Depression

Ramble on

I wish I had something coherent to say. Actually, that’s not true; I have lots of coherent things to say, I just can’t seem to say them lately. I had a really good essay about the nature of emotions and how there really are just the two of them and everything else we think is an emotion is really just a stop on the sliding scale of varying saturation, but it slipped away yesterday in a haze. I’ve got another one floating around somewhere about pornography; that one made it to paper last year during the Summer of the Hellish Commute [insert appropriate orchestral flourishes here].

There’s an essay floating around in here somewhere about what a scam credit card rewards programs are. That will probably reach escape velocity first since it doesn’t really involve me personally but is more of an observation in the Roger Rabbit/cartoon double take mode (as in, “I can’t believe people are buying into this, me included!”).

I’ve been pondering publication and why I write. The Girlfriend asked me an interesting question last night in the middle of a mini-breakdown precipitated by…well, just being me I suppose: did I want people to read my writing and enjoy it or did I want to get paid? I asked her why, in a world where Nora Roberts has a hardcover on the shelves every 10 months or so and the editing process is so bad that this gem of an exchange got through in her last book^*:

Quincy held up a hand. “Why aren’t there — if this data is correct — more of her at the school?”

“If this data is correct,” Mira repeated, and seemed to Eve to be holding on to the hope it was flawed…

having someone read and enjoy my writing and getting paid for it were mutually exclusive?

The answer, of course, is because the editing process is so bad. It used to be that in the book biz you were looked down upon as an author if your book went straight to paperback release; now, there’s so much competition (and yet the standards seem so incredibly low <cough> Clive Cussler </cough>) that a straight to paperback release is like a gold ingot. Of course, given that Americans are reading an average of one book per year (someone has to make up for my mother and her 7-10 books per week), even if I did get published in the traditional sense of the word I’m not sure who would read me. So why is it, like Jim, I’m contemplating doing NaNoWriMo again? If I do NaNo this year and finish it would be the third novel I’ve written. Maybe self-publishing and setting up a merchant account at PayPal are the answer, but who has time for all that marketing? The whole point is to write. Or, as a friend of my Mom’s used to say “Writing is hard, lonely, demanding work, but it beats getting up in the morning.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about community and friends, and how the definitions of these things change and how fucking unprepared I am for getting older. Thinkers more highly trained than me in the nuances of group and individual behavior have lamented the fact that America is beyond obsessed with youth, that we prize it above experience and knowledge. It doesn’t take a genius but only someone even marginally observant to realize that the bulk of America’s consumer culture is built on trying to retain youth. The dirty little secret of getting older, though, isn’t that your body starts to break down – that you have sags where you didn’t used to have sags, that losing weight is more difficult, that you take longer to not be hungover the next day – it’s that your support system breaks down. Just why is it that no one told me how hard it would be to make friends after I turned 30? There’s a life-lesson I could have used.

This was going somewhere, it really was. Up there, somewhere in the middle it started to firm up but, typical of late, the thread of reason is gone now, flushed by distractions and a pandemic lack of concentration.

I wish I had something coherent to say.

* Origin In Death by Nora Roberts, writing as J.D. Rob, pp. 219-220. August 2005.

Withdrawal isn’t just church-approved birth control

I wish I could say that my depression rolled in like a weather front, black clouds heavy with self-loathing and self-doubt, easy to spot and take precautions against. But it’s not. It’s more insidious than that, moving in on little cat feet in the dead of night when I can’t sleep making me puzzle over some remark I made off hand or something that didn’t go quite right or some perceived unsatisfied “should.”

Withdrawing from contact with other people seems like the most natural reaction; after all, if I can’t stand my own company who else would want to be around me, right? It’s also the worst possible thing I can do: with only my own perceptions as feedback the hole underneath me can do nothing but get deeper and deeper as the cycle turns and I, eventually, find fault with the very fact that I exist. Yet, I have no alternate plan.

Last night we had dinner with one of The Girlfriend’s friends from college and her new girlfriend who were in town unexpectedly. We hadn’t seen this woman in about eight years. The last time we saw her she was in the middle of a long-term relationship with someone else. Inquiring politely, we were told a very long story about S’s method for dealing with her depression: she went to bed for three years.

I kid you not. According to The Friend, S. would get up, go to work, come home, and go to bed. That’s it. End of story. Last night it struck me as sort of a silly way to approach something. Today it’ seems like a not bad idea.

To the lady at the movie theater,

Yes, I admit that I could have been nicer when I asked your daughter’s friend to stop kicking the back of my chair, but given that I know for a fact that I, at 5ft 9inches tall, had to stretch to reach the row in front of me from the exact seat she was sitting in, and given the fact that it’s pretty damn obvious in a “stadium seating” scenario that your feet are level with the back of the head of the person in front of you, and given the fact that she’s 12 and should know better, I don’t see why I should have to be nicer.

Oh, yeah, and before you say it, I’m gonna: it’s not about race, it’s about manners. I know I didn’t help to teach her any today, but what can you expect from someone who had to contend with getting the chair behind the back of her head kicked once every five minutes? Maybe you can do better. Good luck. I wish you well with that.

It’s not the blues, it’s the blackouts

Bouts of depression blow: there aren’t two ways around it. But what’s really worse than the whole feeling like utter crap – swimming up stream – crying at the drop of a hat for no good reason – wanting to do nothing but sleep ball of wax is the fact that I can’t remember a damn thing from one day to the next.

I found a really neat camera case online this weekend (was it Saturday or Sunday? I don’t know.) Sort of neoprene, wrap thing that would accomodate both the auto-winder I have and the camera body with a lens. Came in all kinds of bright colors, all of which reversed to black. And I’ll be god damned if I can remember where, or even the search I used to get to the web site I saw this on.

And if I’m like this in my mid-30s, what’s another 20 years of up and down gonna do to my memory? I’m really not looking forward to the day when I have to carry an index card around that has my home address and phone number written on it.

Is this how happy people feel?

I knew someone once who was seriously bipolar, among other problems she had, who would be telling me in all earnestness right now that I might want to consider lithium or some equally scary drug.

I’m feeling much better now than I was a few days ago. It almost feels…happy. But is this what happy people feel like, or is it just relief that the tide of feeling utterly alone and worthless has receded?

Despite having just spent $1,142.10 to get my car fixed yesterday, I was in a pretty good mood as I drove home, in rush hour traffic, along a route I hadn’t been down in probably a good five years. The flowers were blooming, my car was fixed, there was good music on the radio, albeit on a number of stations around the dial, the sun was out and it was warm enough to open the window a little.

It didn’t matter that the guy in the SUV cut me off in traffic, or that someone wanted to make an illegal U-turn and that was backing everything up, or that my country seems to determined to make me a second class citizen, or that I could stand to lose a few around the middle. I felt light, and sweet, and like smiling for no reason at all. Everything was OK, and would be OK.

And I started to wonder, is this how self-professed “happy” people feel all the time? And what can I do to make this last?

It’s a wonderful thing when the world is a welcoming, shiny place, when a set-back is something that I can look at and go “well, that didn’t turn out quite like I thought” and move on rather than have it settle on me with the equivalent weight of a cinder block.

I’m going to try to remember that feeling, remember how large and alive I felt, and to hold on to it for the next time I feel myself start to slide into the pit.