For the most part, I don’t experience my depression consciously. It’s like a software virus that lurks among the background processes of my mind, and has a profound effect, but as a survival mechanism, I have learned to screen it out and pour myself into my distractions and shut out nearly everything else in order to keep my mind too busy to let the bad thoughts get in, most of the time.

It’s not a good coping mechanism. In fact, it’s a lousy one… quite maladaptive. It is dependent on me maintaining a very low physical stimulus lifestyle and not venturing outside of my tiny little comfort zone. It requires to spend all or most of my time buried in those aforementioned distractions. So I spend all of an average day  reading, sleeping, using my computer, or eating while watching Netflix. ^[1]

And this coping mechanism works up to a point. Sure, it sucked 20 years of my life away and is the main reason that I am just getting started with my life at 44, but on the other hand, it kept me alive and away from suicidal thoughts of self-loathing and a panicky desire to escape from being myself no matter what the cost.

There’s been many a time I have wished life had a reset button, or at least let me save my game when I am doing well.

I feel lucky that I got the education I did, then found Upwork, a place where I can get paid for doing my writing thang from the comfort of my existing techno-hermit lifestyle.

Anyhow, like I said, most of the time, I can tune my depression out.

But there are these moments…

I never know when they will strike. I assume it’s whenever some part of my emotional healing process has enough of an electrical potential built up that it discharges. ^[2] One second I will be fine, and the next,  I feel cold and detached and isolated and depressed. It’s like someone threw a bucket of ice water at my soul.

That’s how I feel right now. It’s not that I got bad news, or thought of something awful, or realized I forgot something super important, or screwed up and ended up late and lost again or disappointing a lot of people. ^[3] Nothing bad happened.

But when I got up from eating and watching Netflix, the icy hold hand of death reached into my soul and froze me inside.

Who knows, maybe it was nothing more than the ghosts and shadows which chase me through my days finally getting a chance to catch up with me.

Or maybe it’s just low blood sugar. Who knows.

Now overall, I am not worried about this freeze because I know I will thaw out again. This is just one of those bits of emotional bad weather I have to endure. This too shall pass.

Not long from now, I will go back to enjoying my “day off” and being in a fairly good mood about stuff. Possibly I will have to hit the soft reset button on my brain and take a nap first. Bit either way, soon, it will be over.

But until then, it’s really fucking cold inside me right now.

Maybe all I really need is a good cry.

I find myself thinking about people who act on emotion more than I do, which is not very hard. A less enlightened side of me always rolls its eyes and shakes its head whenever I encounter such people doing dumb shit that could have easily been avoided if they had just stopped and thought about it for a moment.

But I have no moral standing on that issue. I am cognitively capable of that kind of forethought and planning, but I am far too emotionally immature to pull it off.

Instead, I end up doing things as thoughtlessly as those with far less IQ to draw on that I got, only with less justification.

I suppose that if I was capable of fully embracing a kind of “go with the flow” attitude in my life, I might be able to develop the necessary fatalism to deal with my lack of the emotional muscle to stay in the moment of pondering plans long enough to do it right.

Not total fatalism. Then I wouldn’t plan anything at all, because what would be the point of planning be if everything is going to happen the way it’s going to happen anyway?

Just enough fatalism to limit my compulsive attempts to control outcomes and give myself a hearty helping of forgiveness for all my flaws.

But I can never be the happy go lucky person part of me wants to be. Part of me will always be a worrier and a planner and even an organizer at times.

SO I can’t do either path, really. I will always be suspended in the middle of the n-space between a thousand different dualities, unable to pick between A and B because to choose either would mean losing part of myself.

And I have too little substance to me as is.

Maybe that’s immature, though. Maybe there is no real growth without a sacrifice of self. Maybe the only way to be strong is to choose who you are and stick with it so you can nurture it and let it grow.

Maybe I just need to learn to live with the fact that I only ever get to be this one person with this one particular lifetime to use or lose.

Maybe. But one thing is for sure.

I really need to grow up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.