Let’s tackle that nasty depressive anti-action bias, shall we?

It starts like this : Tonight, I actually put a more than minimal effort into making my supper, and that’s pretty revolutionary.

See, my normal diet is semi-terrible. Only semi, but still, not great.

My usual meal consists of a peanut butter sandwich, a soup bowl of whatever juink food I have around (chips, pretzels, cheesy poofs, or whatever), a piece of fruit (apple, banana, or orange) and some of whatever sugar free sweet things I have around (cookies, ice cream, lemon cake slices, etc. )

It’s not the worst diet in the world. It has protein from the peanut butter, vitamins and minerals from the fruit, and carbs from literallly everything else.

I eat WAY too many carbs.

Also, there is no calcium in my normal diet and no animal protein. That’s a problem and I have the total lack of Vitamin B12 in my bloodstream to prove it. I know that it is possible(in theory, at least)  to get all the B12 you need from vegetables and pulses and such, but I don’t eat those, either.

I should. But I don’t.

But the mqain thing about my usual semi-terrible diet is that it takes a minimal amount of work and involves absolutely no waiting.

The most complex and labor intense part of the whole operation is the making of the peanut butter sandwich, and it shames me to admit this but sometimes I am too lazy to even do that and just skip it.

My life is so sad!

But tonight, I bucked the trend and invested a non-minimal amount of effort into my meal. Tonight’s entree involved me microwaving hot dogs, making toast, then buttering that toast and putting cheese slices atop the slices of toast then adding the hoit dogs all sliced up and nuking the whole thing till it was melty.

That’s not much effort in the grand scheme of things. but compared to my usual “time away from the computer” minimizing ways, it’s a five course Cordon Blue feast.

And the thing is, and I am telling you this to tell it to myself,. I was not miserable. In fact, I enjoyed it, and enjoyed the tasty results of my labour as well.

And I have to tell myself this because that’s not what my depression predicts at all. My depression views all expenditures of effort with a ;laundiced eye and categorically rejects anything that strikes it as more effort than absolutely necessary.

To it, the fact that I could have gotten fed with less work is all the evidence it neecds to declare the whole thing a terrible idea that can only lead to misery.

And it’s wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong! The truth is, my depression doesn’t know what the fuck it’s talking about. Its predictions, like the predictions of conservative doomsayers, are never correct and only persist because the predictions make emotional sense, even if logically they are absurd on every single level.

My excuse is mental illness. Dunno what their excuse is. Same thing, maybe.

I know I keep coming back to this point, but it’s because it’s so hard to get it through my head. My depression is worse than useless when it comes to predicting the emotional outcome of a course of action. How I feel when I consider an action should and will be viewed as a total non-predictor, and I should instead try to use my skills of logic to counter the distortions of depression and try to figure out how it would REALLY go.

That would certainly require more effort and it would, hopefully, be a temporary measure to be abandoned once my negative bias has been sufficiently corrected.

That’s only part of the problem, though. Because under those negative predictions lies the real problem, which is that great mass of frozen sadness, grief, rage, bitterness, and pain at the center of my being that makes my intentions melt like summer snow as it turns its head to the wall and says “No. ”

That’s the real down dirty damage that makes my life so hard. The delusional negative predictions are merely a case of justifying the emotion. The deep truth is that I don’t want to do these things because I am scared. Scared of life, scared of exposure, scared of the world, scared of myself.

And behind that all is a feeling that, if all my damage got out of the way and I actually crossed the distance between myself and the world outside my jail cell, Something Terrible would happen.

And patient readers know that this feeling of dread don’t have and doesn’t need a specific prediction attached. What is this Something Terrible that will happen? I honestly do not know. Something so bad that my mind can’t contain how bad it is.

Something worse than anything else.

Something that will mean my death – the death of the fellow typing these words.

Something that would involve so much change that I would become someone my current self would not recognize, and to the primitive parts of my mind, that is the exact same thing as dying.

So instead, my mind generates complexities and nuances and uses them to create my personal labyrinth where I can feel like I am making real progress towards the exit without having to fear what happens if I make it.

No risk of that because there is always more maze. It never ends. It can never end. If it ends, the Terrible Thing will happen. So the same mind that is solving the maze is also generating more maze when I am not looking.

It’s not that there is no progress at all. I am a much saner person now than I have ever been and each day I get a little better.

But I don’t seem myself making any truly big leaps until I can shut down the maze machine and face life without the comfort of my labyrinth’s encloakment.

Then I will truly be abkle to walk naked in the sun.

And all my lands will burst into rowdy spring again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.