• About Me
  • About this Blog
  • Voice Over

flor san roman

~ Adventures and Abstractions

flor san roman

Tag Archives: depression

Where I’ve been

07 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by Flor in context-ual

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

depression, me, observations

The super obnoxious thing about depression is that most of the time it looks like nothing more than laziness. Just laying about being useless. But while that’s happening connections to friends are being severed, maintenance of good habits withers and disappear, and responsibilities start to be ignored. And because the depressed person is internally thrashing around trying to find something that feels good again, they’ll probably take up some bad habits (eating junk food, shit sleep schedules, drinking, drugs, etc) because at least they offer a spark when everything else is dull and uninteresting.

People promise they’ll be there when you need help. But depression is a chronic problem, and when it’s really bad, really dark, it’s already gotten past the point of “cut off connection to anything requiring leaving the house” and past the point of “made snarky or angry remarks that pushed people away” and past the point of “ignored paperwork needed to get back to therapy or renew medication.”

If depression were cancer, the point someone could help would be Stage 2, when we’re just kind of obnoxious. But maybe, if you’re patient and persistent, you can convince us to take a shower and step out of the house for an hour. If you think you’re going to help when we’re suicidal: You won’t. That’s stage 4 and we’ll never tell you about it.

When you have depression, even mild depression, at best you’re at Stage 1 all of your life. Kinda submerged, but getting by. Mostly everything is good really. Life is very handle-able here, but the pain in the ass is when we’re supposed to be happy and we just can’t be. All we can do is nod and say, “Yes, that accomplishment I’ve been shooting for for years has finally come about, and it is good.” It’s hard to feel happy about it, but we do know it’s supposed to be happy making. And we may also know (this comes with some experience) not to expound on how we feel weird and conflicted about it because someone will try to helpfully inform us that we should be happy – something we already know – which will make us just feel worse. So we’ve learned to slap a smile on and say thank you to praise even if we don’t feel grateful or elevated by it. Yeah, intellectually, I can grasp a lot of things. I worked hard for this and I *should* be proud. I *should* be happy. I *should* be grateful. I *should* be eager for the next thing. I *should* be driven to do the things I say I like doing. But I’m not.

Some people can get right to work on the things they don’t like doing just to get them out of the way. Some people can go ahead and do things they aren’t interested in, because it’s a step toward getting to their goals. That “getting it out of the way” that “accomplishing a step toward a goal” makes most people feel good. It’s enough to make motivation happen.

Motivation to me seems like: you wake up in the morning and you have a vision in your head of doing or being something and it makes you get right up and get to work on it. You don’t think about it much, you don’t measure your desire for it, you just get to it. If you don’t have a specific thing to work on right then, then you get to planning the next stage of what you want, letting yourself get excited over your goal.

I wake up, sometimes in the morning, often, not, and spend a lot of time trying to talk myself into getting up. I try to think about what I want to get done, what’s feasible that day, what I wrote down the night before for today, etc. Should I clean? Should I work out? Should I work on career things? Should I budget and pay bills? Should I do the work I promised other people I’d do? Should I respond to emails?

It’s maybe like testing solutions on litmus paper to see how acidic they are. I try out each option in my head to see which one gets a reaction from my heart. One or two may get tiny little lift of “maybe…” and a couple more will get an “oh shit, I gotta do that” Most will get jack. Silence. Even when I think “well this step will contribute to that goal that I really want” …squat.

The best I can say is the same feeling you might get when you have an assignment and the due date is in more than a month. Are you going to get to work on it today? Are you reeaally? Because most people I know tend to wait until the deadline “feels” real, and then they get in gear. When you don’t have a deadline on things, and it kind of doesn’t matter if you do it or not… or, more importantly, it doesn’t “feel” like it matters… it’s hard as hell to get the damn motivation going. I can’t seem to connect to the far out goals no matter what I do. I guess I want to have a real career? I suppose I would like to have good variety of friends? I wanna lose the flab but what is that really? What would I even look like?

I need the near term stuff to matter. What I can get done this week, today. But right now everything in front of me is repair work from having been disinterested for so long most of it just collapsed in on itself. And just observing that alone is crushing.

Advertisement

Anger is a Symptom

25 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by Flor in context-ual

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

depression, me

I don’t know if I’ve ever read how angry depression can make a person.  I know when I was younger, maybe a dozen years ago, and working full time I could feel my rage build up inside me until I was utterly useless at my desk.  All of my energy was spent hiding how much I wanted to set everything on fire and/or throw it out the window.  I wasn’t violent by any means but I had to excuse myself from conversations lest I would whip around and start screaming in people’s faces about how stupid they were, how the things they talked about were so insanely petty, how everything was bullshit….  Let’s just say it’s good that I don’t work there any more and most of that vague, pointless fury has quieted down to ennui.  I may not be able to hide how boring I find most the world, but it’s better than breathing fire on unsuspecting coworkers.

A lot of that anger was really something that I inspired against myself.  I hated my life and everything I was doing with it.  And today I still prickle with vexation at myself and what I’ve done so far, but I aim a lot of the anger squarely at my depression.  Because in recent history nothing has made me lose so much ground and so much time from my life as the lethargy and misery of depression.

I get angry at every day I feel myself lose motivation, every hour I spend napping when I wasn’t really tired, every minute I hang in indecision because I can’t get up any drive to just pick a direction.

And I get angry at the time spent too angry to move.

Maybe vague but potent anger feels better than vague, sucking grief.  I don’t know.  It blots out suicidal thoughts and gives me energy… for a time. It takes more energy though. When it’s burned out I’m back to miserable.

No one talks about this.  I don’t know why.  Maybe people judge anger even worse than being sad all the time.

The thing about suicidal ideation and buying eggs

21 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by Flor in context-ual

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

depression, me

When suicidal thoughts first popped into my head they were more like fantasies the way you might fantasize about pretty much anything as a teenager. Getting that boy/girl of your preference to notice you, winning a competition or just dreaming up the proper comeback to an insult from the day before. I don’t remember when it first popped into my head, and as someone who wrote bits of fiction for fun starting from a very young age I didn’t think anything about it, taking pills to never wake up was just another idea like the one about meeting the goddess Athena or time traveling to New York’s Gilded Age. I wrote little stories of people who just up and took their own lives for no particular reason. I saw the scene in my head and I wrote it down.

Suffering suicidal ideation and suffering from it are two different things. When you suffer something, you go through it but you’re not necessarily in agony. (I swear the phrase “suffer fools gladly” has been much abused.) You suffer traffic to get to work on time, you suffer your boss’s small talk before the metting starts, etc. But when you get sick the misery is expressed as “suffering FROM headache and fever.”

Suicidal ideation is probably the least miserable indication of depression I suffer. I’m so used to the thoughts playing like a montage of videos looping on the walls at the back of my mind I forget they’re A Thing. Everyone fantasizes, right? About sex, about winning the lottery, about beating a rival…I do that and have my death mixed in. I can lean into the fantasy like it’s anything else and really flesh out the details, or just leave it running in the back and give it as much attention as I give the hum of my laptop. What I can’t do is turn it off. I must suffer it to get to my conscious thoughts.

Well, you could always hang yourself!

Yeah, we found this rope! –Bad Idea Bears, Avenue Q

What I can’t stress enough to people who don’t suffer ideation is that I really don’t want to kill myself. I’m not fantasizing because that’s what I want to do – which, I realize, is the stark difference between dreaming of taking my life and dreaming of getting some action.

This is where the thing about buying eggs comes in. Say you have a shopping list in your mind and you’ve just been so freaking busy you haven’t had time to write it down. So you recite it to yourself over the course of the day so it doesn’t slip away that you need to go to the store. But every time you get to the line with eggs you think, “oh wait, my roommate just picked up some eggs last night so I don’t have to buy any eggs.” And you carry on with the list. But the next time you think about grocery shopping eggs are still on the list and you have to go through the whole recall that you don’t need to buy eggs all over again. This happens over and over and over until you start to get a little infuriated with yourself, but you’re already driving to the grocery store so you can’t write down the list for the pleasure of crossing off “eggs.” And then you’re shopping and you slow down at the section with eggs and all you can do is roll your eyes at yourself, maybe shake your head at your weird memory, and keep on shopping.

On the one hand it doesn’t feel like a big deal to me, particularly compared to days when I can’t get out of bed, feeling numb, feeling frozen or aimless, being unable to enjoy things everyone else loves or those really dark times when I’m not fantasizing. At those times I’m studying the fantasy, comparing it against a checklist I’ll call “Do I really want to do that? No? Why not?”

On the other hand the ideas are there ALL THE TIME. I am constantly on the verge of going shopping and constantly having to remind myself I don’t need eggs. CONSTANTLY. I think to myself, “okay what do I have to get done next?” and the answer is always something like, “go to the gym, read this book, fix the broken light, email the director, kill myself, fix a snack, check with my friend about when we’ll get lunch.”

See if you can find the item in the list that sticks out like eggs I don’t need to buy.

I’m constantly crossing it off when it pops up in my mental to-do list, but like the most persistent case of mood herpes it just won’t go away. It pops up more often when I’m feeling anxious and when I’m super stressed and frustrated the thoughts get more intense, until they crowd out other thoughts… And then when things go really pear-shaped I have very little energy left to keep crossing suicide off my to-do list.

I start to feel like I should buy the fucking eggs to get them off my list.

But I won’t.

Probably.

Floundering, Drowning Life

01 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by Flor in context-ual

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

depression, fears, me, observations

I was trying to stop crying.  But that just made it all worse.  God, trying to cry quietly just sucks.

Even when I’m doing things I like (theatre, voice acting), there’s still biding shadows in the back of my mind.  I can rather forget that they’re there.  I can even get so that I forget what it’s like and end up criticizing other anxiety-ridden depressives like a normal, non-messed up person.  The thing I can’t forget, ever, is that stress really brings on the bad brain.

When I’m okay it just pisses me off because it kills so much of my time and energy.  On an okay bout like this one, I lose maybe a day.  But I’ve lost months if not years barely able to get out of bed.

I’ve got *so much* that I want and need to get done that laying about, staring off into space ends up feeling like a cosmic insult I’m giving myself, after all the other abuse I’ve already laid on me.

Everything I’m good at, everything I want more of, is totally crippled – I can’t think creatively, I can’t tune into good art or other people’s feelings.  Every effort feels hobbled; productivity slows way down, assuming I can get anything done at all.  And I feel like every single thought has a giant boulder that it has to go around in order to come together in the real world.

There’s no real reason to tread all this ground – Allie Brosh already did the job spot on.  I mean, the line “No, see, I don’t necessarily want to KILL myself…I just want to become dead somehow” is perfect (and in context, hugely funny).  But maybe only folks who know what depression is like can get that, and everyone who doesn’t know it should count their damned blessings.

What’s on my mind is two things:  The difficulty of trying to build a life at the same time that stress triggers anxiety and depression.  As well as the frustration and pain that comes when a bad episode gets written off as angst, to say nothing of being accused of attention whoring while getting slapped around by self-hatred.

Whatever I do with my life, no matter where I go or what company I keep, this disorder hangs around.  If I’ve got an episode going then all of my measurements for situations between people are completely distorted.  Clear thoughts are almost impossible, and even when I think I’ve got one, I rarely actually do.

After decades of measuring myself and whatever I create, all I can say is… I dunno.  Am I good at anything?  I dunno.  Am I smart?  I dunno.  Am I talented?  I dunno. Is what I made any good?  I don’t know.  I can only go by what other people say because when I rely on my native judgment, folks and I regularly part ways.

Can there be more frustrating conditions for trying to make a go at creating art for a living?

But like I said, that’s all a part of my life.  I make art because I have to.  I’m to the theatre like the ocean is to water.  And I’ve found voice acting spurs everything I like bringing into the world.  It’s stressful making these happen as my body of work.  And of course all the rest of life – sharing living space and getting dinner on the table and finding the time to be alone and paying bills and dodging debt and just trying to keep even more things from breaking…  All of it piles on the stress until something finally breaks my last resolve to push on and all I can do is choke and gulp and wipe my face before anyone notices I’ve been crying.

I’m not sure what the hell else I’m supposed to say for myself when these are the circumstances through which I view the world.  But… I think… I think, I’m a pretty good actor.  Maybe.

————————————————————————————————–

Title was taken from one of the poems in Birthday Letters, written by Ted Hughes, better known as Mr Sylvia Plath (to whom the poem was addressed).

“Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give.”

Rough to read, but you know who really doesn’t want that “strange glitter?”  The person who’s too fucking depressed to swim to shore.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 782 other subscribers

Monthly Archives

Tags

absurdism acting admin aging america anxiety art books brain hack burbank class work communication communion depression dramaturgy Einstürzende Neubauten essay existentialism experimental experimental music expressionism faith family fears fiction friends future holiday home life improv industrial music Industrial Records japanese me meme music narrative nerdery news observations opposition performing philosophy politics reading recent history rehearsal SITI social networking society SOSE surrealism suzuki theatre theory of knowledge Throbbing Gristle travel USC video gaming viewpoints voice wine work

Categories

Abstraction Background belief context-ual fiction Japanese Politica Theatrical Uncategorized Vino Voice Over

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • flor san roman
    • Join 45 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • flor san roman
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar