Been pretty damned depressed lately, as alert readers have probably already guessed.

But I know why, or at least, part of why, and that means I am at least on the way out of the long dark tunnel. I feel better today than I have in a while.

And I figure it is mostly because I am finally caught up on sleep.

You see, I fell back into a bad habit without realizing it : being depressed by how much I was sleeping.

I had a few days where I slept around sixteen or so hours out of twenty four, and that can be pretty damned depressing if you let it be.

And for a while I knew this. I have written in this space before how proud I was of my ability to remember not to be depressed about how much I was sleeping.

But I guess I forgot all about that, as seems inevitable with me, and what is worse, I let the idea that I was choosing to sleep so much creep in, and that would make it all my fault and another sign that I am just pathetic and can’t handle anything, and yadda yadda yadda, shame spiral, depression, self-loathing, and hating my stupid fucking life.

I was even talking to my therapist today about all the usual depressive things, like lack of motivation, and feeling like I had no zest for living, no reason to be awake. If your life is incredibly unrewarding, why not sleep all the time? What is worth staying awake for, anyhow?

And there is definitely some truth to that. I do not enjoy my life all that much. I enjoy bits and pieces of it, which is good. I love hanging out with my friends at a restaurant or back home in front of a video. I like hanging out with my online friends, although that seems weirdly unrewarding lately for a reason I can’t quite fathom.

I guess I enjoy playing games on Facebook. Or at least, I enjoy it enough to keep doing it, which is not exactly the strongest of endorsements, but it is all I got.

I am seriously considering getting myself a new Wii game as an Xmas gift to myself specifically because it will give me something to look forward to during the day, and something to do besides sleeping.

Is that sad, or what? But whatever helps, I guess.

But lack of zeal for living aside, I do not only sleep for escape.

Sometimes I sleep because I am goddamned tired and the low quality of my sleep makes me run up a huge sleep debt that has to be paid off in very big installments.

So I end up being super sleepy for two or three days. I know all these things, and yet, somehow, I forgot. I started thinking the old bad way, looking for an excuse to hate myself and my life.

I am not surprised that all that negativity was looking for a way to go back along the same old pathways. I have not made much progress in finding new, less destructive, more acceptable ways for the same emotions to express themselves.

And well, if you block the old pipes without opening enough new pipes, things are bound to back up and cause a huge mess for you to deal with.

I guess I sort of thought that if I blocked off the self-loathing, the anger and frustration it expressed (and caused) would just naturally find another outlet.

I mean, it would have to, wouldn’t it?

But um, not necessarily, as it turns out. I figure the problem must be that I have not yet truly faced the issues that cause all that anger and resentment and frustration and rage in the first place.

Issues with my past, issues stemming from all the time I have spent sick, issues, issues, issues.

And the thing is, dealing with all that anger I have stored up over the years is a damned tricky proposition. I fear my own rage and so I have, historically, walled it up like in “The Cask of Amontillado” and ignored it while trying to live my life.

The sort of dark, violent, angry thoughts I end up thinking when I try to deal with it do not exactly encourage self-exploration along those lines. I really worry about what I would be capable of if I decided I just did not give a shit any more, and that scares me.

I just feel so close to madness sometimes. Like I could just snap.

But maybe that is all just a barking dog with no teeth. Maybe that is how my depression protects itself, by putting horrible thoughts into my head whenever I get close to the source of the problem.

If that was true, it would be safe for me to just dive into those emotions and see where they take me, see if I can vent them for good and reduce the pressure inside me. Certainly, I could see myself deriving great benefit from releasing all that nasty dark anger lying like a lump inside me.

Or at least some of it, for crying out loud.

But how? I grasp the theory of dealing with your emotions by going someplace quiet and safe and just giving yourself permission to feel everything while at the same time firmly establishing that you are not going to act on any of the emotions.

The metaphor is that you watch your emotions pass through you like clouds through the sky, not trying to control them but not letting them control you, either.

But that is a lot easier to do with things like grief or sadness or regret. Those are naturally fairly passive emotions that do not demand action.

Anger, on the other hand, inherently demands action as its form of expression. Just sitting there letting the rage wash over me without doing anything with it sounds really, really hard.

And if that dam should happen to break…..

Well, I would end up some sort of headline.

I have been thinking a lot about what lies outside the light lately.

By the light, I mean the dazzlingly bright and powerful (but cold) light of my intellect. I have been an intellectual in the deepest sense of the word for nearly my entire life.

I have been guided by this intellectualism almost to the exclusion of all other considerations. The intellect possesses such power and versatility that it is easy to forget that it does not contain all of the experience of life within it.

All my life, I have sought mental stimulation above all other concerns. That is why even as a preschool child, I wanted books, not toys. Toys didn’t do anything. They just sat there, expecting you to do all the work to make them interesting.

So I never played with toys as a child. I read books. My parents had plenty of books around, and I would also get books as gifts at Xmas and on my birthday.

And then video games came along, and I wanted those, too. They provided a rich stream of constant stimulation. What better for a too-intellectual kid than that?

So I had plenty of fodder for my intellectual development. But what of my social, spiritual, or emotional development? What of faith, security, social connection, or a feeling of being connected to something more powerful than myself?

Nope. Just intellectual development, and that, largely self-directed. Nobody took a particular interest in my bright young mind. I just developed a need for stimulation that brought intellectual development along with it as a side effect.

Yay, lucky me.

And I have gone nearly forty years of living without really thinking about what this intellectual over development has cost me.

Luckily, over the last few years, I have been approaching the problem by degrees. It started with me coming to feel that something was terribly, terribly wrong about how I grew up.

That is all it was at first, a feeling of terrifying wrongness. A feeling like a cold and unforgiving wind was blowing through me, and with it came the realization of just how lonely and closed off I was as a child.

And as I continue to struggle to grasp and truly understand my past, I have come to understand more and more of my own role in what happened to me.

For example, I have been pondering just how arrogant a child I was. I didn’t know I was being arrogant and I certainly was not doing it on purpose. But still, I was pretty arrogant compared to your average child.

My lack of respect for authority, my utter refusal to do the sort of work I did not enjoy, my arguing with the teachers right in front of the class, my obvious disdain for the school work I found beneath me because it was so damned easy… I was not an easy kid to deal with.

I can only guess at what the teachers thought of me. They probably thought I was a royal pain in the ass and wanted as little to do with me as possible. All that unwitting arrogance, and yet, I was also pathetically dependent on them because I could not get along with my fellow students.

And if the teachers saw me as a lot of trouble, what did the students think? I get why they hated me now. They had a lot of reasons. I am not saying bullying me was justified, but I get why it happened and I am not entirely blameless.

So as I slowly contemplate the cold, cold life I have lived (but it’s so brightly lit, how can it be cold? And yet it is. ), I begin to touch upon the truly raw, scary realm : the limits of my perception.

The realization that, after decades lived thinking you were perceptive and brilliant, that there is a whole universe to which you are effectively blind… that is oceanic in its degree of illumination.

Or in this case, the illumination of the limits of your illumination… brightly lit darkness.

So far, all I can really do is look at this darkness, this blindness, and let myself get used to the sure and certain knowledge that I not only lack knowledge and understanding of so much of the world… but that I do not even have the tools to explore this new space yet.

What went wrong with me happened so long ago that I fear I have to go back to the beginning to try to put things right. And having to start from scratch when you are nearing 40 is a daunting prospect, to put it very very mildly.

I have, at least, come up with some questions to contemplate in order to get me going on the kind of emotional development I need. Some way out of the bright and cold and into the dark and warm.

Towards not fearing that darkness outside the light, and maybe even figuring out how to dim the brightness a little and thus make the darkness less dark by contrast.

I want to be able to lead a full, rich, normal, socially connected life, without the loneliness and isolation and impotence that had held me back.

Questions like these ones :

What went wrong? What was the breaking point? The sexual abuse? The lack of kindergarten? My first bully? What?

What would I have been like if that had not happened? An important part of my recovery is recognizing that things could have gone differently and imagining what that might have been like. Once I imagine something, it becomes far more real to me. So what might I have been like if things had gone a little differently? I picture a warmer, more charming, somewhat cockier version of myself.

And here is the big one :

Who would I be if I was not so damned smart? It is amazing (and disturbing) to contemplate just how much you can substitute intellectual development for emotional and social development. What would it have been like if I had been born with an average IQ, and had to get along in the world the way normal people do?

Would I have been better off in the long run?

What would I do, who would I be, without the shield of intellect to protect me?

I don’t know the answer, but I feel it to be a very good question to ask myself.

Being smart has been the bulk of my identity for so long.

Could I survive without it?

Other people get along fine without it…

Christmas is a tough time for me.

Like a lot of depressives, I am mostly likely to feel blue around special times of the year. (Really not looking forward to my 40th birthday in May.)

And the sad truth is, the times when others are happiest are often the most difficult for us sad and broken souls. The pressure levels alone are enough to make people lunge for their Xanax. And those of us who come from troubled families often have less that wonderful memories of supposedly special days.

(Not me, though. My family always pulled themselves together for holidays and birthdays. )

But the real trial is having nobody to spend a special day with, and for me, that special day is Christmas Day. (Well, plus Christmas Eve. )

My family are all far, far away, and I have no way of getting to them. And my friends all have families close by to celebrate the day with, so I can’t do it with them.

So that leaves me all alone on a day when I probably should not be alone at all, mental health wise.

But I am making a plan. I will go see The Hobbit in glorious 48 frames per second, and buy popcorn and snacks, and settle in for three hours of escapist fun.

That should help ease the pain until it is time to go to Joe’s family Christmas dinner. Joe’s family is nice enough to have me over every year, and that is definitely a lifeline for me.

Without that… I really have no idea what would become of me. I would probably have to check myself in to the outpatient ward at the hospital, or something. Assuming they are not already overbooked this time of the year. There are a lot of broken people like me in this world and we all might need a little extra help not hurting ourselves when things get really bad this time of year.

Normally, I am not that type of depressive. I don’t talk a lot about wanting to harm myself. I don’t end up in the mental ward for doing crazy things. I don’t end up in jail for hurting others.

I am way too sensible and smart and in control for all that shit. And shy, and passive. The more dramatic expressions of depression would all be too overt and active for me. I need all my energies to just cling to my passive and pathetic place in the world. Hurting myself would be drawing attention to myself, and making myself a burden on others, and that simply will not do. I am not allowed to do any of those things.

I am supposed to just disappear and not draw attention to myself. You see why it is so hard for me to get help, don’t you? It is hard for me to even ask.

It’s hard to ask for help when you are not even supposed to exist.

So this is not the most wonderful time of the year for me. And yet, I still love Christmas.

Why? Because Christmas is a wonderful time of the year, despite all the headaches and the commercialism and the stress and the depression.

Christmas represents many of my most cherished ideals, such as kindness, compassion, closeness, and camaraderie. And I am saying this as someone who has absolutely no experience of religion. Christmas has only ever had a secular meaning to me, and I cherish that meaning.

And it is because I cherish that meaning that I fiercely cling to Christmas despite the temptation to give in to cynicism and become jaded and harsh towards it.

I can see why people do it. When Christmas stops being good for you, the most natural thing in the world is to be bad to to it. To reject it, and deride it, and push it away from yourself. To claim Christmas is “meaningless” or “too commercial” or “fake” or whatever. To complain about how everything becomes Christmas related this time of year, even though you personally hate Christmas.

I mean, how dare they continue to celebrate a wonderful holiday filled with love and warmth and closeness when it clearly bothers you?

How insensitive can you get?

Yet I reject all of that. Sure, my Christmas is not pleasant. I would have every reason to turn on Christmas. It makes me depressed enough to be worried about my self-safety, for crying out loud.

But despite all that, it is something that brings joy and wonder and pleasure and real closeness to billions of people worldwide. The fact that it does not happen to do that for me does not matter. I am not that selfish or self-absorbed. Christmas is wonderful, and I feel that if I was to start crapping on it, I would be crapping on all the genuine goodness it brings to millions of others.

And why would I do that? Just to make myself feel better? How pathetically limited and selfish that would be. I do not believe in making other people feel worse in order to make myself feel better. That is acceptable, it seems, to a lot of other people in this world, but it is not acceptable to me.

And if the only way to feel better is to make someone else feel worse, then I will suffer.

Besides, I have faith that there are as many ways to make yourself feel better by making others feel better as there are the other way around, and it is pretty clear to me which way is better.

And not just ethically… spiritually as well. It does you good to do good. It makes you like yourself more and give you a great deal of positive feeling to reflect upon, and hence makes the world seem like a warmer and more pleasant place.

I am not sure exactly what my contribution to the happiness of the world will be (funny novels?), but I am determined to follow the path of mutual profit and not the path of zero sum.

And isn’t that what Xmas is all about?

I had a pretty unique psychological experience this morning, at least for me, so I figured I had better write about it before it evaporates from my brain like the morning dew.

I basically experienced a period of semi-lucid dreaming. I was not directing the dream, exactly, so it was not fully lucid. But I was choosing to dream, and influencing the dream a bit, so it was definitely on the path to the lucid dreaming experience.

And I would love to say this was the result of a diligently applied regimen of soul-searching, inner reflection, and psychotropic experimentation, but honestly, it was just a fluke.

Or so I assume. I don’t know. Maybe I have been striving for this sort of thing for a long time, but not on the conscious level, and that is what all this super intense dreaming has been leading to all these years.

That is an intriguing notion and it would certainly be nice to imagine that all this fucked up dream time has meaning and purpose after all. I have been striving to master my dream state! I have taken my metaconscious to the next level! I am getting what ascetics strive for, and without all that self-denial and flagellation and shit! Sweet!

But I am a little too realistic for that. We will see if it ever happens again, and only when I have established that I can do it regularly will I draw conclusions of that sort.

Despite my many skills, I make a lousy mystic.

The experience was quite fascinating. It was as though the dream world was the ultimate in virtual reality. It was like it was an invisible helmet I could don with an act of will, one that completely covered my head and replaced all that I saw and heard with an illusion.

It was like I could just refocus my eyes somehow, and be in this other realm. I was still aware of standard reality, the Real World, but I was consciously choosing to enter the dream realm with all the casualness of someone deciding to watch TV.

Given that television practically raised me, that is not an idle observation.

I even remember thinking that I knew I could go back to the real world whenever I wanted to, so it was safe to just mess around in the dream realm for a while.

And congenital escapist that I am, I was not exactly eager to come back to my boring, stupid, pathetic real life. The world of my imagination was so much nicer in every way!

And you don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out, savvy? That has basically been my priority ever since I was a bored kid daydreaming his life away in elementary school.

When you are smart enough to finish your work in five minutes, and you are not allowed to read in class (because that is the real problem these days, kids reading too much), and you have no friends to talk to even if that was allowed, what is there to do but to retreat into your own mind and just, well, think about stuff? Process information? Deepen your understanding?

Damn, I was a weird kid.

And all the dreaming I did when semi-lucid was pleasant. No monsters of the subconscious rearing their ugly stupid heads to turn my daydreams into nightmares, Better Than Life style.

In terms of lucidity, the most interesting part was when I was dreaming that my bed was lying on a beach on a pleasant summer day. That was when I began experimenting with my lucid state like it was a form of entertainment, marveling at how I could look all around and see the same scene all around me, just like I was really there.

Yet also knowing that I wasn’t really there. I didn’t realize that at first… at first it was just a dream like any other and I was fully immersed.

But eventually I figured out this whole refocusing the eyes business, and then things got meta. I remember looking out at the water, and looking up at some houses near the shore and thinking “So those are the people I envy. To have a house right on the water like that has been a dream of mine for my whole life. ”

Or at least since my first trip to the beach, I suppose. Still, even as I thought that thought, I knew that what I was seeing was an illusion. I knew that I was basically looking at a VR photograph.

In fact, there was part of the dream where the image froze as I turned my head, and I remember thinking “Oh no, I broke it… maybe my computer can’t handle the frame rate when I move my head too fast!”

And then the scene unfroze when I moved my head more slowly. How messed up is that? Keep in mind, to me this scene was as real as what I am experiencing right now.

Except I knew it was not totally real. And I was still in my bed, naked with a blanket on me (I sleep in the buff. Now you know. ), just like in real life.

I rather liked the idea of sleeping on a comfy bed on the beach, truth be told. All the peacefulness of being at the beach with all the comfort of being in bed.

In fact, I remember thinking that if I lived by the water, someplace where I could go to sleep looking at the ocean, I would sleep so well!

One more interlude worth noting : I dreamed (still semi-lucidly) that I was living in a house full of furries, some of whom snuggled up in bed with me and asked me if there was anything else I needed before I felt fully moved in, and I felt such peace and contentment!

And I remember thinking “This is how it should be. This is what I deserve. ”

That is a very significant thought for the likes of me. To consciously and completely think “I deserve better than what I have!” is a big deal thought on my journey to overcome my low self-worth and my resulting/codependent passivity.

The form it took is also intriguing. A place where I felt safe and accepted and welcome. That suggests that I feel, on some level, that I have worn out my welcome where I am.

Or maybe I jsut can’t believe that anyone could still like me after knowing me well. I don’t know.

Still, this all feels like progress to me.

Literally the day after another article stimulated me to write about writing and depression, I came across this article about comedy and mental illness to stimulate a slightly different lobe of the brain.

First, let’s discuss the article itself. It is a fascinating subject for a crazy comedy nerd myself, but I think it started from a flawed thesis (loosely deduced, it might be stated as “Is mental illness good or bad for comedy?”) and then explicates that thesis in a raw and unfocused, and hence unsatisfying, manner.

There is plenty of potentially interesting stuff in the article, but without a clear and well established thesis to add structure to the stream of observations, it ultimately, in my opinion, fails to deliver.

Perhaps I would be less judgmental of the article if the premise did not appeal to me so much. And I will say right here and right now, I am not saying I could do better.

My own writing often lacks focus and coherence, especially the stuff I write for this space, so that too perhaps informs my opinion of the piece.

Still, I don’t think anyone has ever seriously proposed that mental illness is universally good for comedy. Sure, a lot of comedy people are tightly wound and neurotic, and there is probably a pretty good reason why a lot of successful comedians drink, do drugs, or otherwise show signs of self-medicating depression or anxiety.

And sure, a comedy type might make a crack about how backstage at the comedy club seems like group therapy, or how they become a standup comedian because it was cheaper than therapy (ha, ha, ha).

But I think the article goes a little far in trying to explore that.

Still, it is an interesting topic, so here are my thoughts on it.

I think there is some truth to the notion that the funniest people are the ones who truly need to laugh. It is a deep pain and darkness of the soul that provides the driving force for honing one’s comedic skills. The constant pressure to amuse oneself and hence chase away the darkness inside is the same pressure that forges the mind into a comedy-generating machine, one that constantly seeks out the funny side of things just to try to maintain some sort of island of safety out of remembered laughter in a deep dark sea of depression.

That, certainly, could lead to somebody becoming a comedy fan. But not all fans of something try to do it themselves. What drives the comedy fan to become a comedy producer?

Well, you know what is better than making yourself laugh? Making others laugh. Especially if you are shy and/or neurotic and/or nerdy enough that you have a lot of problems relating to people in the usual way.

You make people laugh, and then bask in that glow of approval and happiness. Making people laugh is especially attractive to sensitive, empathic people, because you get to enjoy their happiness as well as your own. Making people happy makes high empathy people happy. It is just that simple.

So is there a relationship between comedy and mental illness? Yes. But it does not necessarily mean that mental illness and comedy are joined at the hip, and the article’s final conclusion (such as it is) that some mental illness is good for comedy, but not TOO much… well, that’s hardly earth shattering, is it?

I mean, like, DUH.

Myself, I really want to make people laugh. I want to make others happy in the way that comedy has made me happy. Like all true artists, I want to create that which has been good to me.

And I definitely also crave the approval and rewards for making people laugh. That includes the financial, obviously. Hey, I live on $8K/year, money is kind of on my mind all the time, in the way someone who is slowly starving to death thinks about food a lot.

That was sort of a joke.

But I am not particularly interested in standup. While I have been known to greatly enjoy performing (like a lot of shy people, I have a hammy side (a side of ham?), too), for some reason, being a standup comedian does not appeal to me.

I am a little surprised to note this, as I was really into standup at a certain point of my life. Certainly, during the standup comedy boom of the 1980s, I soaked up all the standup I could.

But never during that time did I really imagine myself as a comedian. Perhaps I am too shy for the job, I don’t know. Or even back then, I had some clue that I was better suited to writing than performing.

But does that have to do more with my mental illness than with free choice? Certainly it would make sense for a shy but creative person to prefer the role of creating the comedy but not being in the limelight for the actual end user experience.

But I have performed, and without much in the way of stage fright. I experienced anxiety before the performance (in plays, not standup) but it was the sort of alternately pleasant and painful sort of anxiety that mixes excitement, anticipation, and trepidation. Certainly, it never made me not want to perform. Performing is hella fun.

So why not become a comedian? I could just write my routine, practice it, then treat standup like I am doing a one person play every time.

Still not appealing to me. Standup is such a limited art form. I want to paint on a much larger canvas than that. Writing funny novels might just be the right art form for me.

I can write as big as I want without worrying about how to stage it, or shoot it, or whatever. The novel is one of the most powerful forms of expression for that exact reason.

Hmmm. I might not have gotten to the core of the link between mental illness and comedy, but I may have just figured out what to do with my life.

I’ll take it.

Being a depressed writer, I was instantly intrigued by this article by William Grimes for the New York Times (isn’t that fun to say?) about the links between writers, depression, and suicide.

Apparently, a group of people met to talk about the subject :

In a daylong conference at the 92d Street Y on Friday, several scholars and writers explored the links between depression, creativity and suicide, primarily in the life and work of Sexton, Plath and Ernest Hemingway. The conference,”Wanting to Die: Suicide and American Literature,” was organized by the American Suicide Foundation.

I am impressed that the American Suicide Foundation (I assume they’re against it) organized such a thoughtful and potentially useful conference.

This statement here caught my eye :

In rereading his work, Mr. Styron said, “I began to realize all my work was of an incipient depressive personality struggling to prevent the demons of mood disorder from crowding in.”

Writers being the sort of people that instantly relate everything to themselves, I immediately pondered whether there were signs of depression in my own work.

I don’t think so. Nothing definitive, anyhow. What I write is sometimes tragic and/or sad, but then again, a lot of the time, it’s funny. I am generally a positive writer, looking to make the reader happy.

Then again, I have this space in which to talk (incessantly) about my depression, so perhaps that frees me somehow from putting it into my writing. Who knows.

And if you really want to go down the endless twisting road of psychosocial literary analysis, absolutely anything can be construed as a sign of anything. It just takes imagination and a will to believe in your own bullshit. Much like religion, really.

But if there is a link between being a writer and being suicidally depressed, I suspect it has to do with the sort of person who becomes a writer, as opposed to something about writing that makes people depressed and maybe even suicidal.

I have said this many times before : writers are not normal people. If we were, we would likely not be writers. Writing means spending a heck of a long time completely alone, typing away, sweating little details and making whole worlds come to life with nothing but our words as tools.

All because we have this deep down feeling that we have something we want to say.

And yet, it is often the case that we have no idea what it truly is we want to say, and have to write story after story, book after book, just to find out.

And meanwhile, we are spending all that time alone. And that leads me to my first conclusion : to write, you must be an introvert.

Extroverts simply would not have the patience to spend that much time alone. They would want to be out interacting with people. Whatever they had to say, they would say it to their wide circle of friends. They would not feel the need to write it all down and make their point through narrative or essay.

Of course, nobody is one hundred percent introvert or extrovert, and I am sure there are lots of extroverted writers out there.

But just as not every old sailor was gay but there was a certain sort of person who didn’t mind spending months at sea with only men on board (women are… um…. bad luck?), I think you will find that the sort of person willing to be a writer is a lot more likely to be introverted.

There has to be something that makes us communicate with the world by this elaborate, laborious, and extraordinarily indirect route, instead of, say, just saying things.

Now let’s look at depression. One of its most salient attributes for this discussion is that it tends to make people want to isolate themselves, and makes it hard for the depressive to connect with others.

At least, not in the normal way. But perhaps, through writing? That way the over-stimulating, frightening others are kept safely far away, and the writer can mostly engage with their richly detail inner life.

Thus, the others are a largely imaginary inner audience, and this provides enough distance for the writer to write for an audience which is mostly a reflection of their own imagination and standards.

But some day, if things go way, the writing will be read, and that tiny amount of social connection is low enough in wattage that the introverted, depressed writer can handle it.

Then add in the sensitivity that is required to be any sort of decent writer. This is another factor which selects towards both writing and depression. Being extremely sensitive is both a gift and a curse. It allows the writing to develop the kind of deep understanding and true compassion required to write realistic worlds with living, breathing characters that good writing requires.

But the curse is profound. The world is a very rough and dangerous and painful place for the truly sensitive. Like the doomed denizens of the House of Usher, the sensitive person finds the world loud and bright and harsh, and often must go through elaborate measures to turn that volume down enough to let them function and cope.

And sadly, for many writers, those measures include drinking or drugs, also a sign of depression.

So to somewhat sum up, I think the link between writing and depression mostly has to do with the sort of people who become writers in the first place.

Happy, cheerful people brimming with optimism and faith are too busy living life and socially connecting with others to spend dozens of hours writing.

Sad, depressed people full of pessimism and despair, on the other hand, are left with writing.

Of course, these are all broad and in some cases wild generalizations. I am trying to define why there might be more depressives than the statistical average in the writing game, rather than explain every single case of a writer who is depressed.

That said, writing is a good profession for the depressed.

Or at least, I hope it is!

Feeling crappy and low again, although I figure I will get over it once I have been up and about for long enough. Have to put some miles between me and all that mad, bad sleep.

So yup, spent most of today asleep. Yaaay. And each time I awoke to eat and/or eliminate, I felt like I had been slow roasting on a spit in the fires of Hell. And now that I am awake, I feel like shit.

No wonder I often succumb to the desire to go right back to sleep wen I am in this state. I feel like crap, why be awake for that? But especially if I am dehydrated, that will only make things worse in the long run.

Or maybe not. It is possible that I genuinely need all this sleep and I should not be berating myself over it or pitying myself for this sleepy senseless life.

Perhaps when I “go to sleep when I am not all that sleepy”, what I am really doing is acting on my lack of deep sleep and trying to fulfill that need, despite the fact that the rest of my sleep needs are met.

And I should just relax and do what I gotta do to get enough REM sleep points to keep the sleep debt at bay, and not worry too much about the hours spent dreaming.

But it just bugs me to spend mst of a day asleep. I am a middle aged guy and I don’t really want to waste what time I have left sleeping.

But then, when it comes to figuring out what the heck else to do with my life, I tend to come up empty. Or rather, when it comes time to motivate myself to do other things.

I am stranded on this lonely little island of a life for now, cut off and confused, and I will stay here till I find the motivation to get into my little boat and row, row away.

Or at least work to make the island bigger, dammit.

I keep nudging myself to at least download some recipes and bake desserts for myself. That way I have an activity to do to keep myself awake and active and moving.

Plus, I get the sense of accomplishment of having made something for myself, and of course, I get the desserts themselves as well, and the little happinesses they bring.

All very logical and sensible reasons to do it. But if the motivation is not there, it’s just plain not going to happen, and all the logic and reason in the world can go disappear up its own asshole, for all the fucking good it will do.

There are no logical motives. Only emotional motives pursued via logical means.

Logic is method, not motive.

So what I really want next is to connect with my emotional self better, and release my grip on this intellect-heavy paranoid mistrustful world-view in which the world is a hostile entity just waiting for my guard to drop for just a second and then it will get me.

That shit done drive me crazy, mama. There has to be a path to a more relaxed, accepting, positive, harmonious, and peaceful being. Something that can make it through the ferocious guardians of my internal self, the giants of my intellectual rigor and suspicious nature, and yet which can provide the sort of soul solace that my parched and pockmarked intellectual landscape cannot.

I just think too damned much, and feel too damned little.

But of course, just realizing that does not solve the problem. And the idea that revelation is the solution to everything is the exact sort of illusion to which the overly intellectual types like myself fall prey in droves.

We act like all our problems are just puzzles to be solved, issues to resolve, problems to fix. Like if we think long enough, we will hack the password to ourselves and be able to just go in there and repair ourselves. But it just does not work like that.

The pleasure of revelation plus the emotional release that occurs when the revelation is of true psychological impact fools us into think that it is the thinking which got us there, and that this pleasure is the point of a whole process.

But that revelation came just as much from feeling and emotional (and spiritual) growth as it did from any act of thought, perhaps even more so.

That is why standard advice which we evaluate as being quite probably true does nothing for us. All the usual advice for depressives just freezes in midair and shatters at our feet, and we just look at it dying there and shrug.

Because until you are at the right place emotionally, all the words in the world will be absolutely useless. It is not a problem accessible via the rational mind, the left side of our brain.

The left brain is powerful but very cold. The right brain is diffuse and lives entirely in the present, but it is also the seat of all emotional warmth and renewal.

So by being such left-brained intellectual types, all about the logic and the rationality and so on, we think we are being sensible and smart, but we are are actually leaving ourselves freezing in the dark.

I am not sure how to escape that. But I think it starts with trying to remember who you were before you constructed this massive set of armor out of the cold steel of intellect for yourself, and to reconnect with that person, and start the process of convincing yourself that you can be that way and still be safe.

That is why helping a depressive is such a crapshoot. All you can do is try to say things that might be what they need to hear at that moment to start the emotional healing process. You can say the truest, wisest things in the world to a depressive, and if it not exactly what they need to hear at that moment, it will be completely useless.

Same as these words, right now.

So, editing my book is continuing apace. I have been doing 1-2 chapters per day, so now I am up to Chapter 14 out of 30. (Should be 15 but I had to miss a day due to an Internet outage.)

I have settled into a groove when it comes to the editing. It is the same groove I got into with the previous book, although I had to find the groove again in order to remember that.

What keeps me going in the editing is the joy and pleasure of read (or is it rereading?) what I wrote. In general, I am pretty happy with what I have written, and rather enjoy reading it while I edit this and that.

Mostly, I just proofread and work on sentence structure. That’s about the level of editing that I can handle at this point in my development as a writer and as a human being.

I hope that, with time and patience and therapy and recovery, I will become strong enough to look at my work from a greater height, so to speak. To have the confidence to handle larger issues, both in diagnosing them and in fixing them.

As it stands, I have confidence that what I write is a decent read, and a heck of a lot better than a lot of stuff on the shelves. (And the… eShelves?)

But I am still somewhat dissatisfied with the work as a whole. I feel like my most recent book, just like the previous one, is somewhat of a mess. It lacks the deep, solid structure that makes a book truly great, and not just a bunch of stuff that happens.

Don’t get me wrong. Lots of perfectly wonderful books are more or less just a collection of things that happen. The sort of solid structure based on a deep understanding of theme that leads to an amazingly meaningful conclusion that I wish for is probably, when looked at objectively, something that only the greatest writing in the world has achieved.

So I am probably setting the bar pretty high there. But I am not expecting myself to achieve this goal any time soon. In fact, I will be happy to achieve it at all in my time on Earth as a writer. If I manage to write one book that I can truly say is the sort of solid and coherent story that I have always wanted to tell, then I will die a happy, happy writer.

And of course, it would help if I was writing according to some sort of plan, or even an outline, instead of just starting with a few scenes and a few characters in mind and winging it from there.

But I don’t know. I have been pondering the idea lately that maybe I am better off winging it and trusting my instincts when it comes to the bigger picture. It is certainly a way to keep from overthinking things and getting all tangled up in anxiety and worry and complication and multiplication of variables.

Don’t sit there on the shore trying to figure out the perfect dive. Just jump in and swim.

Not the way a thoughtful and deliberative planner like me usually goes about things, but then again, I have written two books by winging it and none by thinking things through, so I would have to say that so far, winging it is winning by roughly infinity percent.

SO that will be, I think, my method in the future. On paper (remember that stuff?), the proper and sensible way to write is to write an outline, then flesh out the outline, then write a rough draft based on the outline, then carefully revise the outline over and over again until it’s as good as you possibly can make it, and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz I am already bored into unconsciousness.

I don’t think I am capable of doing that. At the very least, if I tried to do that now, I would not end up with something I liked. And if I don’t like it, nobody else will. I truly believe that the artist has to please themselves first. Otherwise, what they are doing is not true art, but mere simulation, a trick used to please others at the expense of your own voice.

And I truly believe that making sure your art pleases you results in better art. That special kind of coherence that makes good art stand out can only come from a unity of vision that, in turn, can only come from the deep and sincere desire to express something from deep within oneself.

It could be said that great art comes from something the artist needs to express. Something inside them needs to come out, and the art is the method of escape.

This need not be as dire and serious as it sounds. A strong desire to amuse and entertain can be just as sincere and powerful motivation to create art as releasing your inner demons onto the page. Joy and merriness are emotions people suppress just as much as their sadness or rage.

So I figure that I am the sort of artist who had to learn by doing. I can’t learn writing from books or web pages or seminars or any of that. Integrating outside information into my highly intuitive and idiosyncratic creative process is just too damned confusing and hard.

This is not an act I can perform rationally. Creativity is not like that. It come from within, and the trick is to capture it in action, not turn it into a mechanical process.

Luckily, I have an amazingly fertile mind, so it is not like I am worried I will run out of idea. I will just keep writing things and submitting them places (that’s the tricky bit that I have not done wo well on so far) until my stuff is good enough for either the eBook market or a big publisher, or both.

And maybe then I will make enough money for a minimum wage lifestyle! w00t!