footpad, posts by tag: depression - LiveJournal (original) (raw)

The victim of depression	[Dec. 21st, 2012|07:40 am]Footpad
[Tags**|depression, rumination] [Current Mood**	flat]_Written two weeks ago:_Our culture is gradually learning not to stigmatise depression, but to recognise it as an illness which is at least partly treatable. For me, the most fortunate aspect of this (apart from the treatment, bless it) is that I can be open to my colleagues about my condition. I gulp down my citalopram with my morning decaf, and I'm happy to talk to people about the effects and experience of depression. As with homosexuality, I don't go out of my to advertise the fact; I just don't use gender-neutral pronouns when talking about my partner, and I don't pretend that that little white pill is aspirin.As a side note, you might be surprised to know how many people quietly admit to me that they're also taking antidepressants. Tip: it's a lot more than those who turn out to be gay!Right now I'm in an uncomfortable condition: my citalopram doesn't seem to be working as well as it should. I've become markedly avoidant, with lots of silly little stress reactions, and my mental condition has been flirting with that nasty little phenomenon called depersonalisation. On Tuesday I was even struggling to construct coherent sentences to my poor therapist. Also, for some reason, I'm also intermittently hypersalivating.The obvious diagnosis is of course rabies, but unfortunately I haven't recently exchanged bodily fluids with any bats, so we have to consider alternatives. To this end, I've recently suffered a bewildering battery of medical tests, whose results I'll be collecting in an hour or so.My colleagues' understanding has been very valuable to me over the past week or so, as I can keep them advised of my circumstances and trust them to make reasonable decisions on my behalf. They're the people who're looking after me at work—not, be it said, the Human Resources department, to whom I lie through my teeth because their Stalinist policies make it perfectly clear that they're a bunch of syphilitic epsilon-minus-semi-moron baby-eating dingoes who aren't fit to be trusted with a primary-school charity raffle, let alone even the most elementary aspects of humane pastoral care.To my colleagues, I've been able to plead depression and know that they'll cover for me._Written today:_I was going somewhere with all of this, but then I got distracted, possibly by a wall that seemed to need staring at.My test results were all basically normal, but I explained to the doctor that I was basically ineffectual at work, and got myself signed off sick for a couple of days so I could go home and unwind. On arrival, I found that akeela and draugvorn had made the place beautiful, with a fire in the hearth and a malamute on the carpet, and I felt that getting signed off sick was exactly the right move.I'm now ready to make my point, but after all this divagation and confabulation, it's probably better to put it in another post.
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The return of the sun	[Mar. 21st, 2012|11:54 am]Footpad
[Tags**|caffeine, depression, happiness, life, organisation] [Current Mood**	constructive] [Current Location	Switzerland]Today is March 21st, the vernal equinox, the day when—at least in most years—a small lump of iron-rich rock, slowly rotating in a tilted orbit, briefly presents its equator to its small unregarded yellow sun. Across both its hemispheres, day and night stand in perfect equality, except at its poles where horizontal daylight streams across the wastes of ice.Personally, I think of this as the day when the sun returns.It is also my sixtieth consecutive day without pharmacologically significant amounts of caffeine, and about my fifty-fifth day of awakening. The degree of personal change I've experienced in the past two months has been simply extraordinary.It's like, when I stopped drinking coffee, I was released from some kind of fearsome anchor that had been pinning me to the floor of a cold and murky sea. Suddenly I just began doing stuff. All those little things that bother me, that make me think, "I really should..."—they've started getting done. Tidying my room. Catching up on my accounting (after eight months!). Getting on my bicycle again (after a year and a half!). Getting the garden back into shape, after three years without pruning. And following up a hundred mails, letters, jobs, and obligations.It's not that all these tasks are new. These are things that have been on my mind, in some cases, for years; in some cases I've had reminders sitting right by my desk, very gently nagging at my awareness. The difference is that I now have the energy and initiative to address them. And the truly astonishing thing is how many loose ends a life can contain. I've been whittling them down for over a month and there's still no shortage of them.How could simple caffeine have suppressed me for so long? Well, naturally it's not just the caffeine. There are many factors, interleaved and combined: the lengthening days, the cumulative effects of psychotherapy, my steadily improving relationship with akeela, my blasé attitude to work, my increased physical activity, and, not least, the self-reinforcing positive energy of feeling that life is improving and things are getting fixed.Best of all, this new energy feels entirely natural and unforced. I have not resolved to tidy my room; I've just enjoyed putting things away and enjoying the space. I've been doing gardening because it's fun. I've been doing my accounting and bookkeeping and emailing and organising because disarray is faintly claustrophobic and distracting, whereas an organised life leaves space to breathe (and paradoxically requires much less effort). I haven't had to motivate myself; the motivation has simply arisen from within.I'm half afraid that this won't last, that my momentum will run down, that it's all just a brief interlude of optimism between the months of dysthymia. I certainly don't believe that this is the end of depression: major depressive disorder is in my genes and my synapses, a black dog that will walk alongside me to the end of my days. I've had minor recoveries before, only to lapse once more.Even so, this recovery is extraordinary in its duration, its intensity and its stability. I'm starting to dare to hope that aspects of it may actually be permanent: that even if things go dull again, this may still be a marked change in my baseline mood. It truly seems, as the days lengthen in the northern hemisphere, that the sun has returned to my world.
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Tying it all together	[Oct. 21st, 2011|11:21 am]Footpad
[Tags**|coming out, depression, furry, jody, piotr, work] [Current Mood**	hopeful]Dear me, that was an icky couple of weeks. My boss is very understanding of my situation and tries hard to avoid making me work two weekends in a row, but this time it just had to be. I can manage one weekend without getting to see my dog, but now it's nearly three weeks and it's kind of an ache, you know what I mean?I miss akeela too, but I miss him in the evenings. Right now there's watery morning sunlight slanting across the valley and I want to be out jogging in the cool damp woods with Mischa, taking pleasure in each other's company in the wordless communion of packmates.My room shows all the signs of a mild bout of depression. Scattered DVDs on the table, litter on the floor, an unmade bed. There've been signs of progress, of getting back to grips with things in the office and in the home, but everything's been a bit Too Much Effort recently. Unanswered emails, unfulfilled social obligations, lost objects, a general sense of running two paces behind everyone else and never quite being able to catch up. Fairly soon I'll look at all the mess and think, "damn, that's annoying," and I'll start clearing up and then I'll be back in the swing of things. Not quite yet though.I've got to work tomorrow too, but I have every prospect of getting away in time to take a train up to Germany, and then I get Monday off as well and my life will once again contain people and talk and the serene bliss of lying on the living-room carpet with my arm around Mischa, both of us half-asleep and smiling in an oxytocin daze. I most definitely have things to look forward too.Hey, akeela, please decide what you want to have cooked for you on Sunday evening.÷I've always been vaguely ashamed of being an Internet Furry Freak, but over the past months it has, for whatever equally weird and inexplicable reason, ceased to bother me. I'm still a little... sensitive about it, and not entirely without reason. Here's how the conversation went, with a much-esteemed and dear colleague of mine, over our trays of mediocre food at the staff canteen:Him, looking at my not-obviously-convention T-shirt: "What does that 'CH-on' on your T-shirt mean?"Me, laconically: "Furry convention."His eyes brighten and he tilts his head, smiling incredulously. "What?"Equally tersely, "Furry convention." I fork some food, chew and swallow.He rocks back in his seat as though, looking away from me and laughing with a hysterical edge in his voice. "Oh my go-o-o-o-od!"And, in a later conversation:"I've got to say you're one of the more sorted-out furries I've known."I double-take, and can't help breaking into a grin. "Dude... mental patient?""Still."So clearly my reticence was more than a little justified, 'cause there's a Reputation out there. Sometime I need to ask him what on earth, by reputation or painful experience, he thinks furries actually are. The answer surely promises to be comically and painfully hilarious.÷So last night, at a going-away party for a dear colleague and friend whom I've worked with right from my first day at CERN, I gave that friend the address of this blog. I know him as well as I know almost anyone; we've stood by each other through thick and thin and he's taught me a lot about who I am and how to survive in the real world. And yet I never ever talked with him about a whole other side of my life.So now he gets to find out, and that's a good thing. Hiya J. Here's the rest of the freak show. Love you, man.
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Rambling off the tracks	[Jul. 3rd, 2010|12:37 am]Footpad
[Tags**|depression, dog, happiness, life, trains] [Current Music**	Julee Cruise, _The World Spins_]One of the things I really appreciate about German long-distance trains, which make them qualitatively more pleasant to travel in than their English counterparts, is that they have special sealed small-children compartments in each wagon.¹ One of those compartments is earning its keep right now: I can just faintly hear the sounds of irate screaming, just loud enough to be on the cusp of hearing and remind me that I don't have to suffer from it.Dusk is falling and the air is cooling after a sultry summer's day. A heat-wave is rolling in across Europe; tomorrow it'll be 34°C (that's hot, by Yurpeen standards). We'll spend the weekend grilling meat, celebrating nerkitt's birthday, and figuring out how to keep poor mischamute from broiling in his own beautiful pelt. Short walks only, with a quick wash in the river meanwhile, and an air-conditioning unit set up in the living-room.I've given up coffee again, maybe for the final time. Reading more of Peter Kramer's Against Depression, I've realised that there may be good (or, more accurately, very bad) physiological reasons why caffeine lowers my mood, making me hectic and sharp and sour. Anatomically speaking, long-term depression appears to be a self-reinforcing pattern of permanent and cumulative damage to the parts of the brain that deal with stressful emotions. Having had two bouts of major depression, I am probably already vulnerable and handicapped in my ability to deal with persistent stress, so those who've seen how I react to caffeine won't be at all surprised by the mechanism that makes it bad for me.And tomorrow Germany plays... uh, Argentina, I think? in the football. 'Schlaaand!
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A pocketful of the abyss	[Jun. 8th, 2010|08:16 pm]Footpad
[Tags**|depression, picking up the pieces, suicide] [Current Mood**	thoughtful]Beautiful weather outside—a cloudy variegated sky, already dimming towards an unseen sunset, the soft wind cooled by a light clean rain. I put on some rice to cook, and some ratatouille to reheat, and went to lean on the balcony and watch the weather—Woo. Long way down, easily lethal. I do live on the eighth floor. Another storey up, and I could take a flamboyant swan-dive off the roof. A few seconds in the sickening clutch of free-fall, the fierce whoosh of wind, a fractured glimpse of the ground rushing up, then... not even blackness, not even an end to thought, but something more final still. It's hard for the animal consciousness to grasp the prospect of its own extinction.Fortunately I don't want to go there. No more rain, no more Mischa, not even the chance to enjoy that ratatouille. Plus it wouldn't actually end my troubles: when akeela found out, he'd boot down the doors of Hell itself just to berate me for being so damn' stupid.But still the memory of suicidality persists, like a heroin-addict's belt or a memento from the war. When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss doesn't just gaze back into you: it slips into you through your pupils and coils itself like a worm into the quiet corners of your soul. There you will carry it eternally, and from time to time it will awaken and whisper to you.Callous people tend to think of sorrow as something that passes and is gone, but actually it stains us and reduces us. That's why it's important on every level, from our everyday encounters to the fabric of our society, to nurture and promote the generality of joy.
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