And not the fun kind with like, feather boas and sequins.
Was pretty depressed earlier this afternoon. Had one of my attacks of sadness and despair where there doesn’t seem to be a point to anything and everything seems stupid and ugly and like a very bad idea.
Luckily, it passed after I got a bit more sleep. These things don’t usually last very long. They reach a peak and then recede.
The peaks are bad. Very bad. But even in my worst moments, I know that I will not feel this way forever, and therefore all I have to do is hang in there and wait for the worst to be over and then things can go back to the current local definition of normal.
I am certainly far, far beyond the point where I might do something permanent based on a temporary emotion. I do get suicidal feelings sometimes but I recognize them for what they are, namely an expression of extremely frustration with my own unhappiness and not a true desire to die.
We depressives rarely want to die. We just want it to be over. We want the pain to stop so we can finally truly rest or maybe even get some real sleep.
You can see how that desire can easily be confused with an urge to die., especially by the depressed person themselves.
It’s what the blackout drunk is looking for, too. They drink so heavily in search of something that can force their brains to stop and rest and give them some peace.
So it’s like suicide in a bottle, but without the commitment.
I can see the appeal. I really wish I had a way to force my brain to halt all processes and shut down like a good computer. Let me do a cold reboot so I can clear out all the dead processes and memory fragments and clutter and remember what it was like when my mind ran clean and clear and crisp like it was right out of the box.
Obviously, I am not going to take up drinkin’. MY health is already terrible, thank ye kindly. No way I would live long if I turned to the bottle.
Same with any other kind of chemically induced effect of a similar nature.
What I really want is for my brain to run well for a change. For the fog to clear and let the warm sunshine in and let me just live love and laugh without constantly being hounded by my inner demons of self-hatred, uncertainty, and lack of vitality.
A hard reboot might be one way to achieve that. Purge the system of errors by restoring from a clean backup, otherwise known as your long term memory.
The right antidepressant also might do the trick. I could ask to try ones other than Wellbutrin and Paxil, see if that makes things better.
But I doubt it would. My gut tells me that my mental health problems are too complex, deep, and personal to be solved by a chemical.
I need to get deep into my very operating system and make changes to some very old code that has been running for a very long time and that called upon by nearly every program in my mind.
And that ain’t easy.
More after the break.
What I want for my birthday
I don’t fucking know.
I never do,. It’s far too open ended a question, with far too many possible answers, for my poor brain to calculate.
And when I ask myself what I want, I tend to come up with unhelpful answers like “a job” or “a boyfriend” or “love”.
Because the problem, as always, is that I taught myself not to want things. I figured there is no point torturing myself with longings for things I can’t get, so I learned at a very young age to not think about what I don’t have and to instead concentrate on enjying what I’ve got.
Which sounds all wise and shit, but it’s actually just an expression of a deeply wounded soul afraid to truly look outside itself so it remains self-absorbed.
I’ve been extremely withdrawn and frightened for so very very long. Afraid of having to deal directly with overstimulating, confusing, anxiety provoking reality, I just kept burrowing deeper and deeper into myself until I had no idea what the real me even was any more or which direction was “out”.
I only know the Russian nesting doll version of myself.
When I look back over my almost 50 years of life, I am amazed to see how unnatural it all has been. How bizarre it was that I listened to absolutely none of my instincts and kept living this sad, sorry, stultifying life while the whole time my health was slowly falling apart and I had my metaphorical fingers in my ears, singing “LA LA LA, everything is fine, even if it’s not!”.
I can’t shake the feeling that there has to be something deeply and terribly wrong for a person to have lived this preteen life for as long as I have.
I mean, I am going to turn fifty a week from yesterday, and all I know how to do is entertain myself. With video games. And blogging. That’s it.
That’s not a life. That’s not even life.
That’s some kind of diagnostic loop gone berserk. A test pattern that grew legs and arms and a mouth and took over the empty shell of where a human life should be. A dozen lines of code accessed a million times a second despite not having been updated since they were installed in 1977.
I feel so weak and helpless and sick sometimes. And small. So very, very small.
I just hope that one day, I can find the rest of me and be a real little boy again. One with instincts and desires and drives and everything!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.