Sunday, September 18, 2005
Quote of (most) Days
"I have no 'loved ones'. Oh, don't get me wrong, there are 'ones' that I love, they're just not mine to have."
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
The Eye of (or Calm Before) the Storm
So I didn’t win anything in the Lottery today-again.
Like many people, I vividly remember the night of my mother’s death. It was over 34 years ago, I was ten (yes, I’m 44, congratulations, you’re a math whiz) and after my mother had been taken away in the ambulance, my brothers and I were kept at home by a neighbor who had us watching television to try to keep us occupied and distracted. It was a sitcom starring Jimmy Stewart and I remember laughing at something and stopping abruptly with the thought, “my mother may be dying and here I am laughing, I’m an awful person.” While there had been heinous problems in my life prior to that evening, I think my depression really took root at that moment.
I woke up this morning to bright golden sunshine but it has gradually completely clouded over and grown quite chilly. What most of the nation doesn’t realize about Seattle is that, even when totally overcast, it’s still very bright. It’s just the difference between the yellow-gold brightness of an incandescent bulb and the blue-grey brightness of a fluorescent one. Back in the suburbs of Detroit where, when it gets overcast, it can get so dark that the streetlights come on in the middle of the day, people can’t conceive of it still being bright when cloudy. However, much like the midwest, the weather here is remarkably changeable. In a phone conversation I had a few moments ago, I was told that in Greenwood (about 3 miles away from me) it’s totally sunny and warming up-and, according to the forecast on the radio-it’s due to get back up into the 70’s by later this afternoon.
Funny how the mind distracts itself while the world comes down around it.
I have a week to come up with six thousand dollars or, in a month, I’ll be homeless.
God, I hate being melodramatic yet my life does seem to go that way a lot.
The money I owe is a hospital debt that I incurred from not having any insurance and missed a couple of payments on and has been sold to a collection agency. The agency contacted me three weeks ago and, that day, I went into a major anxiety attack; racing pulse, sweats, irrational fear and transient numbness (though that was mostly in my face). After realizing that I couldn’t achieve anything while in that state, I put off dealing with it till the next day. Subsequently, each time I’d explore options, the sheer enormity of both the debt and my ignorance of how to deal with it would overwhelm me and begin to induce another anxiety attack (much as it is now, just talking about it) and I’d set it aside again.
Then, of course, the depression kicked in.
One of the symptoms/side effects of depressed and other
emotionally/psychologically damaged people is “wish fulfillment” or “wishful” thinking. The sincere belief that unrealistic, sometimes fantastical events will take place and resue you from your life. For example; the director or screenwriter or somebody who sees the Chuck Norris film I had a small (but featured!) role in will want me in their next project-at a significant salary, of course; or, the common one, I’ll win the lottery. Yes, I’m an intelligent, educated man and I’m aware of the odds against either of those but tell that to the little voice in my head screaming “everyone tells you how the camera loves you and how talented you are!” and “but SOMEBODY wins the lottery-it COULD be you!” So I’d keep checking the web to see if the movie’d been finished, and buying my lotto tickets and holding my breath.
The last time I attempted suicide (and was consequently hospitalized for a few days) it was the result a of a post-anxiety attack depressive period.
In my head, I’ve started writing the note.
Pray for me.
Like many people, I vividly remember the night of my mother’s death. It was over 34 years ago, I was ten (yes, I’m 44, congratulations, you’re a math whiz) and after my mother had been taken away in the ambulance, my brothers and I were kept at home by a neighbor who had us watching television to try to keep us occupied and distracted. It was a sitcom starring Jimmy Stewart and I remember laughing at something and stopping abruptly with the thought, “my mother may be dying and here I am laughing, I’m an awful person.” While there had been heinous problems in my life prior to that evening, I think my depression really took root at that moment.
I woke up this morning to bright golden sunshine but it has gradually completely clouded over and grown quite chilly. What most of the nation doesn’t realize about Seattle is that, even when totally overcast, it’s still very bright. It’s just the difference between the yellow-gold brightness of an incandescent bulb and the blue-grey brightness of a fluorescent one. Back in the suburbs of Detroit where, when it gets overcast, it can get so dark that the streetlights come on in the middle of the day, people can’t conceive of it still being bright when cloudy. However, much like the midwest, the weather here is remarkably changeable. In a phone conversation I had a few moments ago, I was told that in Greenwood (about 3 miles away from me) it’s totally sunny and warming up-and, according to the forecast on the radio-it’s due to get back up into the 70’s by later this afternoon.
Funny how the mind distracts itself while the world comes down around it.
I have a week to come up with six thousand dollars or, in a month, I’ll be homeless.
God, I hate being melodramatic yet my life does seem to go that way a lot.
The money I owe is a hospital debt that I incurred from not having any insurance and missed a couple of payments on and has been sold to a collection agency. The agency contacted me three weeks ago and, that day, I went into a major anxiety attack; racing pulse, sweats, irrational fear and transient numbness (though that was mostly in my face). After realizing that I couldn’t achieve anything while in that state, I put off dealing with it till the next day. Subsequently, each time I’d explore options, the sheer enormity of both the debt and my ignorance of how to deal with it would overwhelm me and begin to induce another anxiety attack (much as it is now, just talking about it) and I’d set it aside again.
Then, of course, the depression kicked in.
One of the symptoms/side effects of depressed and other
emotionally/psychologically damaged people is “wish fulfillment” or “wishful” thinking. The sincere belief that unrealistic, sometimes fantastical events will take place and resue you from your life. For example; the director or screenwriter or somebody who sees the Chuck Norris film I had a small (but featured!) role in will want me in their next project-at a significant salary, of course; or, the common one, I’ll win the lottery. Yes, I’m an intelligent, educated man and I’m aware of the odds against either of those but tell that to the little voice in my head screaming “everyone tells you how the camera loves you and how talented you are!” and “but SOMEBODY wins the lottery-it COULD be you!” So I’d keep checking the web to see if the movie’d been finished, and buying my lotto tickets and holding my breath.
The last time I attempted suicide (and was consequently hospitalized for a few days) it was the result a of a post-anxiety attack depressive period.
In my head, I’ve started writing the note.
Pray for me.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
The Darkness Beckons
I guess I really ought to look up some statistics on Depression, the percentage of the population that suffer from it, the percentage of diagnosed cases that result in suicide, the percentages of suicides that were treated and untreated for it...but my depression leaves me too tired to even do that.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/suifacts.htm
http://www.allaboutdepression.com/gen_04.html
Isn’t Google a wonderful thing?
I took care of (as in “primary caregiver”) my great-aunt Clare for ten years. She was paranoid-schizophrenic to begin with and developed alzheimer’s on top of that. (I come from an incredibly polluted gene pool) One night, as I was holding her hand, waiting for her to fall asleep, she told me that she had realized her mind wasn’t working very well anymore and that she was sorry to me for what she was putting me through. I wept for hours later that night.
One of the scariest things about the darker moments of an episode of depression is that your mind begins to betray you. The inability to focus through the mental fog, the loss of memory of things you want-but not the things you need to forget and, mostly, the way incredibly inappropriate things pop out of your mouth that you didn’t even realize were in your mind. Looking in the mirror, tieing my tie to get ready for an audition , my gaze wanders up into my own eyes and “I want to die” comes out of my mouth seemingly of it’s own accord. (any wonder I didn’t get cast?) A friend telling me about a student of his who was hit by a bus and killed instantly and I say “lucky bastard” before even asking the kid’s name. The incredibly uncomfortable silences after these utterances aren’t much fun either. I mean, what’s to say?
When it gets really bad, it’s like being drunk-you have virtually no inhibitions. You feel that, not only do you have nothing, you actually are nothing, therefore, there’s nothing to lose.
Another consequence of the loss of mental focus is the loss of body awareness, a kind of drunken clumsiness. You forget how big or small you are and run into or miss things you’re reaching for. You feel the pressure, see the bruise or worse, the blood but, despite how badly everything else about your existence hurts-actually, physically hurts-you have no awareness of the damage you’ve just done to your body. Unfortunately, this doesn’t extend to body-consciousness. You laugh at the blood, you think “maybe some of the ugliness and pain will drain away.” But it never does. And, eventually, the episode fades and everything hurts that much worse-and leaves scars to boot.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/suifacts.htm
http://www.allaboutdepression.com/gen_04.html
Isn’t Google a wonderful thing?
I took care of (as in “primary caregiver”) my great-aunt Clare for ten years. She was paranoid-schizophrenic to begin with and developed alzheimer’s on top of that. (I come from an incredibly polluted gene pool) One night, as I was holding her hand, waiting for her to fall asleep, she told me that she had realized her mind wasn’t working very well anymore and that she was sorry to me for what she was putting me through. I wept for hours later that night.
One of the scariest things about the darker moments of an episode of depression is that your mind begins to betray you. The inability to focus through the mental fog, the loss of memory of things you want-but not the things you need to forget and, mostly, the way incredibly inappropriate things pop out of your mouth that you didn’t even realize were in your mind. Looking in the mirror, tieing my tie to get ready for an audition , my gaze wanders up into my own eyes and “I want to die” comes out of my mouth seemingly of it’s own accord. (any wonder I didn’t get cast?) A friend telling me about a student of his who was hit by a bus and killed instantly and I say “lucky bastard” before even asking the kid’s name. The incredibly uncomfortable silences after these utterances aren’t much fun either. I mean, what’s to say?
When it gets really bad, it’s like being drunk-you have virtually no inhibitions. You feel that, not only do you have nothing, you actually are nothing, therefore, there’s nothing to lose.
Another consequence of the loss of mental focus is the loss of body awareness, a kind of drunken clumsiness. You forget how big or small you are and run into or miss things you’re reaching for. You feel the pressure, see the bruise or worse, the blood but, despite how badly everything else about your existence hurts-actually, physically hurts-you have no awareness of the damage you’ve just done to your body. Unfortunately, this doesn’t extend to body-consciousness. You laugh at the blood, you think “maybe some of the ugliness and pain will drain away.” But it never does. And, eventually, the episode fades and everything hurts that much worse-and leaves scars to boot.
