I used YouTube’s editor to fix the lighting on this one. How does it look?

Still sitting on my iceberg.

But I am not too worried. This too shall pass. And when it does, I will have another little piece of myself back. And there is no profit in worrying about being depressed. I have learned to treat it like having a cold. Sure, it sucks, and sure, you are going to do whatever it takes to get better or at least alleviate the symptoms, but at the bottom of it all, you know that you are mostly just going to be waiting it out.

Of course, writing about it helps a lot, too.

Spent a lot of time asleep today. Whatever. It’s not like I had anything important to get done. Just another day in the life of the quiet kind of depressive. The kind that never attempts suicide, never ends up in the psych war, never brings people down with their bad mood.

We just wait out our lives in silence.

It’s been a long long time since I have been even vaguely suicidal. The worst I have is moments. Moments where all the frustration and anger at my condition peaks and I just want to escape being myself for a while.

Real life is such a drag, you know?

But those pass quickly. I am a judo master when it comes to slamming those thoughts down. I know that I get a little better every day and the times when I feel bad are just part of the process of healing. You can’t heal from anything, physical or mental, without a certain amount of pain. Growth itself is often painful. Trying to avoid everything that is painful is futile. Nearly everything worth getting in life involves crawling over the jagged rocks of life at least a little.

The secret is to have tough skin and sufficient drive to make going over those rocks a piece of cake.

Still working on not beating myself up over the lack of progress type things done by yours truly lately. I knew that when I finally got around to making my “things I could be doing right now” list, there was a very high chance that the machinery of my mind would turn that into the “things you SHOULD be doing right now and oh my god you haven’t done anything in ages you sre such a loser everybody hates you” blah blah, but I took the risk anyhow.

These are the sort of things I want to get over, and you don’t get over anything without dealing with it.

It is still hard to accept that sometimes I can make progress upstream and sometimes the best I can do is keep up with the stream. And some days, not even that.

It’s always water.

I did do one thing I have been meaning to do for a while today. I signed up for Patreon. It’s a site where people can sign up to sponsor an artist they like. You can either pledge a certain amount per month or a certain amount per piece of art, like every time an artist posts a new piece of part, you would pay them X bucks.

Obviously, for a fellow like me, the “per blog entry” thing would be pretty expensive. I do two a day, after all, so even a $1 per piece sponsorship plan would cost someone $60/month. Plus, to me, that seems uncomfortably open to abuse. Sure, on the one hand, it inspires artists to be prolific, but what about quality?

I suppose what keeps artists from just churning out tons of low quality crap for the cash is that a Patron can withdraw patronage at any time, and if you art sucks, that is more likely to happen.

Still, I have myself set up on the monthly plan. It just seems more honest somehow. Here’s the link, if you are interested.

Click here if you would like to sponsor me.

It doesn’t have to mean a lot of money. You can pledge as little as $1 a month if you like. It would just be nice to have a little extra encouragement, especially on the down days.

It was pretty hard for me to go through with it, signing up and everything. Even harder to tell people about it. I have spent a hell of a long time thinking I am worthless and useless and so on, so to have the temerity to even suggest someone would put one red cent in this Internet busker’s hat of mine shows significant progress for yours truly. It took a lot of what passes for guts in me to do it.

So yay me, I guess.

I still find it hard to imagine that anyone will do anything with it. What I do seems to fly under the radar of even the people who experience it themselves. People don’t know how to react to it, or how to process it, so it just sort of… passes through them. Like light through a window pane.

But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I did it and that I am telling you about it. Just like what matters is that I submitted that story of mine to On Spec, not whether or not they accept it.

Just putting myself out there is a big step for me. One of these days, I am either going to get one of these submission tracker programs or do it myself with a spreadsheet or something, and then I will have the tool(s) I need to keep every story I have ever written that is even faintly readable out there in circulation.

My friend James Patrick Lynch is right. I really should be putting my “stuff” out there more. It’s very easy to just stay in the cozy interiority of the artist’s mind, making art just for fun, but I want to be able to support myself with my writing skills and that means taking this shit seriously, even if it’s only in bursts.

Oh, and in case my comments earlier did not make this clear, I don’t want anyone to worry about me when I write all these sad things about myself. It doesn’t mean I am in any danger of self-harm.

This is just how I work through things.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.