Today, I am going to blog before I do a video.

And when I do a video, it might be something without me in it.

Why? Because I am depressed.

This song expresses how I feel right about now.

That great and terrible sadness is still with me. It seems to have moved in with me for the time being. I am sure it will leave once I hear and understand what it is trying to tell me, or more likely, feel what it needs me to feel.

But I grow tired of its wearisome gravity pulling my mood down. It really does feel like there is something within me pushing down on my mood. I feel so very heavy inside, like I have ten feet of anchor chain wrapped around my shoulders.

Sometimes, it even feels like I’m falling.

I think this all started with my decision to start trying to emotionally detach myself from my current domicile before we move. The idea was that this would make the transition to the new place a little smoother than previous transitions. I thought that would be the smart, practical, forward thinking thing to do.

But in retrospect, that may have been a mistake. I think that is what unmoored my mood and set it floating, and with me, that is rarely a good thing.

Or maybe it is, who knows. Maybe my insistence on uniformity of mood come what may is exactly the thing that keeps me from getting anyplace in life. Maybe I need to look back at thoughts of learning to accept a higher amount of emotional variability in order to break free of the gravity well that has kept me in limbo for more or less my entire adult life.

I think that, at some point, I unconsciously invented a kind of mental mechanism designed to hold my mood to a slightly functional level where I am not particularly happy but I am also not particularly sad, and I can get through each day without danger from my depression as long as I keep my life very, very low stimulus.

And that is the curse of it, of course. Keeping your life to a very low amount of sensory stimulation and relying entirely on the mental stimulation of video games and online chat makes for a very lopsided and unhealthy lifestyle. Your soul starves while your mind grows bloated and distended, like someone who exercises only one arm.

Your world grows increasingly unreal and abstract and you start to feel like you don’t exist. That you are just as virtual as your life.

I think this phenomenon explains why I often feel a lot better after I have been out of the apartment on my own for a while. Exposing myself to the world like that might sometimes be stressful and put a lot of strain on my anxiety resistance, but it also gives me fresh stimulation from real world environments, and that acts against that feeling of unreality that is so corrosive to my mood.

It’s hard to be happy when you don’t even feel real. For me, at least.

Meanwhile, I quietly drown in unshed tears.

Oh, more depressing news from yesterday’s doctor’s appointment : they think I have something called an umbilical hernia. Apparently, that is the sort of thing that happens only to babies and fat people.

So it seems that the pressure of my unbelievable fatness on top of my guts has caused some of them to bulge out a bit. Such happy news. They did not seem to think that this was a huge deal, even though it seems kind of important to me.

In fact, it might explain a lot of my little digestive problems. Maybe if it was fixed, I would be able to digest things more smoothly, I would not get these soft blockages in my intestines, and I would have more room in my bladder.

They also think that my sleep apnea is putting a strain on my heart, which is also lovely news. I guess I should not be surprised, though. Sleep apnea is a serious medical condition and I have let it go completely untreated for like five years now while my CPAP machine gathers dust two feet from my bed.

Clearly, what I should do is go to my GP, confess my enormous burden of medical sin, and get him to get me back on track towards a course of treatment that might actually work for me.

The CPAP machine I have almost made it. I used it for many months, successfully fighting back my feeling that it was smothering me when it was doing the exact opposite. It was helping me breathe way better than usual.

But eventually I lost the fight and got so frustrated with the complications the machine brought to the simple act of sleeping that I gave up on it without telling anyone about it.

And so it sits there. In theory, I could just clean it, put it back together, reread the manual, and start using it again.

But I just… can’t. And I can’t explain why.

So I am not sure what the next step would be with my sleep apnea. Surgery, I guess. Or weight loss, like that is going to happen.

Wellm who knows. If I get into the habit of working out at the gym in the apartment building we are moving to, I might just lose weight, or at the very least, replace the fat with muscle and thus give myself a more demanding metabolism.

But right now, I just feel like I am falling apart and there is nothing I can do about it. I’m heading for the brick wall of an early fat guy death in squalor and agony and I lack the will or capacity to steer away.

So I will lay me down to sleep, and hope that whatever haunts me these days will leave me while I dream.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.