Depression has a lot of clever, tricky ways of keeping you under its thumb.

And all being smart does is make your depression smarter too. Bright as a star or dull as a worn dime, it’s still a game of chess you play against yourself and that means the outcome is always stalemate.

Which is exactly what the depression wants. Stalemate means it wins.

I look around this room of mine (something I rarely do… more on that later) and I see the piles and piles of garbage and junk and how filthy dirty everything is because I never clean because my depression and/or addiction to video games won’t let me, and I can only come to one conclusion :

It’s really fucking depressing.

Now obviously, the sane response would be to clean it up. It’s a bad thing which is making me sad and I would definitely feel a whole lot better if I cleaned everything up and made things fresh and nice and good for a change.

And on paper, I am perfectly capable of doing so. Cleaning takes effort, of course, but I am pretty sure that if I could find the motivation, I could find the energy.

But that’s not how depression works. Depression makes you (passively) create the bad situation that is very depressing and then it keeps you from doing anything about it by vetoing any large expenditures of energy of any sort for any reason.

And its definition of “large” is almost but not quite equal to “any at all”. Depression makes it hard to believe that any expenditure of actual effort can ever actually be worth it unless it’s in the narrowly defined high reward corridor of our addiction(s).

Yes, I am saying all depressives are addicts. We all self-medicate via the excessive use and over-dependence on something, whether it’s TV or video games or crack cocaine.

Back to my filthy disgusting room before I sidetrack myself any further.

The sane response would be to clean, but the depression blocks that. So instead, I just don’t look at it. Ever. I have total tunnel vision and only see or notice the things directly related to living my sad little life, like the fridge, the path between the fridge and my bedroom, the toilet in my bathroom, and so on.

And even then, I only pay the abolute minimum amount of attention to get the job done. Nothing else enters my mind.

I live in a heavily filtered version of reality. 99 percent of what I perceive is filtered out by my depression’s (extremely) passive filtering.

No wonder nothing seems real to me. Subjectively speaking, it ain’t.

And this is how I have always lived, for as long as I can remember. I have always lived mostly in my head, ignoring most of what is around me in order to keep my stimulation level low enough for me to handle and to preserve the maximum amount of brain power for all the nonstop deep thinking I do.

And when I say nonstop, I mean it. It doesn’t stop for sleep or sex or anything. It’s my brutal truth machine.

I am merely its life support system and maintenance man. Oh, and operator.

Asides aside, living in a constant state of clutter blindness (but more so) is no way to live one’s life. It doesn’t exactly lead to positive outcomes. I would be a much happier and saner person if I tuned into my environment, experienced life in realtime, and made whatever adjustments to my surroundings I needed to do in order to maximize my enjoyment of life.

So what’s stopping me? Isn’t that always the question? And I only have one answer : depression. That’s what’s stopping me.

The answer is that I am crazy and crazy people are weird and don’t make sense.

As patient readers know, I am always fully aware of all the positive things that I “could” be doing for myself. It’s never a matter of not knowing what to do.

I mean, I’m a frigging genius. Of course I know what I “could” do.

But I can’t do those things. Not really. Hence the quotes around “could”. It sure seems like I could. It’s very hard even for someone as articulate as myself to explain why I can’t do these things.

I just…. can’t. It’s like there’s this invisible force field holding me back all the time and keeping me stuck in this rut of mine.

So when I say I don’t know what to do in order to escape this cage of mine, it’s not a request for general suggestions.

What I am really asking for is how do I get out using only the things I can actually do.

And even that is booby trapped. Because even if this vaunted mind of mine came up with a clever as fuck solution that met those extremely demanding specifications and my metaphorical cage door swung open, I would be far too scared to actually leave.

After all, this is the only world I know. This sad life in my sad room doing sad and pointless things on the computer all day is my universe.

And I deserve better. I have a hell of a lot to offer the world and deserve a better, fuller, richer, more satisfying life that takes care of more than my most base needs.

Except for sex. It doesn’t cover that one at all, really. Le sigh.

My life is so…. limited. So tiny. In terms of actual, real, honest experiences, I have had precious few, and almost none in the last decade. I sleepwalk through life, afraid of everything, terrified by all the unknowns of the world, with no faith at all in my ability to handle whatever comes up except by making sure nothing does.

There has to be a real way out. One I could actually take. There must be a weak spot in this eggshell, a place where even my weak pecking can break through.

There must have been been a door there in the wall…. when I came in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.