Archive for October, 2009

Deep Grooves

These days it’s been a premonition, a dread creeping in that things aren’t going to be okay. Not depression, no, but something like it. Fear of depression. I thought that when my depression went into remission two months ago I’d be free to think my own thoughts again. I was wrong. Because depression cuts deep grooves in the mind and the mind plays itself out over those grooves, being the easiest of all options, I’m having depressive thoughts even though I don’t feel depressed. The mind is nothing if not efficient. So I’ve become excellent at worrying a problem into something larger than it needs to be, excellent at exacerbating my problems by thinking about them so frequently and with such self-hatred at the core of each of these thoughts. Where this ends, I have no idea. I thought I was out of the woods, but they’re still all around me and might be forever.

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Which causes which? Situation or milligrams?

I apologize for the dip lately, I thought I’d come out of something only to slide back into it. It’s really a matter of drinking coffee in the evening or taking that second Wellbutrin. That’s all its about, for the most part. These evening depressions are avoidable. My wife and I haven’t walked in quite a while, the neighborhood, sampling anything. It’s high time we did that. This weekend we’re going to paint the walls yellow in the kitchen. I’ve got to get more serious about my job, got to get more creative in there. I’m not using half of my creativity in there. I’m just… a worker. That’s the way I walked in there, though, with the exception of that one story, Slovenia, which I felt some connection to, something about the story grabbed me and made me want to think creatively and so something good. Was it the location? The people, a little of both probably. And I was flying mentally, really doing really well. Which caused which? Does doing well at work put away the bipolar, or does the bipolar make one do well at work, when you’re up? When you’re up, you’re up in every sense of the word, in every category of your life.

So, which is it – the situation, or the milligrams?

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