This song seems appropriate for today.

It’s one of my favorite sad songs ever, and today, I feel sad.

So, no different that yesterday, really. I feel listless and restless and depressed. I feel like my life is beyond my control and headed in entirely the wrong direction. I feel vulnerable and miserable and have a sense of dread that I just can’t seem to shake.

So, not a good day, mood-wise.

The lower Paxil dose might have something to do with it. I am pondering going back to 35 mg for a day or two to see if that helps. But I think I am dealing with something deeper than that.

And there is no point in turning up the anesthetic now if I am dealing with some shit that really needs to be dealt with. I might as well just ride it out and come out the other side of it stronger and more stable for the effort.

Still, the signs are not great. I find myself saying “I hate my life!” to myself a lot lately, and that is always a bad sign. I feel like everything in my life is pointless and stupid and futile. I long to just leave everything behind and start my life over again.

Push reset and start over again with what I know now. I mean, I could hardly do worse, right?

But life is not a video game. You make your choices and then you are stuck with them, no matter what. There are no save games to go back to and there is no reset button to press when you realize you have made a whole bunch og mistakes and it would be easier just to start over.

You are where you are and nothing can change that. If you want to get back to where you were before, you are going to have to do at least as much work to get there as you did before. Probably a lot more.

And to be honest, the journey is likely futile anyhow. The moments of our lives are about not just where we are but who we are, and who we are is always changing.

It might not seem like it. For very good reason, we always think of ourselves as the same person we have always been. Anything else would be too big a threat to our sense of self, and our sense of self is the basis for our entire identity, which is in turn the base of our entire personalities.

So it is easy (and probably wise) not to notice the way each day changes us. But you are not the same person you were yesterday, and neither am I. Every moment of our lives changes us just a tiny bit, and like erosion, those little changes add up to enormous ones given enough time.

Think of a candle. Whether it is freshly lit or nearly burned all the way down, it is the same candle. And yet, it changes so much as it burns.

Ergo, even if you get back to exactly where you were before, it will not be the same. You are a different person now, and that means that, sadly, you truly cannot go home again.

Our only hope in life, then, is to face forward and constantly seek a better situation for ourselves in the future rather than fall into the trap of facing backwards and longing for that which can never return.

Still, sometimes I wish I could just walk away from everything I know, sell all my possessions except what will fit on my back, give away what I cannot sell, and just head out on the open road in search of some place where I can be happy.

Someplace where nobody knows me and I have no history, and so I can start over, deciding who I am going to be all over again. Make up an entirely fictional past for myself. Cover up the fact that I have been nothing but a loser my entire life. Pretend I was somebody, once. And then work on becoming somebody again. Erase my mistakes and start over again. Push that reset button.

I do not really have a point I want to go back to, not really. College, I suppose. I was pretty happy way back then. I had courses and friends and felt like my life was going somewhere.

And if I had the opportunity to go back to school, even at my advanced age, I would jump on it in a second. I would complete my studies in psychology, become a therapist, and set up a nice little practice somewhere, and spend my days helping people get through their own problems.

I would like to think that I have a special insight into the world of the depressed. After all, I have been living there for nearly two decades.

Or maybe I would take creative writing. I don’t know. I suppose if I am dreaming, what I would really like to do is take a writing for television degree at a broadcasting college and then get into the biz. Writing for television is my greatest dream.

And you know what? It’s good to dream. Dreams bring hope, even big fluffy impractical dreams that you know damned well are never going to happen. They still help fill your world with a sense of possibility.

Of course, eventually you have to put away the dreams and start to strive. And it is that striving part that I have trouble with so far. Picking a direction and sticking to it until you get somewhere.

Instead I dither and wobble and walk those long slow sad circles.

But who knows, maybe it is all just a chemical imbalance in my brain, not enough norepinephron in my brain for me to be truly motivated to do anything.

If so, come the beginning of next month, I might just finally get what I need to succeed.

And then, maybe, I can forgive myself for being such a loser.

Or at least get on with my life.

Today has been kind of crappy.

Crappy in the usual ways. Slept a whole bunch, and as usual, the sleep got more unpleasant in the afternoon.

The morning sleep, aided by Quetiapine, was pleasant enough. Some dreams, some restlessness, but overall it was solid enough sleep.

But after lunch, I was still pretty sleepy, so I went back to sleep and sure enough, it was the worse kind of sleep, the kind with hyper-vivid dreaming, waking up soaked in my own sweat feeling disoriented and dissasociative, and frankly, not finding it restful at all.

More like I had been keelhauled on the Dead Sea.

So I woke up all groggy and fucked up around 4:30 PM, and honestly what I wanted most was to go right the hell back to sleep, but no, I forced myself to get up and mess about on the computer for a bit because I knew that if I went back to sleep, I would likely sleep for at least three hours and then I would wake up with really low blood sugar and my eat/sleep schedule all fucked up.

And I have just barely gotten back onto my usual schedule from last weekend anyhow.

So I forced myself into consciousness. My plan was to stay awake long enough to eat supper then go back to sleep and do this writing when I got up.

As so often happens, though, the act of keeping myself awake woke me up, so by the time I ate supper, my sleepiness had mostly evaporated.

And that’s where things start getting a little tricky, and highly idiosyncratic to myself.

The sane and logical thing would be to then say “Oh, I am not sleepy any more. Great! Time to go do that writing and then see what else the evening brings. ” Right?

But as I have talked about before, I have this strange problem where once I plan to do something, it is very hard for me to change or scrap than plan merely because it has become obsolete and no longer makes any damned sense.

Ergo, I tried to make myself sleep after supper anyhow, and thus spent a stressful and futile hour and a half or so trying to sleep when all I really wanted to do was get up and do something.

Since then, I have been pondering just what the fuck is wrong with my soggy brain.

There is definitely something wrong with the machinery of motivation and reward. Besides this strange inability to change my plans when circumstances change, I have also noticed that I do not get the right amount of reward when I do something that takes a lot of effort.

Example : say I finally finish a difficult level in a video game. You would think that I would then feel really great. Triumph! Victory! Celebration!

But it just does not work that way. Most often, the most I feel is a cold sense of accomplishment and an overwhelming feeling of depression instead. As if I wonder why I put all that effort into, or at least, the amount of effort it took has drained me to the point where it is impossible to summon up the energy to feel the kind of powerful reward that I should.

Now it is not hard to imagine how that would mess up your motivational structure. Your efforts go unrewarded in a very deep and intimate way. Even if you put in your all and triumph over the forces of evil, you do not feel like you have won. No joy, no exultation. Just grim satisfaction at best.

The tendency to bull through and complete plans no matter what might, therefore, have developed as a way to get things done despite this. The plan, such as it is, gets lodged deep into my intentional machinery, and part of me is so happy to have a sense of purpose for once that my mind resists going back to the unfocused and purposeless state even when that is the sensible thing to do.

If only this lead to the kind of useful, highly determined action plans that lead me to do great things, or at least things that would improve my lot in life.

But no, they tend to always revolve around two simple animal needs : food, and sleep. And that provides a further clue as to what is going on, I think.

Food and sleep are both high reward activities. They satisfy primal needs and they are highly reliable and low effort ways to secure pleasure.

So these weird plans that form in my mind and can’t change are, I think, about more than just the joy of having a sense of purpose for a time. They have to do from the depressive’s deep pleasure starvation due to the anhedonia caused by low serotonin levels.

That is why I am increasingly certain that all depressives are addicts. Only our pleasures vary. One depressive might drink, another might eat way too many high reward foods, still another might use the rush of purpose and self-righteousness from anger as their medication.

Life is so unrewarding to us because of the chemical imbalance that we are forced to cling to whatever provides a strong and reliable enough source of reward to cut through the anhedonic fog and give us some kind of sense that life is worth living.

And for me, those are food, sleep, and video games, in roughly that order.

And here I am, nearing the end of my daily writing, and feeling the urge to slow down and do more other things in other windows because deep down, I don’t want this sense of purpose and focus to end either.

After all, this damned blog is the only vaguely worthwhile thing I do most days, and even it is not exactly going to lead me to fame and fortune.

But if gives me something to look forward to and something to do with my energies and helps me get through every day with just a tiny shred of hope.

And that means the world to me.