it’s not easy living in this mind of mine.

For one thing, I have come to realize that I am still going around in a fog most of the time. In my dark and self-sealed solitude in the pre-Kwantlen era, I didn’t notice this fog because my life was criminally undemanding and had a low enough number of variables that I was relatively free of the clinging confusion that comes with my depression.

Or if I wasn’t, it had no major consequences so I paid it little attention.

But when I went to Kwantlen, it became a problem again for a while. Eventually, I made the adjustment and became a lot better (though hardly perfect) at managing to keep track of what I was doing, what I was supposed to be doing, and what I had to do after I finished the current thing.

Especially in the second semester.

Now I have twice the course load, and I am feeling lost in the fog once more. There’s just too many variables for me to keep in my head reliably, and yet I am not yet organized enough to write things down and keep them neat and tidy and organized like a sensible adult would do.

At least I got the adult part of that down. Chronologically speaking.

And the thing is, I am the one who suffers most from my rampant disorganization.

I am the one has to go rooting through all the stuff in my backpack in order to find anything, forcing me to do something I loathe, namely searching for things, on a thrice daily schedule. At least.

I am the one who keeps ending up in situations where I am in a blind panic because I can’t remember if there is homework I should be doing, or worse, should have already done.

I am the one who get caught out on having forgotten something super important and having nobody to blame but myself, and that’s something at which I excel.

And I am the only one who teeters between bovine contentment and terrified confusion as if I was a dog that’s too stupid to understand the connection between barking and getting squirted with cold water.

But I am not that stupid. I know I am the author of my own disasters. And I have loads of incentive to mend my ways and get my proverbial crapulance together. But when it comes to people with depression like myself, incentive doesn’t mean a thing because it meets such heavy resistance from the enormous leaden weight of depression’s anti-action bias that it is smothered before it comes within a country mile of your deadened motivational system.

Hundreds, if not thousands of times in my life, someone has said “You should do this!” or “You have every reason to do that” or even “here are detailed instructions on exactly how to do the other”, and I said “Yup. ” and nothing came of it because it didn’t make me feel motivated at all. Even if I knew it totally should.

There’s just too much weight to shift. It’s like trying to lift a mountain with one arm tied behind your back. You don’t stand a chance. You won’t even move it one iota.

So for me, the struggle to find the motivation to do something has a lot less to do with all the reasons why I should do it and a lot more about the hard, long slog to find my desire to do it and and then, with a great deal of effort, connect it to the motivational center and hope it runs.

That’s life in the starkly post-apocalyptic hellscape of my soul. Takes a lot of scavenging to get anything done, and even then, it might not work.

But things are improving. I think all the effort I have to put into every weekday is forcing my inner glacier to melt faster than ever before. Having class plus homework should be a learning experience for me (so to speak). I am going to have a lot less leisure time (just when it has become leisure time again) and it will be a struggle at first to keep it together under some circumstances.

Take last night. (Please.) (Sorry.) I had everything planned in order to get the Pitch homework (as usual, three loglines and a three minute pitch) done, but then when I got up to do it, I had a straight up pulse pounding freakout level panic attack, and I simply could not get a thing done in that direction before it passed, and it didn’t pass until I slept on it at my usual bedtime.

And seeing as I usually only have 55 minutes to go from waking up to fed and out the door with a freshly made lunch, I couldn’t do it before class in the morning either.

So I had to wing it. That’s not the worst thing in Pitch class. The whole idea is for us to learn to think on our feet and be able to communicate story quickly and well, so a certain amount of improv will be necessary anyhow. And I have fairly good bullshitting skills that I have never developed because I am so compulsively honest.

But something tells me that life in show biz will necessitate their development beyond measure.

I was thinking about this earlier at school. I really, really don’t want to ever be insincere. Insincerity disgusts me. And I have a strong desire to speak the truth as I see it – something which got me into trouble when I was a kid, as one might imagine.

I was such a handful!

But eventually I figured out that the secret was to develop my diplomacy skills, which I initially thought of as “a way to get away with telling the truth” and eventually became my soft social touch.

There are still times when I am too damned blunt, and I look back at those times and think “Guh, STFU! Nobody NEEDs your opinion on this!”.

But now I mostly dance along the edge of the knife as I strive to express myself fully without being insensitive or completely unaware of how I am coming across.

I have such deep reservoirs of charm and wit and likability.

I just need to clear out all the sediment that has built up in the lines in the last 20 years.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.