Well, summer is officially completely over, because that is definitely not a summer rain happening out there. It is just a preview of what the next six months or so will be like : cold dreary rain that feels like it never ends.

Meh, whatever. I am not particularly prone to seasonal depression except when, as with tonight, it happens to coincide with my own.

A rainy day doesn’t make me depressed, but if I am depressed anyhow, the rainy day can add to it a little, in a desperately poetic kind of way.

And today, I am kind of depressed. Melancholy, really. That is like depression but far less painful. It is a not entirely unpleasant kind of wistful sadness. It is not exactly a mood I would choose, but as spaces on my Great Wheel Of Moods goes, it is not so bad.

I think I am going through some major emotional processing lately, which is why I am trying not to take my moment to moment mood too seriously. I learned a long time ago not to freak out if I seem to be sad for no reason. It is just because I am processing some emotions that need processing, maybe ones that have been inside me for a very long time.

Angry for no reason is harder to manage and harder to endure. Sadness is sad, but it does not demand action against a target. Anger does. And I refuse to vent anger anywhere but on the proper targets, and those proper targets are not easy to access, so the anger just becomes frustration.

Or it gets directed inwards, and then it becomes the very bad, extremely toxic, self-loathing kind of depression that drives me to the edge of madness.

That is when I start feeling trapped in my own skin and like I am a hunted animal who needs to escape NOW, but where can I go?

Especially considering my agoraphobia?

Trapped in a house with unlocked doors. Prisoner of one’s own shell/cell. And so forth.

Today, after seeing my therapist then seeing my GP, I have been contemplating why it is so hard for me to take proper care of myself.

Before, I have theorized that I neglect myself because I am echoing how I was neglected by my parents when I was growing up. That is a big slice of it for sure. Self care echoes the care you have received. It seems sort of senseless, from a certain limited point of view, that other people have to treat you well before you can treat yourself well. Wouldn’t simple hedonistic self-interest mean that people treat themselves well no matter what?

But we are not so simple, we naked beach apes. We have a lot more going on in these crazy hotwired brains of ours than simple equations of pleasure and pain, loss and gain, sunshine and rain.

For starters, we have this crazy notion that we need to deserve something before we get it. Of course, being a social species, that makes sense. Ideas of justice (otherwise known as the ethics of what people deserve) are fundamental to any civilized species.

But in our mixed up modern world, that sense of what we deserve and what we do not can get programmed in some very strange ways, making us think that we do not deserve to be happy and therefore not able to enjoy the pleasures of life that are right before us, spread out like a glorious buffet.

After all, happiness might change who we are and introduce all kinds of stressful change and chaos. Better to just smother than ember before it can spark any change, then go back to complaining about how unhappy you are, which after all is what makes you happy.

So, to drag ourselves back towards the point, I self-neglect because neglect is all I know. But I think there may also be a much simpler reason as well.

One of the primary characteristics of depression is that it makes it very hard to have faith in any kind of delayed reaction. The deadening of one’s pleasure responses due to a serotonin deficit in the brain means that only strong, immediate pleasures, instant gratification, can get through to the depressive.

And the depressive needs that pleasure desperately because it is the only thing that keeps their mood afloat at all. The anhedonia that low serotonin levels brings means that the depressive finds life very unrewarding, and hence focuses fiercely, even exclusively on what pleasures they can still feel.

And hence, understandably, they are quite reluctant to try anything new. In their experience, the odds are heavily in favour of them not getting enough pleasure from a new thing in order for it to be “worth it” to them. With such a high reward level needed to meet that demand, it is no wonder.

And it also means that the depressive will have trouble staying with anything which either interferes with their connection to their existing dependent pleasures or which does not in and of itself provide the high level of reward they crave.

This is as true for a depressive who self-medicates with alcohol as it is for a fat dysthymic like myself.

And so things which are, by all rational analysis, clearly the thing we should do to become healthier and make our lives better are rejected or neglected because they simply cannot provide the very high immediate reward level that is required in order to keep the depressive motivated.

Hmm, once more I am talking in that clinical, scientific way. Oh well. Whatever is necessary in order for thoughts to leave my head.

So things I should be doing, like testing my blood and using my CPAP machine and exercising and eating less carbs and all that jazz, I don’t do them because they are just not worth it in my extremely poor emotional cashflow world.

And I have no idea what to do about that.

But talking it out is the first step.