(no subject)

This week in bullet points:

• Moping, but my designated "mope and don't worry about doing anything else" period is now up. Now I can still mope, but I have to start doing something about it.


• Crazy busy at work. Or it may just be mildly busy but it feels worse than it is because my concentration is shot.


• Used my free birthday meal coupon at Texas de Brazil. It was tasty, but it kind of made me miss my usual birthday dinner with a bunch of friends, which didn't happen this year.


• Discovered Savages, which was described to me as "a band that sounds like Siouxsie Sioux fronting Killing Joke". Of course I had to go give that a listen.


• Will be left to my own devices for a while starting tomorrow. I hope I actually manage to get done some of the stuff I have on my to-do list, and don't just end up screwing around online.


• Tickets to the playoffs game on Friday, hooray! They were pricey, but I needed a pick-me-up (and guys, PLEASE don't screw it up and make me feel worse, okay?) and even the middle of the aisle seats up at the ceiling on the wrong side of the ice were going for a lot of money. Given the choice I will avoid the seats that trigger my fear of heights every time.

(Look, not ALL moping!)

QOTD

(If you've wondered why I've been so quiet here for ages, and/or why I haven't been doing a lot socially, the first paragraph is at least a partial explanation.)

Allie at Hyperbole and a Half, Depression, Part Two:

At first, I'd try to explain that it's not really negativity or sadness anymore, it's more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can't feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you're horribly bored and lonely, but since you've lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you're stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is.

But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they'll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed. The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you're having this weird argument where you're trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope just so they'll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself.

And that's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something — it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.

If you never read it the first time around, her post Adventures in Depression is also excellent for understanding what it's like. [Edit: For me, at any rate.]