Depression’s been pretty bad today.

Which fits with the trend. It’s been pretty bad lately. That ghost I have been talking about that I keep almost running into is closer than ever and I lack the strength of will to turn and face it and get this shit over with already.

Actually, to be fair to myself (for a change), it’s not just strength of will that is missing. I have been doding and hiding from this goddamned for my whole life and the instinct to do so is so finely honed and well developed that I do it without thinking.

So in order to open myself up to the thing. I will have to catch myself in the act of suppressing and dodging it and deliberately refrain from doing it.

Maybe during therapy tomorrow. Who knows.

The good news is that I am starting to fight back. Today, when I had an attack of fear and rage and pain and the sort of emotions that make me think “I hate my life” (never a good sign), I found the strength to mentally roar back, “THEN CHANGE IT. ”

Nothing actually changed, of course, but it’s an excellent start.

The logical case is so simple and obvious that it’s practically a tautology. If I don’t like my current life, I should do things to make it more to my liking. Ipso facto QED.

But of course, with depression, nothing is ever that simple. I currently lack the faith to think I actually can change my life for the better. I feel so weak and feeble and helpless and small. When I try to think of ways to make my life better, I just come upon the same tired old cognititve roadblocks that tell me all possible solutions are too expensive, too scary, too hard, or just plain too much.

It’s all right here on this list I got off Facebook.

I love that list because it is something I have been meaning to write myself and now I don’t have to do it.

And I am sure that I have discussed every one of them in this space at least once, both in myself and in others. I can see my logical errors quite clearly from time to time, and believe me, that helps a lot more than you would think.

The cognitive approach does work for some of us. It’s not a solution by itself, but it can really help with the rest of the work.

But the fatal flaw in the cognitive approach that makes it need other appoaches to supplement it is that it is so cerebral that one can easily fool oneself into thinking you are making progress when emotionally, nothing has changed.

It’s one thing to identify the lie. It’s quite another thing to believe the truth. Sometimes all the cognitive approach does is bring you face to face with your own insanity because now you know your perceptions and beliefs are wrong yet you can’t change them.

That’s because we humans, for all our logical prowess, are fundamentally emotional beings and it is far easier for our emotions to change what we think than it is for our thoughts to change how we feel.

And I am very much including myself in that statement. I might act like I am some kind of hotshot robot, all cool and detached and analytical and able to see ever so much more than others because of it, but I am just as guilty of defaulting to what my emotions say as any Trump loving redneck.

So I might well make an airtight logical case for why I should love myself and be kind to myself and forgive myself for being alive, but unless the emotional work to change how I feel about myself is done, I will default to my usual self-loathing the moment I stop concentrating on the change.

Turns out the Antidepression Fairy only exists if you believe in her. Go fig.

Hence my never ending quest to express my emotions. It’s all those frozen emotions that keep my internal emotional temperature at subhibernation levels and make it so hard for any warmth or light from the world to reach me.

So I dig and I explore and I unearth various strata of frozen emotions and let them melt in the sun and sometimes it feels good but most of the time it’s painful as hell, like trying to pass an icicle through my navel.

Right now, I have an intensely cold feeling in the core of my torso, centered around the middle of my chest and a cold clammy congested feeling around my heart. It feels like my organs have been removed and packed in ice for transport to a transplant. I feel like if I burped, it would come out as cold as a blast of freon.

That’s what it feels like when I am melting those frozen emotions. I feel all frostbitten and raw inside, and no part of this process feels good.

But it has to be done. And I know that later, once I have thawed out some myself, I will feel better for having rid myself of a portion of the emotional backlog that is the root cause of my mental illness.

I will probably feel the exact same way during therapy tomorrow, if the session is any good. Luckily I have a vast reserve of sheer bloody minded determination to keep me going in this process despite the pain and the cold and the indigestion.

It’s dirty, painful, thankless work but all of my progress in overcoming my mental ilness has come from it.

All the words and the logic and the poetry is there only to facilitate the process in lieu of any kind of religious or mystical tradition to offer me shortcuts.

It’s hard to gain transformation from revelation when the revelation has to make sense.

So I have to do things the hard way, through words. It’s not the easiest or most direct path, but it’s all that I have.

Thank you so much for making that possible.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.