‘t lie to you, folks…. I’ve not been doing so well lately.

My depression is getting worse. I feel very fragile and weak and exposed. I find lying down in bed increasingly attractive, and getting out of bed increasingly difficult. Life is so much easier when I just lay there and listen to music and let my mind drift into a half-sleep state where I feel comfortable and cozy and warm, and I am safe from all the world’s harshness and its oppressive sensorium abusing stimuli.

And yet, because it is only half-sleep, I am also safe from my inner demons, who would have the run of the place were I fully asleep.

At this point in my life, I feel like it’s probably best that I rarely remember my dreams.

At other, healthier times, I would crave their insights and feel cheated of them.

But right now,. I doubt they would do me any good.

The bed-seeking is the most obvious sign of my mental health’s decay. And it’s worse than merely wanting to stay in bed, because now even reading seems like a daunting task involving far too much effort and “noise”.

Admittedly, reading the Stephen King stories is probably contributing to that. He’s a brilliant writer but his stories tend to take more out of you than they give back to you, at least in the short term.

Makes me kind of wish I didn’t have this deep compulsion to finish what I start. Were I just a little flightier, I could declare the book to be a net loss for me and put it down and stop reading it, never to look back.

But if I did that, the book would in effect,. hang there in my mind as an unfinished task and continue to take up space until I finally finished the damned thing.

Best not to get in that situation in the first place.

Anyhow. Feeling bad lately. Fragiler and exposed. Talked about it with my therapist today. ^[1] He has upped my dose of Paxil from 40 mg to 50 mg.

I hope that helps. Right now, I feel like it’s all I can do to fight back the crazy voices that say that I “shouldn’t” need a higher dose and that needing a higher dose means I am “weak” and “pathetic” and yadda yadda sis boom BAH.

The usual bullshit. Fuck that noise. I’d take being a happy weakling over being a miserable manly man every single time.

I still have that feeling that something is moving within me. That all my recent mishigas is part of a larger process of healing that is finite and will leave me psychologically better off when it ends.

But lately, my faith that it actually will end is wavering. I tell myself that all tunnels end and all I have to do is stay on the train till this one does.

That means resisting the urge to despondently hop off the train and end up staying in the tunnel forever.

Like Churchill said, “when going through hell…. keep going!”  Seems obvious, but for a lot of people, their first instinct when they feel pain is to slam on the brakes.

Not always the right strategy.

One of my most vexatious issues came up in therapy today. it’s the issue I named tonight’s blog entry after.

It’s the issue of knowing what I should be doing. And it goes like this :

The issue is NEVER that I don’t know what to do. Not really. I am a highly intelligent and creative guy with a tough but highly flexible mind that bristles with muscles. At a moment’s notice I can name a dozen things I “should” be doing.

So advice along those lines, while gratefully accepted, is essentially useless to me. I will take the suggestions and I will agree that what is suggested sounds like a great idea and probably would help me a lot.

But what I don’t say is that there is absolutely no chance I will actually do the thing. None. Nothing. Nada.

And I can’t explain why, either. So I am agreeable without ever actually agreeing to anything concrete. That’s my solution to that problem.

And the thing is, I sort of half-believe that I will do the thing at the time. It’s always a nice idea that some ideal form of me would embrace in an instant and rush out to implement. It feels good to imagine what that would be like.

But of course, this means I have left so, so, so many disappointed people oin my wake/. People who were sure I was going to do the thing they suggested because I gave them every impression that I would do it and seemed totally sincere when I said I would.

And I was sincere. Sort of. LEt’s just say it’s very easy to sincerely mean something in the moment when you know, deep down, that you won’t mean it later.

That you will, in fact, have given up on the thing before even beginning to think about thinking about doing it because that is was depression does to people.

It robs us of all motivation. And no matter how blazingly brilliant and tenderly well thought out and creatively compassionate your suggestioin is, I guarantee it will take motivation, and hence is utterly doomed to failure.

It’s like suggesting the best route for a car with no gas to take.

And I know that’s a hell of a thing to say to people. It certainly left my therapist at a loss for words. He has a tendency to give me advice, as one does to those younger than yourself. And I listen because it would be rude not to do so.

But I don’t need more fucking advice. Advice is useless to me. No matter what route yoiu suggest, the car still has no fucking gas.

What I need from my therapist is to be asked questions that force me to think of things in a new way, and thus provide the kind of disuptive unsettling of equilibrium that leads to a new, superior equilibrium.

So no more life advice. Fuck THAT noise. I always know a million things that I “shoujld” be doing and it doesn’t make a god damned bit of difference because I am out of gas.

And no advice in the world can fix THAT.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.