Have been having an attack of depression. When it happens to me, everything that I can see becomes something to feel guilty about. A link to a past failure. A book I haven’t read. A story I was supposed to write. Dust that shouldn’t be there. Dirt in corners. Everything becomes something that I should feel bad about.
Then I start looking for the point, I start going wrong. It keeps coming back to university. I keep wishing I had never gone. Getting a BA is irrelevant. If you mess the first week and take the wrong course, you have dammed yourself for the next few years.
It’s a domino effect. One thing goes and then everything does. You can do all the exercises, you tell yourself, that this is not your fault. But within you, something that feels more powerful is destroying all that. It’s like sending the bluebird of happiness out into ground zero of a nuclear test. No chance.
The realisation that you’ve been though this before can’t help. At the time, you are having the feelings, you feel that if they will just come back, why try to get to the surface?
What I want to happen, is to find some way I can just re-organise my life to correct this. Then I can’t make the changes I want and it all feels like it goes wrong again. Or something happens that disrupts the plans I had. (I would rate ‘Life is what happens when we are making other plans’ as one of the most sheer ‘howl-in-the-dark’ sentences ever.)
I know that I demand too much of myself. I know that things could be worse. But that can not stop the torrent of anger and spite that keeps sounding out, at me, within my mind.
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
Organisation and depression
Woke up at 9.00am, which I don’t regard as a good thing. I do think it is a bit harder to get going after that.
Started trying to organise the cuttings I’ve saved for future research material. This is the sort of thing that can get more depressing then you expect. As in “I have all this material, why I haven’t I done more with it?” This problem is highlighted by the amount of notes I have turned up form my depressed phrase. One of the things that I have established from this and from my father’s own spell of depression, is that recovery from this is slow. It’s about trying to change a mental outlook, which doesn’t happen overnight. I also think that there can be some triggers that can remain in your head which cause you to start feeling down again. These can fade away over a couple of hours, the trick is trying to distract your mind away from them.
Another reason why this may be getting me down, is that it reminds me of all the story ideas that I had and I haven’t followed though. This means that they build up; waiting to get out and I feel guilty because I haven’t done them yet. Because I don’t know how I can make them work and so on. This is a very good example of the trigger thinking above, really.
In attempt to be cheerful, I got hold of a copy of the graphic novel ‘Freakangels: Volume 2’ by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield, published by Avatar Press. This is the story of 11 twenty-somethings with various mental powers, such as telepathy and telekinesis, defending Whitechapel in a post-apocalypse England. It is building into an exciting science-fiction narrative with a theme about taking responsibility for your actions.
Over today, I have been getting the urge to try and organise my CD collection. Either this is just my mind looking for a source of distraction. Alternatively, it might be the belief that if you can impose a final definite sort of order on everything you own, all books, CD’s and DVD’s, you will be able to have a better existence. I admit that I love the idea of this, but I can spot the flaws in it. Firstly, it might mean you spend the best part of a month doing it. Secondly it relies on you never acquiring anything new after this, because if you did that, it would have to catalogued into the new system and what if it didn’t fit? Thirdly, what if you had to move? Then would you have to do it all again? Fourthly, you could just end sitting around, too neurotic to take out anything to read or watch, in case it disrupted the established order.
Started trying to organise the cuttings I’ve saved for future research material. This is the sort of thing that can get more depressing then you expect. As in “I have all this material, why I haven’t I done more with it?” This problem is highlighted by the amount of notes I have turned up form my depressed phrase. One of the things that I have established from this and from my father’s own spell of depression, is that recovery from this is slow. It’s about trying to change a mental outlook, which doesn’t happen overnight. I also think that there can be some triggers that can remain in your head which cause you to start feeling down again. These can fade away over a couple of hours, the trick is trying to distract your mind away from them.
Another reason why this may be getting me down, is that it reminds me of all the story ideas that I had and I haven’t followed though. This means that they build up; waiting to get out and I feel guilty because I haven’t done them yet. Because I don’t know how I can make them work and so on. This is a very good example of the trigger thinking above, really.
In attempt to be cheerful, I got hold of a copy of the graphic novel ‘Freakangels: Volume 2’ by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield, published by Avatar Press. This is the story of 11 twenty-somethings with various mental powers, such as telepathy and telekinesis, defending Whitechapel in a post-apocalypse England. It is building into an exciting science-fiction narrative with a theme about taking responsibility for your actions.
Over today, I have been getting the urge to try and organise my CD collection. Either this is just my mind looking for a source of distraction. Alternatively, it might be the belief that if you can impose a final definite sort of order on everything you own, all books, CD’s and DVD’s, you will be able to have a better existence. I admit that I love the idea of this, but I can spot the flaws in it. Firstly, it might mean you spend the best part of a month doing it. Secondly it relies on you never acquiring anything new after this, because if you did that, it would have to catalogued into the new system and what if it didn’t fit? Thirdly, what if you had to move? Then would you have to do it all again? Fourthly, you could just end sitting around, too neurotic to take out anything to read or watch, in case it disrupted the established order.
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