I’m in one of those moods where whatever I do is wrong. If I try to blog I’m immediately bored else feel the pressure to go do something else. It’s not quite full-blown anhedonia, more of a restlessness, knowing no activity will satisfy me. I want to go forward and back at the same time, and the urge to do either brings up the question of my existence again.
At the same time I’m tearful just under the surface, have no opinion of my own, am afraid to make decisions, dwell on recurring trivia like my weight and my career. It all makes sense is you think about it.
Temperament is a lifelong measure of relative mood, and in this I think most of my friends would call me entertaining and upbeat. How strange to be a depressive as well, tossed between fear and damnation and fear of damnation, a zero walking.
Comments are getting scarce here. People refrain out of politeness, I’m sure, so not to scream from boredom. What’s there to say to a depressed person? Talk about anything but him. Give him a chance to project himself into the other if ever so briefly.
Forgetting oneself is the bliss I crave. That I can crave bliss shows my depression isn’t as bad as it feels, maybe 3 kilorats today. I couldn’t schlep that bag of food over, it would weight too much, the logistics are forbidding.
Depression is boring. It’s hard to come up with new things to say about depression. It’s like the boy in the bubble like being in a bell jar as if your hands were Styrofoam and would crumble at the first human contact terrified you know nothing forgetting what you just learned posing as a human with a monstrous hand pushing you forward on the gangplank of the abyss but you never quite fall because you’re pushing back but you never board the ship either Sisyphus by any other name tereu tereu take me back to the ball game with a warm Daddy figure and I’ll die for you sorry already dead suspended constantly able to vibrate but not really move as if the air were composed of flypaper feeling mechanical androidish inhuman sad at the fact that you are inhuman it makes you cry to be so inhuman what a pity what a wasted life a life you thought was a human life isn’t there anything on TV?
At -3,
CE
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CE:
ReplyDeleteDoes the daily ritual of a blog where you recount to (virtual) strangers where your frame of mind scales out that day --is this level of self-monitoring before an audience consistent with what the doctor would order, namely self-dilution, or as you say, self-forgetting?
I think your daily monitoring of this disease as a 'first-person physician' may have immeasurable value to non-physicians who suffer it as well. But I wonder if it exacts a larger toll on the teller himself.
Norm
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ReplyDeleteI've thought about that, Norm, and I don't think it's relevant to my mental health. Putting something in writing is mildly therapeutic in any case. If I really wrote down what was in my head it would be terribly repetitive.
ReplyDeleteWith my illness, it's like a light switch; the light suddenly goes on or it doesn't. If it's on, I'm fine. If not, I'm fucked. And note I haven't had a major depression for ten years, and I've been battling this one for five months.
The continuity of the blog may also be helpful in retrospect, though I rarely go back to read anything I've written. I don't think the process inhibits wellness. I've never kept a diary before, and that's another experiment.
I once knew a guy in a manic-depressive support group who had a large graph with every mood shift and every medication and every life event duly noted--he had to consult the chart before he could share, sometimes holding it up to enlighten others. And this lucky bastard was hypomanic most of the time and only a bipolar II. That degree of self-obsession is extreme; but in my case, anything that distracts me, including the act of writing, is better than dead time, because nature abhors a vacuum and it's when I'm not occupied that the mood is hardest to endure.
I've never done this before. Empirically I don't know if it's good or bad. But the distraction factor, getting out of myself, is healthy, even if paradoxically that means writing about myself from a needful distance.
I'll say selfishly CE that I'm drawn to your blog and enjoy reading it. You have a gift for explication and the artist/physician dichotomy is a welcome relief from the standard suffering artist fare. Hope that doesn't make me creepily voyeuristic. I still maintain your diary of this disease has therapeutic value for others. You are a rare combination of eloquence grounded in empiricism.
ReplyDeleteNorm
You are, as always, too kind.
ReplyDelete