Been watching a movie about a woman with depression and it has me feeling depressed.

No big surprise there. The movie, called Side Effects, who is very depressed, to the point where she drives her car into a wall. She ends up on this new (presumably fictional) drug called Ablixa, and it helps her a lot but it has the odd side effect of making her sleepwalk and do things like set the table or cook.

Sounds like Ambien, doesn’t it?

Everything is going good for her until one night, her husband comes home to find her chopping vegetables. He tries to wake her up, and she stabs him to death, then goes back to bed.

In the morning, she doesn’t remember a thing.

I have half an hour of it left, and I am enjoying the suspense. The psychiatrist who gave her the Ablixa ends up losing everything in the ensuing scandal, and has become obsessed with proving it was actually premeditated murder.

I am betting they will not definitely settle the subject. It’s that kind of movie. But if I had to bet, it would be that she truly is a victim of the drug, because otherwise the movie will have lied to the viewer when it showed her life before the incident, as well as how it depicted the incident itself.

And movies rarely do that, especially movies without an established point of view. There’s no framing device telling us this is her version of the story. So, she’s probably innocent.

But maybe not.

Anyhow, there is a line in the movie about depression, saying that “around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, a thick poisonous fog rolls in, and I am paralyzed. ”

I have described my own depression in nearly identical terms. And I have often spoken about how hard afternoons are on me. They are definitely the time when my fog rolls in too.

Clinically speaking, I know what it is. It’s that numbing agent that the mind secretes in response to trauma. That is what drags you down into the pits of hell, and what keeps you from feeling positive things like love and hope.

It blots all that out.

According to that theory, maybe the best drug for long term therapy would be one that blocks whatever chemical or function it is that causes the fog. That would force the patient to actually deal with their trauma, and while that would have to be done under strict clinical observation to prevent self-harm, it is possible that afterwards, the patient would be cured.

Maybe that’s what ayahuasca works.

But knowledge does not conquer all. Knowing what the problem is does not solve the problem by itself. That takes time, and effort, and the will to struggle against oneself in order to change.

And I am doing fairly well with that lately.

This afternoon I was feeling pretty depressed. But once more. I (eventually) recognized it as a physical thing that would probably go away once I got out of bed and moved around some.

And I was right. I have done that now, plus gotten some food into me at last, and I feel a lot better. I still feel crappy, but it’s a level of crappiness that I can live with.

Plus, there was the movie. That probably didn’t help. Don’t get me wrong, in the long run it does me a lot of good to see things depicting depression and its consequences. It helps me to feel less alone in my struggle against the darkness that kills. And by stimulating my own issues, it helps me to deal with them.

But in the short term, it usually leaves me feeling depressed.

Oh well, life goes on. I am slowly building my plan to get that Associate Degree in Creative Writing from Kwantlen. I have not made a lot of progress on it for the last few days because of my health, but tomorrow is another day.

Yesterday, what kept me from being productive was the bad kind of sleepiness. I slept a lot on Monday, and it was that sweaty, unpleasant, restless kind of sleep that makes it hard to wake up even when I want to, and that always blows my mood. Feeling trapped in sleep.

And it feels a lot like a life and death struggle as well. That’s probably because of my untreated sleep apnea. I am fighting for my life because I am fighting for air.

Oh, I had an interesting dream. I dreamed that I was in a doctor’s office and a young, handsome doctor was telling me that he could fix my knee, despite what I had been told. The procedure sounded long and unpleasant, so I was dithering about it, wondering if my relatively minor knee problem warranted such an extreme intervention.

That’s all I remember of it. Intriguing though. The doctor was a lot like the sexy British doctor from The Mindy Project, which I started watching Season Three of only recently. So clearly my mind used him, even though he’s actually an OB/GYN.

But the idea that my knee could be fixed must stand in for something. Perhaps my mind. I would love to find out that my mind could be fixed (like, say, with a magic pill). I would love to make the fog go away to stay.

I would worry what else it was doing to my brain, but it would still be a risk I was prepared to take.

Hopefully, later on I will feel up to getting that Kwantlen thing going. I can’t wait to have something to focus on that actually gets me ahead in this world. Even if it’s just three courses, it will be good to have some structure back in my life.

I fall apart without it.

Right now, I think I am going to lay down for a bit. I think I need a few more winks of sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.