Not doing so great today. In fact, frankly, I feel quite depressed.

Why? I have no fucking idea. Just the winds of fate and my unstable brain chemistry, I suppose. Perhaps I am going through another period of processing deep grief and long suppressed rage.

Or maybe I am just plain destined to go around and around in ever widening circles without ever being able to escape my inevitable return to his dark and fetid emotional state. I don’t know.

Maybe it is just a case of needing to vent the dark stuff now and then. I hope so.

There’s a few rogue factors in play right now. For one, I am still adjusting to the lowered Paxil dose, which means I feel things more strongly than on the higher dose and that means the lows are lower.

Unpleasant, but you cannot escape your past and your problems without feeling the things you kept yourself from feeling all these years. You pay that debt or you stay in jail. Period.

Having less Paxil in my system simply means that I will be paying that debt faster. Hopefully, I will even get to the point where I am paying it faster than I am accumulating it, and actually run at a surplus instead of a deficit.

And then, somewhere along the line, you might even live debt-free. That sounds like heaven to me right about now. More than heaven. Nirvana.

I have been thinking a lot about emotional instability lately. Specifically, about how a lack of emotional stability can rob a person of control over their life and ruin not just their own lives but the lives of the people they love and who love them because it makes the person unreliable, untrustworthy, and unable to even really be the same person from one day to the next.

And that is so incredibly difficult to convey to the outside world. It is impossible for someone who has not experienced it to comprehend what it is like to have one’s entire sense of self, the very bedrock upon which all else is rooted, constantly fluctuating.

And so they cannot understand why some things are so damned hard for you. Why you cling so hard to the wretched little island you have cobbled together from the flotsam and jetsam thrown clean of a storm tossed sea. Seemingly simple activities that might well lead you out of this cage are fraught with unseen peril because the slightest thing might rouse the angry giant within and send the delicate house of cards that is your fragile sense of self tumbling down.

And a basic truth of the human psyche is that loss of self is death to us naked beach apes. That is why people react to potential loss of status as if they were going to die. Why they fight like hell against things that offend their sense of self, including the prejudices that form the deep down root of their egos (Well, I am certainly better than THOSE PEOPLE…. ), even though objectively speaking, these people are no threat to them whatsoever.

And it’s why depression makes life so hard to live. It either causes or is caused by a terribly weak sense of self that leaves the inner life of the depressive subject to an extraordinary level of flux and makes us very reluctant to do anything which would jeopardize whatever small stability we achieve.

Hence the notorious and noxious conservatism of the depressed. We are terrified to do anything or trying anything outside of our shaky little worlds. Things that seem simple and easy are a source of great fear and anxiety to us, and we make up a million and ten reasons not to do things, but they are all just tissue thin justifications covering up the real answer :

New things scare us. They might bring the whole world down on our heads, not in objective reality, but in our reality, and that is the only reality in which we will ever live.

To be a depressive is to have your world dominated by your need to escape your terrible emotional burden. To keep that angry giant asleep. And such is your fear of your fears, such is your desire to keep that fragile stability you have achieved intact, that you will sacrifice absolutely anything, opportunities, friendships, your own life and potential, to keep the seas calm.

And because this all involves a fragile and threadbare sense of self that is constantly under threat, it really does feel like you are saving your own life when you do all the things it takes to keep your anxieties under control.

Even if that means having a life like mine, where I do very little every day, spend as much of it as I can asleep and then fritter away the rest on Internet chat and video games.

Sure, there are millions of things I could be doing to improve my situation. I have loads of potential. I have an amazing brain, buckets of creativity, a warm and likable personality, my own brand of personal charisma and charm, and one heck of a sense of humour.

There are countless applications for that sort of thing. But they all involve risking increasing the amount of flux inside me, they all amount to pushing against the walls of my universe, and so the idea that I cannot choose amongst them because there are too many is actually a facile lie.

The truth is, I can’t choose because they are all frightening, and they are all frightening because every single one of them would involve moving out of the safe space I have carved into my mind, this paralyzing spotlight which freezes me in its light and meager warmth because all around me seems dark and cold and dangerous and unknown.

And you can waste a lot of your life waiting for some magical “change that is not change” to come along and give you a way to leave your cell and take it with you at the same time.

But the truth is, there is no escape without facing your fears.

And for some of us, that is no escape at all.