Feeling weird lately. Not necessarily in a bad way, mind you. But still. Weird.

Like, I have no idea what the fuck is up with my appetite lately. It has gone completely berserk, going from completely nonexistent to “oh my god, I have a black hole in my stomach” at random intervals. All of today until my afternoon nap, I just could not seem to fill the void. Then I woke up from my afternoon nap with no appetite at all, which is also a problem seeing as I have to eat in order to keep my blood sugar up and not end up in the Very Bad Place, but compared to ridonkulous hunger levels, it is a lot less annoying.

In fact, honestly, I should have eaten by now. It is almost 8pm as I type these words, and that means I have not eaten in around seven hours and change. I honestly should not go more than six hours without eating, although that is a rule more seen in the breach than in the observance. So while I write, I will soon go gather some low challenge snacking foods.

It is hard to define “low challenge” in terms of foods for me. Functionally, it means that some foods seem harder to imagine eating when I have low appetite like this than others. An apple, for example, is low challenge. A peanut butter sandwich is medium challenge. Pot roast, which I normally love like it was family, is high challenge.

But I could not tell you exactly what makes a food “challenging”. You would have to ask my gut, because it totally has executive powers in this case. I think of a food and it either goes “GOD NO!” or “….OK”, or something in between.

Some combination of digestibility and flavour, I suppose.

OK, now I am munching on some BBQ peanuts. No carbs to speak of, but at least it will give me some proteins and fat to work on, and hopefully that will bootstrap my appetite somewhat.

That is another thing about lack of appetite. Sometimes, I have no appetite at all until I eat, then suddenly, I am ravenous. I figure that is either rising blood sugar, or giving the sour acid in my stomach something to work on, or a little of both.

It is nevertheless annoying. Eating is not supposed to make you hungrier. That is just plain wrong!

Emotionally speaking, for me, the road continues to be kind of rocky. I have a lot of moments when I cannot, for the the life of me, figure out why I do anything. Everything seems pointless and futile and absurd. The urge to do something crazy and extreme just to break the monotony and shatter the patterns that hold me down comes on strong at those times.

Thank goodness I am a fundamentally stable and sensible person, or I might do something wacky.

But I still have the feeling, deep down, that somehow this is all for the better. That I am experiencing these bad moments (and bad minutes, and bad hours) as part of a healing process by which I am both clearing my emotional backlog and learning to live in a more emotionally real way. Slowly easing that emotional volume knob upwards so I can get used to a higher intensity level, and thus increase the amount that I get out of life.

Of course, as I went into yesterday, that means both the good and the bad get stronger at the same time. So it means that I will feel both better and worse than before, at least until I learn to surf these bigger waves of emotion.

The sine wave of my mood state will increase in amplitude. That is a good thing overall. But the road to recovery is not a smooth and steady one.

It is, in fact, littered with painful, gross, weird, uncomfortable, and just plain unpleasant crap that you just have to climb over in order to get anywhere.

In that respect, it is much like physical recovery. If you end up in the hospital with a serious physical illness, then the chances are pretty good that you are going to go through a lot of pain and discomfort and grossness in order to get better.

Even if all you have to do is rest and convalesce, the chances are good that you will not feel “all better” any time soon, and there will be times when you feel worse and times when you feel better, and subjectively speaking, it will not be a smooth elegant upward curve to recovery.

It will trend upwards, certainly. But it will look less like a gently rolling hillside and more like a seismograph during an earthquake. Lots of ups and downs.

And I am learning to accept that. The desire for predictability, calmness, and a hyper-controlled environment can lead down a very dangerous and damning road to the kind of emotionally suppressive regime that leads to emotional starvation and soul death.

Better to let it in and feel it, and thus gain access to the sorts of deeply rewarding emotions that lead to catharsis and renewal.

The deal, such as it is, would be that by letting your emotional amplitude rise, you are trading increased intensity of negative emotion not just for increased intensity of positive emotions, which would seem to be a net zero equation, but for greater capacity to overcome negative emotions when they happen because you now have deeper emotional resources to draw from to cope.

Thus, you are actually far better off than before. The good stuff is more rewarding and the bad stuff is easier to cope with, and you are a stronger and happier person overall.

At least, that is the theory, and it is one I am perfectly willing to try to prove or disprove.

After all, depression has eaten my entire adult life, so it is not like I can get much worse.