I dread the future.
Or maybe I just dread time.
But for as long as I can remember – certainly for all of my adult life – the passage of time has always made me feel guilty and ashamed and scared.
Let’s make sense of that with an example.
Say I am doing computer stuff and happen to glance at the date. With a start, I realize that it’s already half way through the month.
This happens to everyone.
But what doesn’t is the sharp stab of guilt and shame and fear.I feel as a result. It only takes half a heartbeat and yet I go through an entire cycle of “oh crap, even more time has passed without me getting anywhere in life and now I am an even older loser oh god oh god I better bury myself in my distractions to flee this pain”.
Turns out hating yourself is like anything else you do a lot – you get better at it over time.
I mean, sure it’s horrible to feel that way, but you have to admire the efficiency.
Now obviously, that’s a terrible way to go through life – afraid of the future. And not even any specific future – just the fact that time keeps passing and I keep getting older and more pathetic without making anything of myself is more than enough.
So naturally, I respond to this by fleeing back into my distractions, thus ensuring that I keep falling forward through time without making anything of myself.
With depression, it’s always our coping mechanisms which kill us, one way or another. If we were healthy, we would use these mechanisms a reasonable amount as part of full, balanced emotional diet.
But the void inside us takes far, far more than a reasonable amount of anything to fill, and so we fixate on one high yield activity or another.
Only activities with extremely high effort to reward ratios stand a chance of overcoming the chilling anhedonia of depression that makes it so hard to enjoy anything.
So we end up lost in our overused coping mechanisms, whether it’s crossword puzzles, video games, or heroin. Whatever it is, it is our refuge, because it’s the only way we can feel anything close to normal.
Viewed that way, it’s no wonder that I am not all that productive. To go outside my comfort zone is to venture naked out into that cold dark night in a way that people who have never had depression could scarcely comprehend.
It makes me wonder if there is some more reasonable way to go about recovery. Some way of insulating us poor shivering wrecks against that killer frost so that we can better explore the world without feeling like our souls are starving to death.
I suppose that’s what antidepressants are for. And they help a lot, but they are not enough to make me a functional adult citizen. Not even close.
And therapy helps too. As does this blogging. Thank you for reading it.
But it only goes so far. In order to truly get better, I would have to find some way of not feeling so very, very alone.
I have been alone and abandoned in the cold dark night for so very, very long.
All I really want is to finally be able to come home.
More after the break.
Just finished attending my first fannish Zoom meeting, and man, was it great.
I attended in voice only because at the last second, I became incredibly paranoid that people would be offended by seeing and hearing me eat.
And I had to eat. The meeting was scheduled for between 6 pm and 9 pm, and there was no way I could wait until 9 pm to eat.
As it turned out, it was a total nonissue, but I guess my social anxiety felt the need to make its presence felt before the meeting, so that is how it happened.
Whatever. The next time I will be there live and in color, and my social anxiety will just have to deal with it.
I had loads of fun. I guess I didn’t realize how badly I missed true fannish conversation until I got my first dose in a long time and it was sooooo good.
Same thing happens if I go without Diet Coke for a while. My active withdrawal symptoms are minor – a bit of sleepiness, tiny little headache – but that first taste after a drought tastes soooo damned good.
And I got to see and hear people I had only read via the BCSFAzine letter columns before, like Steve Fahnestalk and Lloyd Penney.
And I got to see people I know but haven’t seen in a really long time, like Steve Forty and Stew Smythe, who has been very ill and so I was SUPER glad to see him.
And in general,. it was just wonderful to enjoy the company of like-minded people. Not to knock the other members of Le Gang – Joe, Julian, and Felicity. They are fascinating and intelligent people and I feel blessed to have them as friends.
But we talk all the time. So it’s refreshing to have a broader discussion with more participants now and then.
Plus, it’s nice to be around people who haven’t heard all my jokes. (*laugh track*)
Gameswise, I finished Assassin’s Creed : Unity, and based on how much I loved that game, I started looking at other entries in the series.
And there are a lot of other Assassin’s Creed games.
So I looked the series up on Metacritic, and the one with the highest score on PC was Assassin’s Creed : Brotherhood. This was good news because that’s also the one Maelkoth said was his fave.
So that will likely be the next game I play once I completethe Franciade DLC in AC:U.
Right now, I can get it for around $20, which is fine, I can spare that these days.
Oh, and get this : Assassin’s Creed : Unity, the one I am almost done playing and absolutely loved, only has a Metascore of 70 percent.
Assassin’s Creed : Brotherhood, the one I am probably going to get next, has a Metascore of 89 percent.
So if I love Unity, I will absolutely adore Brotherhood. Statistically speaking.
I can’t wait to find out if theory and practice align.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.