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mdlbearI decided to go out walking early, in part because I didn't trust the weather to stay clear until after noon, and in part because I thought it might warm me up a little. Set a good, brisk pace but had to drop it down to an amble after half an hour when my shins started to tighten up. Last thing I need is shin splints; I'll probably regret it anyway.
There were quite a few walkers and joggers out by the Rose Garden; one can't talk to them, of course. Nobody even said hello, and most of them had looks ranging from something like boredom to outright agony. A couple might have been hopped up on endorphins; they looked a bit glazed over. I wonder what I look like.
I was thinking about a scrap of conversation from a day or two ago about the difference between New Yorkers and Californians -- I don't recall anything about the wording, but it involved the fact that NY has 11M people, and New Yorkers have to keep strangers at a distance or they'd be overwhelmed. OK, I grew up 50 miles from NYC, and went to school in the Midwest as well as California. I should know this.
I realized that, once again, I never noticed the difference. I still can't see it, and it seems as though the difficulty I'm having recalling the words of that conversation is that I didn't really understand them at the time. It seems as though my own shyness, anxiety, depression, and emotional blindness are enough to completely swamp any perception of the other person's (I don't have the right word here, either: style? distance preference?). I can get closer to some people than to others, it seems, but I don't have a sense of how that relates to anything else at all about them. I can't tell how close they want to get, or how close they get to other people.
It seems that there's a long list of things I just can't seem to understand; can't seem to see. This thing about closeness, whatever it's called. Joy. Love. Flirting. Implied messages. Maybe some of the books I ordered this morning will help a little. Maybe not. I'm not feeling very hopeful right now, just overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem.
Yeah, I'm depressed. I'm working on that, though with no results so far. But the decades of depression seem to have let some essential sense or perceptual ability atrophy or fail to develop altogether. I don't know whether I'll ever get it back, and that hurts even more than the depression does, sometimes.
Writing about it doesn't seem to have helped much this time. It clarified the problem, but that clarity is painful and seems to get me no closer to a solution.
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Date: 2009-02-08 04:37 am (UTC)By "things", do you mean "things I can _do_"? I'm not sure what joy is; music makes me happy. I'm not sure there's anything I'm passionate about these days.
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Date: 2009-02-08 06:51 am (UTC)By 'things', I mean 'things which you can appreciate, things that you enjoy spending the time to experience, things which you enjoy creating, things that you enjoy working with, things which make you feel better about the world'. I intentionally left it open to interpretation -- but not simply 'doing', but 'feel better about the world because thing exists within it'.
What makes your world brighter? What makes your world darker? What makes you proud? What makes you feel shame? What takes your world and throws it upside-down? What is the magic in your snow-globe? What do you enjoy creating? What do you enjoy doing well? What do you wish you never had to do again?
'joy' is a hard one to pin down... when was the last time you became so enraptured with something that you lost track of time? When was the last time you did so, and actively enjoyed doing what you were doing? What did you enjoy about it? What did you wish you never had to do again?
These are just suggestions to get started -- they're meant to lead to more questions, not be the end of the process. (Realistically, identifying the things that you like, and arranging things so that you do more of them, is part of the process of becoming less depressed.)
Eventually (give it 3 to 24 months), you'll ask yourself something like "why am I making these lists instead of doing something else that I enjoy more?"... and that won't necessarily be the day you find that you're not depressed anymore, but that will (hopefully) be the day that you'll have determined that you've changed enough habits to find yourself at a happier point in your life.
Another name for the non-chemical aspect of "mental health" is "behavioral health" -- develop healthy behaviors, and you develop a healthy mental state. Sometimes maintaining those behaviors requires an ongoing adjustment to your neurotransmitter levels; sometimes it only requires a temporary adjustment to get the rest of the system tuned enough that it's no longer necessary.
I also worry a bit... many antidepressants have warning labels that say "use caution in teens and young adults, as they may become more actively suicidal in the first few weeks after starting with them". In my (non-clinical, since I'm neither a therapist nor a doctor nor really any health professional) opinion, this warning shouldn't be limited only to teens and young adults. (I've seen other (older) people starting on them and becoming more actively self-harmful, either through more-frivolous spending or running themselves into the ground. Older people seem to have collectively learned that "if you kill yourself, you can't ever make it better", though, so this should also be taken with several shakers-full of salt.)
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Date: 2009-02-08 12:49 pm (UTC)When I'm programming I can sometimes get into what I call "hacker trance" and lose track of time, but I lose track of myself in there as well; there's no emotion attached to it.
About the only thing I ever do where I lose track of time and am still present enough to enjoy it is talking with a friend. And even there I don't really notice the enjoyment until it's over.