I haven’t really been talking about it, but I have had some periods of serious depression lately, and I figured this is the space to talk about potential reasons why.

The most obvious and prosaic is that the reduction in my Paxil dosage is finally catching up to me and I am just now feeling the negative effects of the slippage.

That is probably the bulk of the reason why. At least, it is the most obvious and sensible explanation, and what the hell, those are often true.

Boring, but true.

Another factor : the depletion of all my mental resources caused by my three day social bender at VancouFur last weekend. Not only did I go three days without an appreciable quantity of sleep, but I also burned my social coping candle at both ends, and that is something that we introverted types do at our own peril.

The definition of introversion is that social activity drains you rather than charges you up, and while I greatly enjoyed all the stuff I did on the weekend, it also took its toll.

And I have to admit, not everything went well. My lack of sleep made it hard to participate in the convention as fully as I would have liked. I spent a lot of the time between events just cudgeling my brain to keep myself from falling asleep in the lobby.

Hotels frown on that sort of thing.

And then there was Saturday night, which depresses me just thinking about it because what went does was so exactly like me and my fucking mental problems that it is just plain sad and absurd and pathetic.

Originally, I was going to go to a very fun sounding event, a Bad Movie Night featuring a bunch of stuff from the MST3K/RiffTrax crew, and I was quite looking forward to it. Love those guys!

But Joe, Julian, and I had some time to kill between supper at ABC and the event, so we went back up to our motel room to rest, and rest we did.

In fact, we fell asleep. Woke up at around 10:30 pm, which meant the event had already been going for like half an hour. No big deal.

But then I made a very stupid decision and decided to stay in the room instead of going to the event. I was so amazed that I had gotten any sleep at all that I guess I wanted to strike while the iron was hot and capitalize on the opportunity.

Yet even while I was making the decision, I knew it was wrong. There was a voice screaming in my head, saying “No, no, no, you idiot, you know you are going to regret this, don’t do it!”

Even as Joe asked me if I wanted to come with them, and I told him I had decided to stay and catch up on sleep, I felt like I was two people, the one saying the stupid thing and the one who knew better.

I honestly felt like I had no control over my actions, like I was just a puppet for my worse instincts. The words just came out of my mouth and I knew damned well they were wrong.

So Joe and Julian left, and I try to go back to sleep, but of course, now I can’t. And so I am stuck sitting in the hotel room thinking about how fucking stupid I am to have given up the opportunity to have a good time. And after that, all I could think of was how all those people were having a great time while I was stuck back at the hotel room watching TV and hating myself.

And the thing is, I knew that if I called Joe and asked very, very nicely, there was a chance he could come pick me up and I could join the fun. Or I could have called down to the front desk to see if there were any shuttle buses available. Or I could have called a cab. I mean, how expensive can a five block cab ride be, anyhow?

For that matter, I could have walked that far.

But no, I got locked into this self-defeating mental state where I was angry at myself and depressed and anxious and feeling like I wanted to jump out of my own skin, but was not actually capable of doing anything to rectify the situation, which of course only made me more upset.

So that was a bad time. And looking back, I know how irrational it all was, but at the time, I was stuck in the basement of Hell, locked in a box called mental illness with no way out.

And that was depressing. But I was doing fairly good at getting over it, or so I thought, and then I looked up the Harlem Shake video we made at the con, and I saw this :

For those of you who do not know me in the flesh, I am the hugely, grotesquely, obscenely fat guy in the white shirt, suspenders, beard, and glasses.

Seeing myself in that video makes me realize just what a fat sack of shit I really am. I had no idea I was so extraordinarily… egg-shaped. Ovoid. Bulbous. Ridiculous. Grotesque.

Turns out, it was smart of me to avoid looking in mirrors all these years, although there is no mirror in the world that could give you a look of yourself quite like that.

It makes me wonder how anyone can bear to even be seen with me. It has sent me into a pretty bad depression for the last day or so.

I guess I will get over it eventually. I have no choice. It’s get over it, or it will kill me.

But a lot of the old feelings are back. Feeling like I am a fat freak, a repulsive and disgusting creature that is nothing but a superating tumour on the heel of society’s foot.

Oh. And pushing forty with no life lived and no contribution to society.

Why do I go on?

Today has been taxing in more ways than one.

First, in the literal sense, because today I did my taxes. Note that I did not say I “paid” my taxes today. And that has nothing to do with the fact that I live on $8K per year ($7,930.14 last year, to be precise) and therefore have no taxable income.

No, I never said I “paid” my taxes when I just mean I did my taxes for the year because that is the literal truth of the action. If you are lucky enough to be a taxpayer, you pay your taxes all year. They come right off your paycheck.

When tax time comes around (April for you Americans), you get to find out how much you get back. That is like the opposite of paying your taxes.

I honestly think that society would be a lot more peaceful and we would accept the financial responsibility of living in the best kind of society the world has ever produced if we could simply eliminate this troublesome yearly ritual.

Having to either negotiate intensely complicated forests of forms all by yourself, or pay some professional to do it who always makes you feel like a reprobate for not saving every damned receipt, sure makes people feel a lot more heavily taxed than they truly are.

If you took the yearly torture period out of the equation, people would not feel like they are being made to suffer by a dangerous and arbitrary authority figure like the government and I think society as a whole would proceed on a much smoother and more comfortable basis.

Instead, we have this bullshit we all must go through every year that seems almost deliberately designed to create frustration, fear, resentment, and stress in the populace.

And this is the only time of the year that one’s financial role in society is brought to one’s attention, so it’s the only memory most people have of their government. It is no wonder that so many people think of the government as only this mean and punishing thing that takes their money away.

If you had a relative who only showed up when something terrible had happened, you could be forgiven for getting to really hate that relative, even if he is just the bearer of the bad news.

Or it’s like how people end up resenting their dentists because every time they see the guy (or gal), they get painfully poked and prodded in the mouth with metal instruments and then judged, and based on that judgment, they might be assigned tortuous and expensive penance in the form of further dental work.

Sure, as adults, we know that the dentist is just doing their job and that we should be glad anyone is willing to do this thankless and fairly disgusting and arduous job. We know that the dentist makes us better off in the long run, and that we should be glad these people are there.

But we are not adults all of the time, and a lot of the time, we end up hating the very sight of our dentist and do silly things like cancel appointments or “forget” them, and imagine our dentists to secretly be sadistic and greedy.

And the same goes for government. This yearly supplication before the altar of taxation forms the one clear impression of the otherwise invisible and unobtrusive workings of government that most people will get, and the impression it leaves is frankly terrible.

Not for me, of course. I have a very low stress life and for the likes of me, filling out taxes is fairly easy and simple. I only have one source of income, and with an income as low as mine, the very concept of deductions is ludicrous. Deductions from what? And I have no other factors to complicate things.

So doing my taxes takes around half an hour, and mostly consists of putting in my personal information and saying “no thanks, does not apply” to a bunch of crap like RRSP contributions, income from rental properties, and the amortized mortgage of a common-law spouse.

I am a little worried that it said I did not rate a refund check, though. Did Harper get rid of the standard deduction or something? If so, he fucking sucks.

Or did I somehow bypass the standard deduction when I skipper other deductions? If so, Turbo Tax really should have warned me about that shit.

It is kind of important to me. Most years, I have gotten something like $150 back. I have always assumed that this was basically an incentive program to get the wretchedly poor like myself to bother to fill out our tax forms.

Otherwise, honestly, what’s in it for us?

But I didn’t get one last year, and now, maybe not this year either. Last year, I chalked it up to filling out my taxes without my t5007 form handy and having to guess what my income had been in 2011.

But this year, I did everything right. So I should be getting some kind of cheque. Right?

As for the nonliteral sense of taxing, I have been pretty tired for most of the day and spent a lot of it asleep. No surprise there. But I feel like I am on my way to being caught up on sleep after my accidental sleep dep from the convention.

Another good night’s sleep, and I should be at least back to my normal level of terrible sleep.

Thank goodness for the quetiapine, though. Thanks to it, I am at least guaranteed five or six hours of solid sleep a night.

Might not sound like much, but I went many years never sleeping more than 3 hours in a row, and for most people, that is just plain not enough.

You need to sleep long enough to get that really deep down body-restoring, brain-refreshing, long term memory encoding sleep that we complicated naked beach apes need so badly.

And now… to nap.