Got a real feeling of twilight even though it’s only 4 pm.
But it’s a dark, overcast day and it’s snowing, and its the tail end of November, so I guess you could call it the twilight of the year.
It’s certainly dark enough to be the early hours of sunset. That’s probably what started me feeling this way.
It’s not depression, thank Whoever. Just a kind of pensive sadness. I feel deep and dark and poetic. The sort of mood that suits barren landscapes and abandoned towns and parts of the city where everything is run down and overgrown and weathered and the only people who ever go there live there.
Otherwise they wouldn’t go there either.
Melancholy. That’s the word for it. And it’s not that bad a feeling. Sure, you’re sad, but it’s a healthy kind of sad. The kind that expresses something from deep inside you.
Kind of like this song. Warning, it’s as sad as it gets.
That song is brutally sad and I would imagine for a lot of people very depressing.
But not me. It always makes me feel better.
One’s tastes in art are always influenced by one’s needs for catharsis, and it’s the same with me. That song reaches deep into the kind of sadness I find very hard to express.
I am much more familiar with expressing depression, which is not the same thing at all.
It’s a simple effect : catharsis feels good. even when it’s the release of a “negative” emotion. The lightening of our emotional burden feels great, and thus seemingly paradoxical genres like horror and tear-jerkers actually make a lot of sense.
Not to mention carnival rides.
Unfortunately, I generally lack the wisdom to see out art that will provide me the catharsis I need. That short-sighted and shallow hedonism of mine is always there saying, “Don’t do that, it will make us sad, and we don’t want to be sad!”.
Makes sense on the surface of it, like all my stupidest issues. There has to be layers of thought below and beyond whether or not something makes sense.
I missed out on so many healthy and natural childhood activities simply because they did not make sense to my preternaturally calm and logical preteen self.
But some thing don’t make sense until you do them. They can’t be explained and verified beforehand because too much of the experience is bound to context you do not have and won’t get if you insist on knowing where the road ends before setting out.
Take it from one who know this all too well : that’s a great way to end up going nowhere.
For decades at a time, even. Your entire adult life.
But that’s what happens when trauma in your past have left you stuck in emergency mode, prioritizing a feeling of safety above all other concerns, including actual safety.
You mind becomes a paranoid fascist state that obsesses over the slightest hints of a threat and allows for precious little freedom and autonomy all in the name of safety.
Well I ain’t safe. Not at all. I am in constant danger, in fact, from all my inner demons.
They just don’t feel like dangers because I’m completely used to them.
Better a familiar disease than a scary cure, right?
More after the break.
Dark days indeed
Turns out I’m not the only one depressed today.
A close friend is feeling the heavy hand of darkness on their soul. Enough so that they stayed home from work.
Life’s kind of ganging up on them. The fan on their car is on the fritz. Today’s an unusually dark and depressing day climate wise.[1] It’s been snowing, so road conditions are crappy.
So I don’t blame them at all for taking a mental health day.
I’d do the same but I’m unemployed.
I feel privileged that they were so open to me as to come straight out and tell me they were depressed. That’s not easy to do for any of us depressives, but especially them.
They are a very private person.
Whoever knows, I am no good at it myself. I can only talk about being depressed in the past tense. I never say “I am depressed” to anyone,. and that includes my shrink.
I have to leave room for detachment, I suppose. Telling people I am depressed in realtime makes things a little too real and immediate for me.
I need time to intellectualize everything, dammit!
But now I am wondering to what degree I actually experience my depression in realtime. Perhaps part of the reason I have no suicide attempts or hospitalizations is that I maintain that chilly detachment from my own emotions.
That’s an intensely creepy thought. Just how much of an ice lizard am I?
Lord knows I want to be more real and immediate and alive. But I am also too terrified of that change to actually do it.
It seems like it would be so overwhelming. So much more sensory and emotional input to handle. So much stimulation to process. It sounds awful – anxiety city.
At least, that’s what my depression says, and we all know what a sleazy and self-serving liar that motherfucker is.
Presumably my mind and soul would get used to the higher stimulation levels as long as I resisted the urge to panic and flee.
You have to endure to adapt.
Of course, the other reason I have no history of suicide attempts is that they are usually cries for help and I gave up on crying for help when I was still in my crib.
I was the child left to cry.
After a while, you don’t even try.
Besides, cries for help are smothered by my Avoidant Personality Disorder, which insists that the only safety lies in going unnoticed.
Well I have certainly done that all my life. I can disappear before your very eyes and you won’t even notice because I have slipped out of your mind.
Seems crazy that a bison like me can do that, but I have the lived experience to prove it. It takes a lot of effort for me to decloak.
I’m the sort of person who can desperately want attention and want everyone to leave me alone and don’t notice me at the same time.
In other words, I’m fucked in the head.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.