote about last Thursday.

It might seem like an unfounded and irrational fear, but I have broken people and scared them off from trying to help me in the past by being stubborn and hard to deal with.

Mp3 : (Marvin Gaye) I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Admittedly, a lot of that was when I was a child, but then again, that’s when people gave up on me because I was too hard to handle, so…. that’s the latest data, so to speak.

We will see how things go tomorrow. If he gives up on me too, I don’t know what I will do. There may be no person alive who has what it takes to get through to me. Mp3

Mp3 : (Patrick Hernandez) Born To Be Alive

If so, I am afraid of the darkness into which that will lead me.