Because it’s all I can do.
I guess when you don’t fight the depression, it’s easy to imagine that you totally could kick its ass if you wanted to.
You could just get up, brush off the cobwebs and dustbunnies, square your shoulders, and finally get around to starting your life.
It’s just that simple. And you are totally going to get around to it any day now.
But ya know. There’s no rush. These things take time. You have to prepare.
Better to do it right the first time then rush into a disaster, right?
And as long as your depression keeps feeding you that line of high test bullshit, you’re its bitch, and it can control you for decades and have you all to itself while your youth melts away and you get older and slower and weaker and sicker.
Trust me on that.
It took me many years to even pull my head out of my own ass enough to look around like a scat obsessed groundhog, see my shadow, and realize I had a fucking problem.
I just kept bopping along playing videos and hanging out online while my life timer ticked away, never giving a thought to the future, let alone foreign concepts like plans, ambitions, and desires.
And now I am going to turn 50 in a month and a half and I have done absolutely nothing worthwhile with my life – there’s tweens with more life experience than me – and that’s an incredibly hard thing to deal with.
The healthy response cycle would be for these feeling of impending doom and time running out to light a fire under my ass and make me frantically try to make up for lost time as I launch myself into a full tilt effort to get a job and a boyfriend and so on.
But that’s for people with the right chemicals in their brains.
My chemicals suck.
And that means that my interpretation of the situation is to feel utterly crushed by all those wasted years and that only makes it even harder to do anything about it.
So I spend most of my time and most of my days squashed flat under the burden of time, unable to do a god damn thing to help myself.
Or at least that’s how it feels. Which means it’s true nevertheless.
My mind is a cold numb lifeless place where things like focus and drive and ambition die long horrible lingering deaths in the Midnight Tundra of my internal landscape.
No wonder the ticking of my life clock doesn’t motivate me. It can’t. The emotion simply cannot penetrate all that cold dead flesh that fills my mind like so much suet.
And no wonder the days where I can’t do a thing but keep holding on vastly outnumber the days when I can actually swim upstream a bit.
It takes me forever to save up the energy and motivation to do one small thing to help myself, like apply for something on UpWork.
And it kills me to feel so helpless as I watch the days go by and see the life force drain from me like blood from a carcass and my body slowly grinding to a halt.
The best that I can do is try to keep the taps open so that said suet can very slowly makes its globby viscous way out of me drop by agonizing drop.
It isn’t nothing.
But it isn’t much.
And I frankly don’t have enough time to wait for it to work.
But it’s all I can do.
More after the break.
The art of expansion
The problem with expanding your mind is that it’s kind of hard to prove.
I mean, I can tell you that after that unpleasant but necessary expectoration of negativity in part 1, I feel a lot better.
Then I watched Arrival with Joe and Julian and holy shit, is it good. Now THAT is science fiction done right.
So I am feeling pretty good right now. Feeling relatively light and clean. Mental fog is thinner than average. I’m feeling bright and shiny.
And that’s allowed me to reinterpret my current state of affairs (mind division) as going through a period of mental expansion.
But not merely in some hippie dippie “far out, man” way that feels like it’s blowing your mind wide open but actually produces nothing tangible or useful besides a trip.
I’m talking about the real deal here. I am expanding my mind like I am filling up a balloon in the center of my mind and as the balloon expands, it stretches my mind and makes more room for my thoughts.
This notion is partly inspired by something that happened in therapy yesterday. Doc Costin challenged me to come up with a way I could improve my life, and I drew a complete and total blank.
Could not think of a damned thing. It’s like suddenly my mind was full of chilled syrup,
And that’s not me. I don’t get stumped by questions of that nature. I am smart enough and creative enough and insightful enough to come up with an abundance of answers to that kind of question.
But depression made me stupid.
And that pisses me off.
The question has answers, dammit. I know it does. And I know that if I can just clear the gunk out of my head, I will be able to see them quite easily.
It’s not an easy question. I will stipulate to that. Figuring out a path to what I want that only goes to places where I can go and involves doing only things I can do is hard.
But I have solved much trickier puzzles before. It’s just a matter of letting the problem fill my mind and then keeping my antenna out listening for the crackle of connection.
We’ve all been there.
But the main thing I am trying to say is that I am pissed off at my mind for not being able to spit out an answer for the most important question of my life, and so a good deal of the expansion of my mind is fueled by rage. Rage and wounded pride.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.