I haven’t really been talking about it, but I have had some periods of serious depression lately, and I figured this is the space to talk about potential reasons why.

The most obvious and prosaic is that the reduction in my Paxil dosage is finally catching up to me and I am just now feeling the negative effects of the slippage.

That is probably the bulk of the reason why. At least, it is the most obvious and sensible explanation, and what the hell, those are often true.

Boring, but true.

Another factor : the depletion of all my mental resources caused by my three day social bender at VancouFur last weekend. Not only did I go three days without an appreciable quantity of sleep, but I also burned my social coping candle at both ends, and that is something that we introverted types do at our own peril.

The definition of introversion is that social activity drains you rather than charges you up, and while I greatly enjoyed all the stuff I did on the weekend, it also took its toll.

And I have to admit, not everything went well. My lack of sleep made it hard to participate in the convention as fully as I would have liked. I spent a lot of the time between events just cudgeling my brain to keep myself from falling asleep in the lobby.

Hotels frown on that sort of thing.

And then there was Saturday night, which depresses me just thinking about it because what went does was so exactly like me and my fucking mental problems that it is just plain sad and absurd and pathetic.

Originally, I was going to go to a very fun sounding event, a Bad Movie Night featuring a bunch of stuff from the MST3K/RiffTrax crew, and I was quite looking forward to it. Love those guys!

But Joe, Julian, and I had some time to kill between supper at ABC and the event, so we went back up to our motel room to rest, and rest we did.

In fact, we fell asleep. Woke up at around 10:30 pm, which meant the event had already been going for like half an hour. No big deal.

But then I made a very stupid decision and decided to stay in the room instead of going to the event. I was so amazed that I had gotten any sleep at all that I guess I wanted to strike while the iron was hot and capitalize on the opportunity.

Yet even while I was making the decision, I knew it was wrong. There was a voice screaming in my head, saying “No, no, no, you idiot, you know you are going to regret this, don’t do it!”

Even as Joe asked me if I wanted to come with them, and I told him I had decided to stay and catch up on sleep, I felt like I was two people, the one saying the stupid thing and the one who knew better.

I honestly felt like I had no control over my actions, like I was just a puppet for my worse instincts. The words just came out of my mouth and I knew damned well they were wrong.

So Joe and Julian left, and I try to go back to sleep, but of course, now I can’t. And so I am stuck sitting in the hotel room thinking about how fucking stupid I am to have given up the opportunity to have a good time. And after that, all I could think of was how all those people were having a great time while I was stuck back at the hotel room watching TV and hating myself.

And the thing is, I knew that if I called Joe and asked very, very nicely, there was a chance he could come pick me up and I could join the fun. Or I could have called down to the front desk to see if there were any shuttle buses available. Or I could have called a cab. I mean, how expensive can a five block cab ride be, anyhow?

For that matter, I could have walked that far.

But no, I got locked into this self-defeating mental state where I was angry at myself and depressed and anxious and feeling like I wanted to jump out of my own skin, but was not actually capable of doing anything to rectify the situation, which of course only made me more upset.

So that was a bad time. And looking back, I know how irrational it all was, but at the time, I was stuck in the basement of Hell, locked in a box called mental illness with no way out.

And that was depressing. But I was doing fairly good at getting over it, or so I thought, and then I looked up the Harlem Shake video we made at the con, and I saw this :

For those of you who do not know me in the flesh, I am the hugely, grotesquely, obscenely fat guy in the white shirt, suspenders, beard, and glasses.

Seeing myself in that video makes me realize just what a fat sack of shit I really am. I had no idea I was so extraordinarily… egg-shaped. Ovoid. Bulbous. Ridiculous. Grotesque.

Turns out, it was smart of me to avoid looking in mirrors all these years, although there is no mirror in the world that could give you a look of yourself quite like that.

It makes me wonder how anyone can bear to even be seen with me. It has sent me into a pretty bad depression for the last day or so.

I guess I will get over it eventually. I have no choice. It’s get over it, or it will kill me.

But a lot of the old feelings are back. Feeling like I am a fat freak, a repulsive and disgusting creature that is nothing but a superating tumour on the heel of society’s foot.

Oh. And pushing forty with no life lived and no contribution to society.

Why do I go on?