So let’s talk about how fucking depressed I have been lately.

Sorry, folks, the train station story will have to wait.

I’ve been feeling really depressed and hopeless lately. Dunno why my depression has gotten worse lately, but I suspect this is part of my excrutiating healing process. I am processing some heavy duty stuff, and while that is going on, I don’t have a lot of mental CPU cycles to spare for such petty concerns as happiness.

Stable mood is for other people, it would seem. What I get is two modes – oblivious and miserable. I am oblivious when I am wrapped up in my video games and miserable the rest of the time.

You don’t need a doctorate in applied psychology to figure out that equation. Misery bad. Oblivion good. Me do good thing. A lot.

As in, most of my waking hours.

It’s my crutch, my coping mechanism, and like all addictions, it is a coping mechanism that is great at the short term but in the long term is going to fucking kill me.

Imagine if I had to leave the apartment and do things all the time, every day. Just go out there and emulate being a real human adult for eight, ten, twelve hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year.

That thought is so horrible that my mind refuses to contemplate it. It crashes the process. When I try to contemplate it, I get a simple four letter error message instead.

And the message reads NOPE.

And I keep trying to exit this mental fugue of mine. I try to get my motor turning over so I can warm up enough for the blood to start pumping and make me feel alive and ready to Get Shit Done again.

But my depression is ready for that now. When I try to put fuel in my tank, it just cascades right back out again like a waterfall. It’s like I am trying to fill a bucket with no bottom. My engine stays dead except for a few dull clicks and a sad little whimper.

I paint pictures with words.

And it’s so frustrating to be like this. I thought I was getting somewhere. I thought that I had finally gotten to a place where I could maintain a connection to my id and tap into my rage and ambition when I needed to snap myself out of my autohypnotic state.

But at some point, everything iced over and the system no longer responds.

So I guess I have no choice but to wait it out. And let me tell you, I am not the sort of man who can be happy doing nothing. The fact that I am suffering and cannot do anything to alleviate it drives me nuts when I think about it.

So I don’t.

A shallow person might look into my life and think I do nothing all the time. But there is a big difference between doing nothing and doing nothing productive.

Video games are not productive, although they provide a convincing fascismile of productivity and progress.

Convincing enough for those of us who desperately need to be convinced, anyhow.

It’s not easy, keeping yourself in a holding pattern like I have been doing my entire adult life. you have to shut out the vast majority of the universe while also ignoring/suppressing all the healthy instincts that lead healthy people to do the healthy things that keep them healthy.

No wonder I am such a fucking icicle. How else could I block/ignore/suppress so much and keep my universe to a size and form I can handle with my feeble will and self? I have to maintain that bitter arctic chill inside or all the frozen things in my graveyard of a soul will wake up and start moving around and remember what they were going to do before I put them on ice.

So as much as I hate the total lack of emotional warmth reaching my soul, I have evidently decided that it’s still better than the utter chaos that would occur if all my dead things came back to life.

I am not sure I agree with that decision. Strikes me as distinctly unhealthful. It’s the sort of move that only makes sense if you are too freaked out to give a single thought to long term consequences and live in a constant city under siege mentality.

That’s how stress kills you. It keeps you in an adrenalized mode and in that mode your body heavily prioritizes the short term and ignores things like maintenance and repair under the assumption that what is important right now is not getting eaten by that tiger.

But you know that already. I have told you that before, probably many times.

I repeat myself when I’m distressed. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat….

I just feel so lost and hopeless lately. I feel like I have a tourniquet wrapped around me and every time I try to escape my current mental state, it just twists the tourniquet tighter and squeezes that much more of the life out of me.

I shared these happy thoughts with my therapist on Thursday. It made excellent ammo for my guilt tripping him about the fact he’s going away for two weeks soon.

He asked me if I was in danger, and I thought about it for a while. I had to really search through my emotions to come up with an answer. I am certainly quite depressed lately, so danger is not out of the question.

Eventually I said no. Then he asked me if I would check myself in to the hospital if I started feeling the danger. I said yes.

I am not sure either answer was entirely honest. I don’t feel suicidal, consciously at least, but I did spontaneously begin writing a story based around a heavy handed metaphor for suicide and I did feel a bit of danger when I listened to this song :

The last thing I need in my current mental state is a very moving song about a joyous, ecstatic, and transcendant death.

In fact, I now kind of hate that song and those that created it a little.

But I think I will be fine. I just have to wait this out.

Good thing I got all these video games to keep me busy!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.