A few people have asked about my depression lately; I thought it best to park as many of my thoughts, such as they are, about it here. I don't want to turn even just this post into a livejournal TMI whine list, so here's the diagnosis in thumbnail: have had Seasonal Affective Disorder [winter depression] as long as I can remember, but it went off the rails a few years back when my eyesight crapped out for a while. Still have the occasional bit of Charles Bonnet Syndrome [seeing abstract shapes that obviously aren't there] when I'm very tired, and I apparently do have Non-24 disorder, a common malady for severely sight-impaired people where their days stretch out to 25 or 26 hours. It's 4:27AM and I'm wide awake; it feels like early afternoon. Given the choice, I chose to accept that I'll be cycling through everyone else's sleep pattern every two weeks or so, rather than drug myself and feel like crap but be [technically] awake 6AM-10PM. I've wasted years struggling to work on other people's schedules.
OK, enough of that crap, alow me to entertain you, maybe: I love reading Dylan Horrocks' thoughts about depression, art and how writing other people's books will eventually drive you crazy. Here are a couple of my thoughts, posted in response to this page of his serial SAM ZABEL AND THE MAGIC PEN:
It’s deeply annoying how so many dopamine-typicals think that “Are you depressed because _____ or are you _____ because you’re depressed?” is the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket/Come To Jesus express lane to recovery — especially the assholes who throw the question out like they’re Captain Kirk and your depression is an inscrutable, invincible robot that can be easily destroyed by a logical paradox. What's ironic is that throwing a Kirkly hard right cross to a depressed jaw would probably be more constructive than tossing out a passively aggressive either/or rhetorical question.
Having thought more about it, my depression is not NOMAD but rather the lizard-man Gorn who beats the crap out of Kirk until he pulls gunpowder out of his ass to blast him and win their duel — only my lizard-man’s growling and hissing translates to something that sounds a lot like “Zodiac Motherfucker” from the Onion/AV Club comments sections. THAT IS THE PRICE A CANDYASS PAYS WHEN HE GETS TOTALLY PWNED BY SOME PIDDLYASS DOPAMINE LEVELS.
Yes, the best metaphors I can come up with about my life right now are STAR TREK references; fuck you, it's all I can do to literally stay on my feet for most of a day when the floor sings to me about how nice it is to lay on. "Oh floor, I wish I knew how to quit you." There, a BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN ref -- is that good enough for your highness? No? Well, crap, I thought that would do it, but it has been quite a while since the film was released. Um, AVATAR? The blue people are reportedly turning a lot of nerds blue? Bah. You know, I've been thinking about how reading a letter that's missing its last page and sign-off somehow commands more attention and stays more vivid in the reader's mind afterward. I think I'm going to start stopping my posts and letters in the middle of a sentence and see how it works. Obviously, I won't do that for cover letters but in one kind of business proposal it
0 What Say Youse?:
Post a Comment