Been feeling depressed lately.

The pebble that started the avalance was when Joe and Julian asked if I felt like staying up to watch our usual Colbert and Daily Show when I got home from the Paragon meeting on Thursday night.

And I said no because my social batteries were pretty drained and I just wanted to go to my room and let them recharge while I played Skyrim.

More about Skyrim later.

Now, I have turned them down in that exact situation before and it always makes me feel a little guilty but this time, the second I sat down at the computer. I was hit with a tidal wave of depression, of which the guilt was merely the crest.

I felt awful. Like someone had just dumped ice water onto the embers of my soul. It’s a feeling I am familiar with but rarely does it happen in so dramatic a fashion.

As near as I can tell, this happened because a certain amount of whatever it is I generally vent through self-hatred had built up due to my recent anti-self abuse campaign, and like snowpack on a mountainside. when it got to a certain point, it all went downhill into the valley, and took me with it.

It’s hard not to see this as some sort of electrochemical discharge that resolves some imbalance in the mind. The usual route is blocked and so the charge accumulates until some small thing provide the opportunity for it to discharge.

Well, it’s hard for ME not to see it that way. Others might feel differently.

Then, on Sunday night, the same thing happened – J&J wanted to watch stuff and I was too socially drained to say yes.

And another sadness tsunami hit me when I sat down at the computer.

I think the specific triggering mechanism is the pain of a missed connection. As you wonderful lovely beautiful readers know, I’m effusive.

You also know that connecting with others is very difficult for me and as a result I have been a very lonely person for a very long time. That’s what that whole robot with the busted antenna thing was about. And so this terrible icy isolation is always just below the surface with me, and it longs for connection with others.

And so when there is an opportunity for it and I turn it down, that unleashed the same sort of emotion that a person who has recently known starvation would feel about turning down a meal – even if they were already full.

This social starvation, like any large body of unexpressed emotion, is not amenable to reason. In both cases, I really was too tired to socialize and needed to recharge my introvert batteries with some alone time. If I had listened to this voice and forced myself to hang with the two J’s,. I would have been, at best, indifferent company, and at worse I would have been sitting there resenting the whole thing and counting the minutes until I could finally run away and hide.

So 1turning them down was the right choice. But my social starvation doesn’t care. Someone offered connection and I turned them down and now I feel like a horrible human being just for setting boundaries and looking after my own needs.

It’s a rough life inside this skull of mine.

Sometimes I wonder how I even survive.

Okay, now fast forward to today. I was still feeling pretty depressed. And that is presumably what gave a certain voice in my head (that I usually ignore) a chance to really speak its mind.

So while I was (what else?) playing Skyrim, periodically, a voice in my head would scream things like “THIS IS NOT LIFE!” and “THIS CAN’T BE IT” and “THERE HAS TO BE MORE THAN THIS” and “I WANT TO LIVE!”

So that happened. It’s probably a good thing despite the fact that it made me even more miserable at the time. IT means that the forces inside me are gathering towards a big burst of productivity.

And it better be soon, because the thing is, I actually have an assignment.

Some people who contacted me via UpWork want me to write a thirty second movie parody scene for no-budget production, it’s been over a week since they asked for it, and I still have not been able to do it.

That’s the biggest threat to my mood right now. I feel crushed between my pressure on myself and my paralyis.

And the two are not unrelated.

It’s the infinite hallway with infinite doors problem again. The assignment is too wide-open. I need a little more to go on. Otherwise, option paralysis will have me in its grip until the situation is “resolved” by them giving up on me.

And the thing is, this is totally within my capacities. So I “should” be able to do it. Thirty seconds is half a page. One sufficiently funny exchange and I am done.

So I know I can do it once the mental blockage it out of the way,.

But until then, I am under a lot of stress.

I have been through this process before when I have had an open-ended project like this. It happened numerous times during my time at VFS. I hem and I haw and I hate myself and I freeze up inside and it’s only when I have worked through all of that bullshit that I can actually do the thing, which is, of course, absurdly easy for me once I managed to get out of my own way.

SO hopefully, by writing this stuff down, I will have accelerated the process so that I can clear my mental logjam and write these people something before they walk away.

I mean, really. I’m a goddamned comedy genius. I know that once I get over myself, I will be able to write something that blows them away.

I just have to make it throyugh that goddamned hallway first.

Anyone seen my keychain?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.