dysthymia

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An inconsequential blog post

I don’t know if I’m going to write any fiction this morning.  I didn’t bring the laptop back to the house with me yesterday, and my insomnia is acting up, so I’m headed into the office very early and writing this on the way.  If I do write any fiction, I guess I’ll update this to let you know.

Of course, it’s nothing new that my insomnia is acting up.  Though I sometimes don’t talk about it‒since I’m sure it gets terribly dull for readers, though not as much as it is for me‒I have poor sleep every night.  I’ve been taking Benadryl nightly now for about a week, but its effects are limited, and of course, it has side effects.

Clearly, of course, humans are not adapted to the modern world, and I’m not adapted to it, either, though I don’t consider myself truly human.  So it should be no surprise that I am not optimally healthy in this world.  I’m also pretty nearly alone, with only long distance communication and “work friends” as well as a greater number of people at work who should feel lucky I haven’t mastered the “force choke” like Darth Vader.  I guess what they really should be glad of is that my frontal loves are well developed in that I have good impulse control and a strong sense of personal ethics.

I’m very tired and yet tense, which I’m sure you know is an exhausting combination.  It’s like being a rat in one of those old psych experiments that looked into learned helplessness.  I try to keep myself busy with writing stories and with music and with learning science and math and programming and other things, including philosophy and psychology‒I already know a lot of biology, of course‒and those things are distracting, and they can even be interesting.  But there’s no real point to any of it.  I can’t really talk to anyone about most of it, except info-dumping and watching even well-intentioned eyes glaze over.

I was thinking of trying to see if I can post this to Instagram in addition to Facebook and the website formerly known as Twitter.  I have an Instagram account, of course.  I inherited it with my Facebook account, so to speak.  But I don’t know that I’ve ever posted anything on it.  Most of the video and picture sharing stuff isn’t really my cup of tea.  I’m certainly not something anyone really wants to look at, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m getting close to my destination.  Maybe I’ll pick this up later.  Unfortunately, so far there have been no fatal car accidents for me.  I guess that’s good.  I wouldn’t really want to take innocent people who are mostly trying to make a living with me just so I can die.  Better to do that sort of thing literally as well as figuratively alone.

‒

I’m at the office, where I’ve been for a couple of hours now.  I haven’t written any fiction.  I did try to look into Instagram, but as far as I can tell, you have to post videos and/or pictures there, and like I think I said, no one in their right mind wants to look at me.  I didn’t try too hard to figure it out, to be fair.  I’m not really all that concerned.  It doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, sorry for not writing fiction today or having anything positive to say.  Maybe I’ll be back in a better frame tomorrow.  Who knows?  Not me.

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Near-catatonic dysthymia with sensory overload and the difficulty they engender in writing fiction at work – a personal case report

Well…

I tried to write some on HELIOS yesterday‒even just a page would have been nice.  I got my clipboard down, put the title at the top of the first page, and I even worked on a few names for characters and places.  I chose a good name for the school in which some of the action takes place, one that I like (this happened before the workday started), and a couple of tentative names for three main characters.  I’m not sure about sticking with any of those.

As I’ve noted before, I made up the rough idea of HELIOS when I was quite young, as a comic book superhero.  I don’t remember what name I had given to the main character, but knowing me, it was probably some ridiculously simple and probably alliterative name.  For instance, I once made up a completely ripped-off-from-the-Hulk character called “the Cosmonster” (!) and his regular, human name was John Jackson.

To be fair to my past self, I was quite young, and I was influenced by Stan Lee, who made such characters as Bruce Banner, Peter Parker, and Reed Richards.  So, there was precedent.

Still, a decent name for the main character is rather important.  “Doofus Ignoramus” is unlikely to be the secret identity of a memorable hero, though it could be an interesting genus and species name for some newly described creature.

Anyway, as I implied, I got no actual writing done on the book.  It’s just too noisy and chaotic during the day, and it’s almost impossible for me to block it all out, since I have to attentive to work matters.

Also, my dysthymia/depression and probably some other things were in full swing yesterday, and I was all but catatonic through at least two thirds of the work day.  I barely moved when I didn’t need to move, I barely spoke‒even when someone spoke to me, except when necessary‒and I don’t think I showed any facial expression before about 4:30 pm, though it can be hard for me to tell.  I’m trying not to exaggerate here.  I really felt more or less completely empty.

I even did a quick Google search for the official clinical meaning of catatonia, to see if I was close to meeting it, as I felt I might be.  It wasn’t quite the right term, but it wasn’t ridiculously far off, either.  There were times during the day that, if I had somehow caught fire, I probably would have looked at it and thought something along the lines of, “Huh.  I’m on fire.  I should probably put that out.  But is there really any point to doing that?  It’s too noisy in this world, anyway…maybe I should just let myself burn.”

Eventually I thawed slightly as the day went on‒I do fit the typical pattern of depression in that my overt symptoms tend to be worse in the morning.  Weirdly, despite that fact, I find it far easier to get many things done in the morning, when it’s quiet and I’m effectively alone.

I’ve always been that way, or at least as long as it’s been pertinent.  Even in junior high, I used to get up and go to school very early, so I tended to be the first student there and have quiet space and time to feel like the surroundings were just mine before everyone else showed up.  I carried this on through high school.  In my undergrad years, I used to set my watch fifteen minutes ahead and then still make a point to get to class early, by my watch, even though I knew it was set ahead.

That would be harder to do nowadays, since all the effing digital devices display time based on local corrections to UTC, getting updates and adjustments through 5G or Wi-Fi or whatever other connections are there.  This is good around daylight savings time, I guess‒it’s harder for people to make the excuse that they forgot to set their clocks forward in the spring and that’s why they’re late for work the Monday after.  But the whole uniformity of time and whatnot seems overrated‒and it certainly doesn’t seem to stop people from being habitually late in the morning and then keeping other people late at the end of the day.

Not that I am bitter.

Going back to writing:  despite my emptiness and disconnectedness yesterday, and my inability to write any fiction, I decided to order two good spiral bound notebooks, thinking maybe I can at least bring them on the train and write on my way back to the house or something.  If I brought the clipboard with the paper in it, the pages would get all shmushed and mangled in my backpack, and that would be very aesthetically unpleasant.

So, I’ll be getting two of those lovely, sturdy “5-Star” spiral bound notebooks delivered today.  They were quicker to arrive and cheaper than if I had bought them in a stationery store, and I had better choices of colors, though I still had to settle for one green one along with the black one to get a one-day delivery.  That’s okay.  One of the nice things about black is that it goes with every color quite nicely.

I guess I’ll let you know how things go today.  I’m not too optimistic, especially given that work is more sensorially overloading and distressing than is even riding on a commuter train, a fact which at first glance might seem rather contradictory.

It makes a certain amount of sense, though.  On a train‒or a bus, or similar‒one is actually much more alone than one is in an office.  There are other people, but they are each also alone.  You are all mutually alone, and there is no impetus to communicate or interact.  It’s much more pleasant than working where people feel they can just come up and interact with you without warning, whether or not you’re already doing something.  And then, they’re all talking and interacting and there’s overhead music, and there’s stupidity, and you can’t even hear the useful, pertinent information that you’d like to hear.  It’s too chaotic and noisy, certainly for someone with constant tinnitus in one ear and other sensory difficulties.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  The forces that brought the world into existence never bothered to get my input when they did what they did.  The morons.  Things could have been so much better than they are, but they didn’t bother to ask me.  Then they give the poor excuse that I “didn’t exist” at the time.  Whose fault was that, huh?  Not mine!

Maybe it’s not too late for me to fix everything.  But it often seems hardly to be worth the effort, even if it can be done.  For the most part, life in general does not merit help or protection.  Macbeth had its number:  it’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Speaking of tales told by idiots, I’ll let you know tomorrow how it goes today with respect to fiction writing after my notebooks arrive.

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There is no receding, you are pain. Something like that.

I’ve been trying, over the past few days, to write blog posts that are slightly more upbeat, and maybe a bit funny here and there, compared to most of my other posts.  I’ve done this to try to give a bit of a break to the people who read my blog with some regularity, and I hope the most recent posts have actually been enjoyable for them.  I’m quite sure they deserve to have something fun to read.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep that up for long, or very consistently.  I’m afraid the increased pain I’ve had lately doesn’t seem to be abating.

Every night, pretty much all night, it’s been just gnawing away at my back and hips and knees and ankles like a demonic, semi-ethereal rat that can’t not gnaw because its teeth are always growing, and if it doesn’t wear them down, it will die a rather slow and horrible death.  If my pain were caused by some dreadful, progressive illness, I would surely be long dead by now, and that would likely be a mercy, for me and for the world at large.

I’m not just sitting back and letting it happen, just so you know.  I am always trying different stretches and exercises and combinations of analgesics and ointments and so on.  I also have massage gun thingies and a foot massager and a foldout massage chair at the office to try to help relax my back and feet.  I’ve tried inversion tables.  And I try to adjust various things to improve my sleep at night, and my sleep posture, changing pillows and locations and types of bedding and all.  Believe me, I don’t relish being in pain.

Speaking of relish, I even try adjusting what foods I eat, and when, to see if that makes any difference.  That’s a bit of a ham-handed* segue, I know, but it’s true.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to tell if any of it makes any difference at all.  For all I know, my chronic and daily pain might be no worse if I had never taken anything for it at all nor tried in any way to combat it.  My moments of temporary respite might be happening on their own, or due to my expectations, rather than thanks to any intervention.  It’s so difficult to judge these things with trials on one person involving a process that waxes and wanes in what amounts to a very long-period, low-frequency throbbing, but never quite goes away.

Even when I was taking chronic, prescription pain meds, the pain didn’t go away for long at a time, and the meds ended up causing suppression of my TSH and GnRH, so I had secondary hypothyroidism and low testosterone, which didn’t help my mood and health.  Certainly, weaning myself off of them didn’t make my pain worse, overall.  And as a bonus, my eyebrows grew back at their outer edges, where they had stopped growing when my thyroid was low.

There are some problems that we do not have the technology and science and resources to be able to solve or correct, and for which we may never have these things.  Perhaps it would be necessary for me to grow a new, cloned body in which to transplant my brain to cure my chronic pain.  Maybe even that wouldn’t work, because my central nervous system‒never quite ideally tuned anyway, though it has many fine features‒might have been too altered by chronic pain to do anything but induce it in a new body.  Maybe if I were a full on cyborg it would be better.  Or maybe it wouldn’t be.

There comes a time when fighting something is no longer beneficial, but is just an act of habit, or of ego, or of stubbornness, or some combination of these things.  My father died peacefully at home, with his wife and daughter (my mother and sister) nearby, taking medication to control his pain‒at that point, hypothalamic/pituitary suppression was not an issue‒and there are far worse ways to do things.  My mother was in hospice when she died, but my sister and I were nearby for her.

I’m sorry to say it, but when I die, I will probably die alone, and not merely in the sense that everyone dies alone.  Though I don’t like the idea of causing trouble for others, I fear that I will be one of those people who dies a solitary death in a lonely room and is only found sometime later.  It’s probably no more than I deserve, and no less.

Oh, by the way, I looked for that graffiti on the way back from work yesterday‒the one I mentioned that had briefly triggered a story idea but that I forgot afterwards.  I didn’t see it, though I tried to start looking at the graffiti as the train passed the spot where I remembered having seen it.  I saw lots of other graffiti that I remembered, but I didn’t see that one.  I’m pretty confident that I would have recognized it, though I suppose I cannot be completely certain.  I was in a slightly different position in the train car, so my angle might not have been right to catch the one I had seen the day before.  Oh, well, I did re-transfer my old notebook file of story ideas from my previous phone to this one, so I wasn’t otherwise idle.

That’s probably all futile, anyway.  I doubt that I’ll actually write any more fiction, or draw any more pictures, or write any more songs‒I probably won’t play and/or sing even any covers of any songs.  I’m just wishing when I think about things like that, just like I’m wishing for someone to be able to help me and to choose to do so.  Anyway, I don’t really deserve any help, so it’s not as though I expect it.

But boy, this pain is really getting old.  I mean, it’s been old for quite a while, and‒as they say‒it’s not getting any younger.  Neither am I, of course, and neither is anyone else.

I’m tired of being in pain, and I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of being alone.  I can try to do things about them, and I have done, and I am, though I may not necessarily mention all the things I do here in my blog.  But I do try.  I’ve been trying for a long time, and I will keep on trying for at least a bit more.  Like probably everything else in the universe, it’s almost certainly pointless, but it’s the way nature has programmed me.  I’m an idiot who doesn’t give up easily, even when he thinks it’s the sensible thing to do.

Maybe that’s why I make so many arguments about futility and pointlessness.  I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone else about life being pointless‒I would hate to think I had talked someone else into suicide**.  Maybe I’m trying just to convince myself.  Obviously, I haven’t succeeded yet; if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this.  But I am tired, and I am in rather nasty pain, and I am alone, and I don’t see readily available alternatives for the life I’m living, which I really don’t like.  I don’t have the energy to make any radical changes.  I barely have the energy to write this blog (and I can do that on my phone).

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for my sake, and like everyone else, I wasn’t ever promised anything by the universe other than mortality.  It is what it is.  I don’t know if my existence is overall better or worse than that of an insect that’s accidentally wandered into an outdoor elevator car at a train station, and which will probably die in there, unable even to comprehend why it cannot seem to escape.  But I can’t be other than what I am.  Neither can anyone or anything else be other than what they are.

One thing I am is, “working tomorrow”.  So, barring the unforeseen, there will be a blog post forthcoming.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to report that I’ve figured out the solution to my pain and my depression and my insomnia and my disconnection and loneliness, and I’ll be able to share it with you and the rest of the world, and Earth will be transformed into a place of peace and joy for everyone.

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but I suppose that, technically, it is possible.  Have a good day.

*Ha ha.  There was no pun intended when I wrote that.  Honest.  I was actually quoting Hannibal Lecter…for whom food-based terms seem particularly appropriate, I guess.

**With the possible exception of some rare political figures.

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You stubborn ancient knave, you reverend blog post, we’ll teach you.

There’s not a whole lot new going on this week, but one thing that is new is that I have begun work on the audio release of The Chasm and the Collision, and it’s proceeding swiftly.  The book’s chapter lengths are generally shorter than my short stories, so the audio for chapter one of CatC is going to end up around forty minutes long.  There will undoubtedly be significantly longer future chapters, but I don’t think any of them are as long as, for instance, Hole for a Heart or Ifowonco, so they’ll be coming out rather more rapidly than have my earlier audio tracks.  Also, I’ve developed increasing skill at creating the audio, and that tends to lead to greater efficiency.  Undoubtedly, I’ll continue to make mistakes, and hopefully I will continue to learn and improve over time.  We shall see.

Unanimity continues to lengthen, though its progress has been slow this week, because my motivation, or my energy level, has been poor.  This is explored in my most recent post in Iterations of Zero, which started out as a simple Facebook status, but which rapidly grew too long for efficient use of that venue.  It deals with the problems, and the ongoing and inescapable danger, of suffering from dysthymia and major depression.  I don’t know whether it’s of use to anyone or not.  Fellow sufferers may at least get some reflective value from it, I’m not sure.  Anyway, because of the problem discussed therein, I haven’t written as much this week on Unanimity as I tend to do when at my best.

This is where my ongoing, habitual commitment (which I’ve described here before) kicks in.  Even on those mornings on which I don’t feel like doing much of anything—most mornings, when it comes down to it—I tell myself, “All right, you don’t have to write much, but at least write one page.”  This is a reasonably non-daunting task, since I write very quickly once I get started, and it almost always leads me to write at least two pages, and sometimes more.  It’s easier to keep working once I’ve forced myself to get started.  In fact, it’s often hard to stop, because I don’t want to quit before I’ve reached a good pausing point, from which I’ll be able to pick up again next day, and I also want to complete whatever chain of narrative is prominent in my head that day.

A related ethic has led to the continued production of the aforementioned audio for CatC.  I committed to recording at least some of it every day, and that led rapidly to the complete recording of the chapter.  In fact, it only took two recording sessions.  Now, I’m working on the editing, which, thanks to skills I’ve developed over time, is going more quickly than it would have in the past.

I’ve tacitly decided that I’m going to do my blog series, “My heroes have always been villains,” on a once-a-month basis, on the second Thursday of each month.  If you’re looking forward to the next installment of that series, you now know when you can reliably expect it to come out; I tend to be rather compulsive about plans of that sort, barring events that make me unable to write at all.  These are always possible for anyone, and are more possible for me, given the difficulties I describe in my IoZ post, “A daily game of roulette.”  I wish I could be more optimistic about such things, but to be more optimistic about my optimism would require me to have a more optimistic starting point in the first place.  Instead, my main proactive force, the thing that keeps me pushing forward, is simply a profound and often maddening (to other people, at least) stubbornness.

With that, I think we have enough for this week.  I’ll almost certainly be posting my next audio file before the next regular blog post, and I’ll spread news of that on social media, so notification should be easy to get.  My daily writing continues, as it ought to do (by definition), and the first draft of Unanimity will be finished before long—probably before the end of summer, though certainly not before its beginning.

I hope you all stay well, and try to improve every day, in at least small ways.  If you happen to know someone who struggles with depression—and it’s not possible to have depression without a struggle—please reach out to them and show support.  They are often entirely incapable of helping themselves, because the very part of their being which would do or even motivate that helping is what the illness debilitates.  They may not feel that they’re worth saving, but if you do, then it’s going to be up to you to do it.  It’s said to be difficult to provide psychotherapy for sociopaths because they don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with themselves.  In depression, the problem is a little different:  it can be difficult to help this disease’s victims because they often, quite literally, think that they do not deserve help, and that your time would be vastly better spent on other people and causes.  You should judge for yourself.

TTFN.