I have dwelled too much upon my doom

[hawkwing_lb]

So Jim Hines has a post up about his depression. It's got me thinking about my own weird brain chemistry, and the fact that I've been extra avoidant since the social!stravaganza that was last Wednesday. (Not that a play with a friend is especially extravagant. It's just, I don't seem to be able to have fun without suffering some kind of backlash. Introvert crash.)

I've never had a diagnosis. I mean, I had some counselling for a couple months after my small nervous breakdown my first year in college, and once for three or four sessions a couple of years thereafter, when I think exam stress was getting to me. You woman up and learn some coping skills - after I got back up, it didn't seem like counselling had anything more to offer me. (Although my symptoms sound a lot like dysthymia, which is not a word I'd come across before. Except with extra added anxiety.) I've been talking escitalopram for years now, and I'm one of the lucky ones: my side effects are some extra sleepiness. That's if the escitalopram is actually to blame.

It's been years since things were so bad I couldn't function for whole weeks. That hasn't happened since the first time. But most of the time I doubt myself. (A lot of the time I dislike myself.) Most of the time, the future seems hopeless. Most of the time, I get by on not thinking too far ahead, because looking more than two or three weeks in the future is a sure route to I will never amount to anything/why shouldn't you go jump off a bridge? I have this feeling that for many people, it's easier to be hopeful. Easier to be motivated. Easier not to curl up in a corner and spend days watching videos and reading old paperbacks because who gives a fuck, right? The world's going to hell in a handbasket and you'll let everyone down - in fact, you have already, they just don't know it yet/haven't pointed it out, and why can't you have a job like everyone else, you lazy slob, research isn't REAL WORK and everyone knows it.

So, yeah. I try not to think about it too much. Otherwise it gets too hard to keep going.

Anyway. Have an entertaining link:

Thine appraisal is now due: I do Regret ye failure to demonstrate Impact of mine Experimentations in ye academic yeare. Should mine Labours on Gravity, Opticks and Fluxions fail to attract ye Approbation of ye Peasantry, I will accept ye Voluntary Redundancy to make room for an Younger and Sexier Experimenter to whom ye Tattle-Sheets, Mummer-Shows and Chap-Books shall devote Time and Space. Such as ye Fop Cox and that damn'd Simpering Worsley.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Uh, your entertaining link is actually a repeat of the link to dysthymia...

(Which, yeah. Sounds a lot like me, too. Except that I laugh at their two years, because I have felt this way all through my adolescence and my entire adult life. I never thought of it as a disease, though: just an attitude, a mindset, a personality trait. A gloomy outlook on a gloomy world. I learned to deal, and so far I've always found a reason not to jump off that bridge. Sometimes people urge me towards treatment, but I resist: I'd hate talking therapy, and better living through chemistry may lift the spirits but I worry what it might do to the work. The person I am makes the books that I write, and I think they're worth the writing, so.)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

...ooops.

Sorry, should be fixed now.

I have the better living through chemistry because without it I regularly cannot face speaking to actual people, so I discovered. Not to mention it makes the suicidal ideations both less frequent and easier to conquer. I do not want to go back to that place more often than I absolutely must.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I was an anxious/clingy pre-adolescent, though my major memories are all pretty happy. The depressed shit didn't really kick in until I hit college and had way fewer comforting routines to keep me on track.

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

As you know, I'm similar, though I think I'm more anxious, and I can't take the blood-soaked nightmares the escitalopram gives me. It sucks.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

It does. But we go onward, nevertheless.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I am one who finds it easier to assume the worst than to hope, too. What I told myself about research was that when I measured it by the everyday standard -- what is this worth in money? what can it earn me? what will others pay? -- it not only made me anxious, it was bad for the research, because it was the wrong measure. The voice of capitalist value is socially dominant and very loud, and its damaging to many people and things. It's very reductive. I did and do worry about feeding and housing myself, but I eventually trained myself into valuing the work in terms of what it illuminated, explained, examined. The work you're doing now is not paying you well, nor is it 'adding to the economy' (where 'the economy' means monetary value) but it will outlast you. In the hoary phrase, you are adding to the total sum of human knowledge, and that is of great value.
Best wishes.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I hope so. I hope that synthesising the results of other people's research and using different models to throw light on the past counts as adding to the sum total of human knowledge. (Archaeologists get very judgey about people who don't dig.)

Thank you.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Historians are going to love you. We get very judgey about archaeologists who don't write up!

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I hope. :)

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

"why can't you have a job like everyone else, you lazy slob, research isn't REAL WORK and everyone knows it."

ugh.

Not to take away from the other factors contributing to how you feel, but I really hate that this is the general attitude from society a lot of times. It's not true and I can sympathize from experience that it does not help. So when I tell you that you are anything but lazy, that you are brilliant and doing important work, please know that I am not saying it to make you feel better, but because it's true. That other crap is not. And if we had a healthy attitude towards art and knowledge, society would realize this.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

You are a good friend. I do not appreciate you as you deserve. :)