Oh right. Depressed, and brooding about it.

I just cannot seem to shake this depressed feeling. It started with the disaster of Thursday night, but it just keeps dragging on. Any time I have a quiet moment to myself where I am not in full blown distraction mode, there it is, waiting to pounce.

And pounce it does, and then I feel horrible, all dark and depressed and hating myself and my life. It is like this invisible weight pushing me from all sides, making it hard to breathe and forcing my thoughts down into the dark, instead of up in the sunshine and blue skies, where I want them to be.

I have to admit, it has me scared. I have felt far more depressed over the last three or four days than I have in the last five years or more. I have felt worthless and depressed and scared and trapped and crazy and stupid and angry from all the pain. I have felt like screaming, like crying, and like putting my first through my computer screen. (That last was mostly Gnometown, granted.)

So obviously, this whole thing with the toilet backing up has unlocked something truly deep dark and bad inside me. It was not just the toilet that backed up because of too much being put through it. That was just the physical manifestation of what was going to happen to me.

And this time, I can’t just get Joe to fix it for me, though that would be awfully nice. Then I could just retreat deep into my shell and not come out until the problem was all gone.

But no, some things I just have to work out myself in one way or another. Whether you choose to deal with life or not, it deals with you. There are no time-outs or do-overs. No matter how many lives you can imagine, no matter how many alternatives you can envision, you only get to live one single precious life, one string of seconds like beads on a wire, and the sooner you accept that and learn to simply live in the moments you actually have, the better.

Still working on that. It is just so darn comfy in this nest of mine inside my mind, with thick spongy walls of non-realtime to protect me from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I am like the Captain of the B Ark in Hitchiker’s Guide, the one who has spent decades in the bath because he just keeps saying “Well, why get out now just when it’s getting comfortable?”

I walled myself off from the world and retreated deep into my own mind at a very early age, probably initially due to being sexually abused when I was very small, not even school age. I do not have memories of the incident itself, but I do remember making the same heartbreaking decision that many other abuse victims make, to just take myself far, far away. To use the clinical term, I dissociated, defocusing my mind away from the here and now and retreating into my imagination and my intellect.

And in a very real sense, I have never come back out. I am still in there, trying to operate reality from inside my fragile shell. Other incidents, like getting bullied rather brutally, would cause me to retreat further and further, shells within shells, wheels withing wheels, increasing my insulation from the world but further crippling my ability to deal with it.

Hard to explain that to the outside world, of course. They do not see that you are trying to deal with things from inside a series of shells. They don’t see the shells at all. They just can’t understand why simple things are so hard for you to do. And why a big fellow like me can seem so weak.

Well, strength comes from the heart, from the soul. And mine is very very weak. It did not grow up with the rest of me. Certainly it did not keep up with this runaway brain of mine. The brain gets stronger all the time from all the exercise I give it, but that soul, the heart, the spirit animating it remains a sad little cripple.

I think at least part of my recent depression must be physiological. My blood sugar is low, I think, and that is a very bad thing. Plus, despite an awful lot of time in bed, I get the distinct feeling that on some level, I am in dire need of sleep. I must be lacking in restful Z’s. And lack of proper sleep can make the whole world seem worse than it really is, and worse than it would seem if you were rested.

Plus, my allergies have been acting up, giving me a runny nose and stuffed sinuses and who knows what else. I have long suspected that the sneezing and whatnot are only the surface symptoms of my allergic reaction to airborne pollen and such, and that the reaction actually causes a system-wide inflammatory condition that can lead to other things, like digestive issues.

So who knows what maelstrom of malady is brewing inside me now. We won;t even think about what the airborne toilet water circulating around for a few days might do to a person. It does not bear thinking on, and I am the kind of guy who will think about damned near anything.

Well, thank goodness I have this blog, where I can just pour it all out onto the virtual page and thus get some kind of cathartic release. I feel better now than I did when I started writing this, and I think I will take a nice long nap now.

Thanks, as always, for virtually holding my hand (and my head?) while I virtually spill my guts. I can;t guarantee that this is the last treatment, but I feel like I am on the mend now, and I have you precious few who read this blog of mine to thank for it.

Thank you all very, very much.