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Thursday, January 27, 2011

Depression

I constantly battled depression as a teenager. Over time, recognizing there was nothing powerful or important about depression, I taught myself techniques to extract myself from the numbing fog it wrapped around my brain. It's now a fairly rare experience for me to go through spells of depression, but it does happen.

Art Alexakis sang that being neurotic and depressed "doesn't mean that you are sad." For me, depression seldom manifests itself as sadness. Instead, it steals my energy from me, leaving me an automaton going through the bigger motions of my daily life ... and totally skipping those smaller motions I just can't muster up the energy for.

I'm normally a huge fan of my twice-daily walks with my dog. When I'm not suffering plantar fasciitis (about that, >!@#!@#!#@$!), I love running. Right now, due to my injury, I have to settle for walking. Except that, the last couple of weeks, each 5-minute walk has seemed like an earth-shatteringly ginormous monstrosity of energy-suckingness. Whereas I usually spring from bed with a smile each morning, I've recently had a hard time pulling myself from bed no matter how wakeful I am. Little things like showering and flossing feel like enormous expenditures of energy.

Frankly speaking, my pattern recognition skills suck. If all the clues are there, though, there are occasionally times where I look at them and go, "Hey! I get it!" This is one of those times.

I'm depressed right now. This is very different from being sad, although it may sometimes involve a measure of sadness. Part of this is due to a very stressful experience very recently concluded. Another, my S.O. rightly suggests, is due to the fact I've poured a huge part of myself into The Monster's Daughter. Now that's done, and I'm left with a big question mark in response to the question, "What to do now?" I have projects I'm working on, but none of them are all-encompassing projects the way The Monster's Daughter has been, especially the last couple of months.

I'll find my footing again. I've done it a dozen times before. In the meantime, I guess I'll enjoy the feeling of having seen something very difficult through its conclusion.

https://www.createspace.com/3547508 = The Monster's Daughter, print
http://amzn.to/gg6Jso = The Monster's Daughter, Kindle
Coming soon to Amazon & the Nook!

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