October 11, 2007

Actually…that wasn’t fun at all, and no one laughed, least of all me. The worst thing about crawling out of depression is that you will, without fail, fall back in at some point, and when you do, all the positive gains you’ve made will pale beside the immediacy of the black dog and its languid growling. Then you lose motivation to do certain things, which results in, say, a weeklong gap in fiction writing, or the failure to fill certain prescriptions that were more important than you thought they were, and before you grab onto the ripcord and release the chute of happiness you spend a couple of weekends apartment-bound with pizza and boxed sets of Futurama.

It’s this sort of experience that makes me believe in the chemical nature of it all: the difference is so profound, and such a thing apart from me, that it truly feels like a demon. A malevolent entity. We hates it, we do.

Then I take some steps. I do things to take care of myself, which almost immediately result in positive change, and lessens the sense of being alone in the rearmost car of a plunging roller coaster in the middle of Death Valley. I still think it's chemical, but I continually wonder at the ways in which acts of individual will can re-spice the neuronal soup and transform it into something less like week-old haggis in a blender and more like onion soup made with Vidalias and a nice Gruyère.

There’s a flip side to all this, and that’s jolly old mania. I do get a bit of that from time to time, but not in a typical “manic depressive” sort of way. It’s more that my undepressed state of mind is, by comparison, so energetic that it can feel like mania. When I’m in the groove I write a ton, I stay up until four in the morning recording vaguely musical noises, and I post long, self-involved essays on Astonished Head.

Which leads me to my current project: Die Korrektivs. Correctives are how I deal with what I call the “consideration gap.” That’s what happens when I’ve given further thought to issues I’ve raised on the site in the past but haven’t yet written about again. I’ve made a commitment here to avoid revisionism, the icky practice of deleting embarrassing posts or changing them to reflect a better version of myself or my thinking. I’ll go back and edit for basic language, typos, and so on, but once it’s out there, it’s out there, and I treat my posts like print media, which can be an interesting, if neurotic, experience. (Actually, that’s a concise summation of my entire life. I shall have it carved onto my tomb: An Interesting, If Neurotic, Experience.).

Along with generating content that’s of absolutely no interest to anyone at all, the consideration gap is one of the dangers of making the deliberate decision to be a public diarist. The period of time between Wait! I’ve changed my mind! and Here’s some new and better thinking! can be cause for anxiety, which is only partly remedied by the knowledge that no one really cares all that much about my foibles. The fact that I now find some of what I wrote in a fit of general wobbliness to be embarrassingly emo is of no real concern to anyone. No one links to my fifth-rate Heinleinesque theoretical ramblings about polyamory, and that's probably for the best.

Which brings up the question: why bother?

I bother because this is a work in progress, and it’s got holes in it. I try to patch those holes, and in so doing, I mend gaps in my thinking. The fact that these writings are public, and can actually be read by others, keeps me honest.

So there’s that.

In the meantime, while you wait with bated breath for more of my rambling, here's a nifty New Yorker article on counterfeit wine, via BoingBoing.

BUT, ALSO:

I black out the site for a few days, and traffic spikes up. Seriously, what the hell.