Because sometimes, I just… can’t.
One of the hardest things to cope with about depression is the numbness at its root. It is my belief that depression and all its horrors stem directly from a deep and terrible numbness of the mind that cuts off the patient from all the positive inputs we need to be sane and healthy individuals.
Thus, depression isn’t always about feeling terrible.
It can also be about feeling nothing. Which is terrible.
The numbness robs us of our capacity for pleasure and joy, and we end up addicted to whatever activity has the sky high effort to reward ratio to be able to pierce that thick layer of ice that clings to our hearts and give us the tiny trickle of life-sustaining energy on which we survive.
I am all about the poetic rambling sentences today.
To some, talking about depression’s numbness is counterintuitive because we tend to think of depression in terms of negative emotions, like sadness and anger, and numbness seems like the opposite of emotion.
But what I am saying is that it’s this numbness that leads directly to the negative emotions by starving us of the kind of spiritual sunlight people need to survive.
We are not in control of this numbness. It comes and goes as it pleases according to the chaotic whims of our brain chemicals.
So we never know how we will feel. And that’s depressing in and of itself. We can live in totally different emotional universes from minute to minute and there is no way to cope with that except to shut down and hide from the world some place with very low stimulation levels where we can feel safe.
This is why we self-isolate. We seek hyper-stable low-stimulus environments in order to compensate for the chaos within.
The worst, to me, is when it freezes out those we love. It’s easy (and convenient) to imagine that we are all alone in our bleak snowscapes but we are not.
Almost all of us have people who love and care for us who have been left out in the cold by our illness and who wish they knew how to reach us.
I know I do. I am eternally grateful for my dear friends and their persistence in loving me. I know I can seem like I am a million light years away sometimes but I do truly love you all with all my heart and appreciate all you do for me.
I wish there was a way I could keep my illness from hurting anyone else. But the only way to do that would be to go back to living completely alone and there is no way I could survive like that any more.
I barely survived it back then. I was pretty crazy a lot of the time.
So I guess I just have to trust that my friends know what they are doing and can take care of themselves and figure knowing me is worth the cost.
Well I am pretty damned amazing, come to think of it.
So I guess it all works out.
More after the break.
Starting from scratch
Also known as the blog entry about nothing.
No ideas rattling around in my capacious cranium at the moment, so I guess it’s time for a State of the Fruvous address.
I am doing okay. It’s an intense time to be me. That stent operation has put a lot more energy into my system and I am still sorting out what to do with it.
I have a whole new motivational system to build. after all. One that can actually lead to action for a change.
What a strange new world.
Right now, like I said before, the most straightforward and noticeable effect is that it has turned up the volume on my emotions.
Fine by me. The more I feel, the faster I heal. I’d pop the cork and let them all out at once if I could.
Here comes the flood.
The immediate effect of this is that emotions are un-suppressing themselves. Stuff just keeps bubbling up and I am doing my best to keep my mind open. flexible, and receptive so that I can receive what my deeper mind is trying to tell me.
And I can feel something stirring within me, struggling to wake up, trying to be born. It knows the dreaming has to end and it wants to leave its crib and see the world at last.
But as for right now, it is still primitive and weak. Barely even a conscious thing, more like a person in a coma who has just remembered reality.
But it grows stronger by the minute. This rich new diet of life force lets it put on bone and muscle mass rapidly, and soon it will be ready to escape this hibernation chamber I have been locked in for so long and actually go find out where the crew went.
It’s alien monsters, isn’t it? It’s always alien monsters. Why can’t it ever be something fun, like they’re all hiding in the cargo bay to throws me a surprise party, or they got invited to some kind of interstellar barbeque joint and my invite is waiting for me along with a rented space tux and a shuttlecraft, or they found an orgy planet, or something.
Actually, forget the surprise party. I hate those.
My point (I think) is that I feel hopeful that I am getting better. The route will be anything but linear and there is no telling how long it will take, but I am moving along my path to recovery at an accelerated rate and that has to be a good thing.
I still have a lot of sadness and doubt and isolation and all the rest of depression’s usual bag of tricks. I still have a whole lot of healing to do.
I am still carrying around a very big wound and it’s still weighing me down.
But I am melting that block of ice on my heart as fast as I can.
Die, my depression. DIE.
Wow that got intense quick.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.