A walk in the morning / on still being blind

[mdlbear]

I 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.

Comments

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

You're very used to seeing a solution as soon as you identify a problem -- or, if not seeing a solution, at least seeing a possible path to a solution. The fact that you've been depressed for years means that you've found a comfortable set of paths around your depression-space... well, maybe not 'comfortable', but they're at least 'familiar'. To take this into The Forest Analogy[tm], you've worn those tracks so they've become trails, and at the moment you're not recognizing any possible paths off of those trails.

(It doesn't help that we're always taught "don't walk off the trail" when we go to any of the state parks with forests, either.)

I haven't had as many years to live with depression as you have, and I expect that my experience wasn't (and isn't) as life-altering as yours is/will be. I'll share my experience, though, that much of the self-reinforcing process of depression is as much to do with habits (built from emotional reactions and lack of recognition of such) as with any chemical imbalance which leads to such. If you change your habits, you can change your life. (this is MUCH easier said than done... mostly because it's very difficult to identify the habits that are so ingrained that you can't even see them.)

Try to find the things that bring you joy, and work from there. Find the things that you're passionate about, and work from there. Find the things that you tolerate, find the things that vex you, find the things that you despise more than anything else, find the things that bring emotional reactions. This is likely going to hurt a lot at first (my own experience was that I found a lot of things that I hated, a lot of things that brought me pain, a lot of things I tolerated simply because I didn't think I could change them -- many, many more of them than the things that brought me joy or happiness or comfort)... but my experience is also that the mind brings up pain before it brings up pleasure.

Write it all down. Make lists, or write them into songs, write them into stories, write them into journals -- you don't have to share them, and I encourage you to share only that which you feel comfortable sharing. Accept the things that you've been denying, accept the things that hurt, accept the things that you would otherwise hate yourself for... and then forgive yourself.

[kyrielle]

It could be a chicken or egg thing where lacking that sense added to the depression and wasn't caused by it too.

Fwiw the friend of mine who learned to read ppl consciously because they didn't do it automatically? Took a while to learn it but is better at reading ppl than most now because it IS conscious and so not swayed by hir mood or energy levels.

Along the Trail...

[idea-fairy.livejournal.com]

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.

People (pedestrians and bicyclists) I've encountered along the Stevens Creek Trail in Mountain View

http://www.stevenscreektrail.org/

seem friendlier than that on average, even before I bubble them.

By the way, the map at

http://www.stevenscreektrail.org/Virtual_Tour_Home.html

is a little out of date at the south end. The trail now extends across El Camino Real. That's what all that construction was on El Camino where it crosses the 85 Freeway.

I usually park in the shopping mall at El Camino and Grant/237 with the Burger King and the Walgreens. There are enough little shops there that no one seems to notice which ones you do or don't actually go into. From there it's a short walk down El Camino to the trail entrance, which is adjacent to the freeway ramp.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

FWIW you seem much more interested in human contact recently. Nothing wrong with this--just that you never seemed to mention it before.

Don't know that there's much else I can say about what you're going through, except that I'm with you, I'm "listening" and I hope you feel better soon.

If I think of anything that seems like it might be useful I will let you know.

Love, Cat

[mdlbear]

Very true. Since maybe two years or so ago, and especially this last year. It's what the River posts are all about, basically, though I suppose that hassn't always come through recently.

[mdlbear]

*nod*

How does one go about learning to read people? It's a skill I desperately need and want to learn.

[kyrielle]

Well, the technique my friend used was to watch source material where the intended emotion/subtext was known. Film critics / professors apparently publish commentaries on classic films (shot by shot and scene by scene) commenting on how the actors portray emotion and subtext - so taking those commentaries and putting them up beside the films allows identification of particular expressions. It sounds like the sort of undertaking that might take a while, but it gives a lot of reference material....

ETA: Also, check out the work of a psychologist named Paul Ekman. I quote my friend: Ekman has compiled a lot of evidence indicating that emotional states are universal across cultures, and so too are the more primitive ways of expressing those emotional states. As an example, backing away from someone, hands up, palms out, is a cross cultural sign of "de-escalate confrontation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman Take his work with a grain of salt -- but so taken, it's plenty worth reading.

NYC actually pretty friendly

[hvideo.livejournal.com]

I can't say if it applied when you were growing up or not, but I recall having heard of several studies in the last decade or so that ranked New York City as one of the friendlier big cities in America.

Now, some surveys (as opposed to studies) might give NYC a lot of votes simply because it is a big city that comes easily to mind - so even though they often rank NYC highly I'd tend to discount the surveys. The actual studies were doing things like dropping a pen (when your arms are full) to see if someone would help, dropping a stamped letter to see if someone would mail it, asking for directions to see if people would help or not and so on. Other factors included eye contact, or reactions if you gave someone a smile, or general friendliness/rudeness in stressful situations (tellers in a bank with long limes) and so on.

Big cities are generally considered less friendly than smaller cities or towns, true - but NYC does a lot better than most. The perceived problem is apparently more Hollywood Stereotype than reality.

[mdlbear]

Is there a reference on this exercise? It sounds potentially useful, though difficult...

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.

Re: NYC actually pretty friendly

[mdlbear]

Thanks for the reality check. I got this from a couple of actual New Yorkers, but didn't really understand enough of what they were saying to tell whether it's compatible with this study or contradictory.

[mdlbear]

Which of his books, or related books, is likely to be the most useful?

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

It really is difficult... and there isn't a reference that I've found. A lot of it came from my own therapist (an LCSW), and a lot came from my own experiences.

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.)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

New Yorkers don't make eye contact for no reason (which people in other places sometimes do). Eye contact without anything to explain it is perceived as a potential threat. Also, New Yorkers are perceived as rude, but they're really just in a hurry and don't want to be interrupted or distracted. But if you ask directions, or drop something, or are trying to wrestle a baby stroller, a cranky four-year-old, and three bags of groceries through a revolving door, New Yorkers will be glad to help. (Think of all the true stories of strangers helping one another on 9/11.)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Would you do me a favor? Could you go over to mdlbear's house, randomly and unexpectedly, knock on his door, and greet him with a stream of bubbles? (In return, you can request some sort of odd favor from me, of course.)

[mdlbear]

Thanks.

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.

[kyrielle]

I'm sorry, I don't know. :( I keep meaning to follow up on this but finding the time and energy has been difficult.

[mdlbear]

*grin* I understand completely.

[kyrielle]

A comment in a friend's journal caught my eye, re reading others: http://leora.livejournal.com/372781.html?thread=2159405#t2159405