As almost always, I’m just grabbing images from the Interwebs. I’ll take ’em down if anyone wants me to.
Telling someone with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, “Oh, yeah, I get really tired too,” is like telling a blind person:
“Oh, yeah. Late at night I can’t see anything either. I just wait a few hours and then I can see again!”
Forever alone.
2. “Oh! I wish I had that! I wish I never had to see my ex-boyfriend again!” HarHarHar.
Yeah? Well, here’s MY ex-boyfriend.
3. “Oh, hey! Sometimes I close my eyes and I can’t see either! Have you tried opening your eyes?”
4. “I had a cousin who had that! She drank unicorn piss mixed with rainbow sugar and spun into cotton candy during the first blood of the current astrological epoch by kitten princesses! Now she’s alllllll better! Here, I’m going to give you her e-mail address. She’d totally love to hear from you!!”
Bite me.
5. “It’s right there in front of you! I don’t see why you won’t just look at it!”
6. “I read this book and now I think only happy fun thoughts and my vision is clearer than it’s ever been! I threw my glasses away and I can see a mini-cicada on the ass of that dog over there! It’s flashing me the ‘I love you’ sign in American Sign Language!”
Not only am I off meds, but I don’t have an appointment with my psychiatrist until October 27 (more than a month from now)~so I’m in a position, potentially, to chronicle my descent into madness for you, Dear Readers. I don’t know if I’ll be able to (since Depression can make the mere idea of Sitting Up seem like crazy talk. “Yeeeaaaah, right. I’m totally going to Sit Up. And while I’m in the magic world of Sitting Up and everything I may as well teach myself to play the ukulele and dash off a concerto for solo uke to be inserted into the 2nd act of the one-woman show I may as well write to highlight the wit and wisdom I have gained through the monumental journey I have conquered in managing to Sit Up”). I also don’t know whether I will continue to descend or whether this is it (this seems bad enough. I spent all day inside yesterday and have cancelled breakfast plans and afternoon boating plans for today, leaving myself nothing to look forward to but bedtime [it is 9:44 a.m. as I write this]).
Maybe the worse part of how I’m feeling today is that it’s not that bad~I’m not bleeding out of my eyeballs. I can walk. I can still concentrate well enough to write (although I can’t read, go figure~one would think it would be easier to summon the imaginative power to read than the creative energy to write)~and yet I feel debilitated.
I woke up a little over an hour ago (after around 10 hours of sleep) without feeling refreshed. As I laid in bed taking stock of myself, I waffled. From one second to the next I cycled between the feeling that I would leap out of bed and join my friends for breakfast (something I look forward to doing every Sunday morning) and the suspicion that this would be impossible (I was already pretty sure the boating would be out of the question).
I can’t adequately explain why it is impossible to meet my friends this morning because I don’t understand it myself~but here’s an attempt to break it down:
I woke up un-refreshed (not unusual~this is a part of the illness outside of the Depression that my doctors are trying to track down).
From second to second my feelings fluctuated between looking forward to seeing my friends and the feeling that seeing my friends this morning would require monumental acts of heroism beyond my feeble potential.
If I was going to go to breakfast and then the boating party this afternoon, I would have to shower. And as I’ve mentioned, Sitting Up is a very big deal~so I might as well imagine an attempt to shower The Gruesome.
But still: if I forwent showering I might still imagine washing my face and brushing my hair back into a clip~my friends are casual, no need to impress them with my showering skills….
But then there’s the getting into my car….
And the drive (a full 15-20 minutes of Sitting Up and Paying Attention to Things)….
And then there’s the breakfast itself~and this is where I knew I’d have to give up the idea. Even though everyone I knew to be going is my friend and even though a particularly good friend who I don’t see all the time is going, and even though I was looking forward to trying the pancakes (PANCAKES!) I couldn’t imagine myself Sitting Up and looking anything like human for a couple of hours.
I’m afraid and ashamed to admit that I’m pretty sure that all I’m going to be able to manage to do today is lie on the couch and watch Netflix (this feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy as I type this~and that doesn’t feel good. I don’t want this to be true. As I type this I’m thinking “Well, maybe I’ll be able to do my dishes” and “Maybe I’ll be able to tackle the personal filing I have spread out on my living room floor.” I want to be able to do these things~and maybe I will be, I’m hopeful: but since I’m trying to tell you the truth about Depression, I have to tell you that all I’m likely to get done today is watching Netflix while periodically gazing out the window and hating myself for missing a beautiful day).
And for me, that last sentence above is the worst part of Depression: it makes me hate myself. As much as I know that it’s an illness like any other and that there’s no more reason for me to feel personally responsible for not being able to go out and enjoy a beautiful day than if I were bedridden with cancer or something, I cannot shake it.
I am a self-hating depressive.
I have internalized our culture’s prejudice against mental illness. Logic be damned, I can’t shake the feeling that I should be able to control myself. Since I want to, I should be able to pick myself up and join my friends at breakfast~and since I don’t fully understand why I can’t I hate myself for not being able to. I feel guilty. I feel like a whiney slacker.
This is today’s truth about Depression: it can make you hate yourself just as much as those who don’t understand the illness do.
It’s taken me awhile to realize this (a long while) and still I don’t know whether this “realization” is right~but I’ve come to think that a lot of the screwing off I do is self-medicating, in a way(?). Why am I spending so much time numbing myself with endless hours of FB (my friends aren’t that interesting) and Netflix (how many documentaries can a human reasonably watch?!)?
Let me explore this a bit: Is there a difference between what I call “screwing off” and the stone lethargy of Depression?
When I’m in the darkest throes of Depression, there is no question of doing anything. Doing things is out of the question. “Doing things” includes eating, showering, and everything else that is an activity outside of crawling out of bed, oozing onto the couch in the living room, and reaching for the remote.
I haven’t been in the darkest throes for many months now. I’m able to leave the house for purposes other than avoiding getting fired. I can read for pleasure. I can enjoy the company of my friends. I can maintain a tidy house. Yet I still do a lot of screwing off. By “screwing off” I mean compulsively watching Netflix and being reluctant to leave the house unless I have to.
Stand by. I’m thinking….
Oh.
Huh.
This is legit. I really just realized: I still have Depression~and what I just described as “screwing off” seems a lot like the symptoms of Depression I described above.
So maybe I can be less hard on myself? Maybe I can forgive myself for not writing a novel right now? Maybe I can continue to allow myself room to heal?
I guess this is Today’s Truth About Depression. You’ve seen it unfold in real time.
I started this post trying to make sense of my guilt over not getting more done and I’ve ended by realizing~oh, yeah, duh: I suffer from a Major Depressive Disorder. I do not and can not control my brain chemicals!
I’ve come to avoid reading posts about Depression and Anxiety.
There are plenty of people writing plenty of posts about Depression and Anxiety. Every now and then I go poking around for support and I usually get more depressed by, on the one hand, wallowers:
And on the other hand the chirpers:
To be fair: sometimes I wallow. Sometimes I try to chirp. But it’s very difficult to find posts that don’t do either~that tell the truth about depression without either embracing the bad the way a dog curls into its battered and smelly but beloved old blanket or reaching for pathos with martyred sighs that extol even as they lament the dark virtue of the Burden We Bear.
I’ll try. Sometimes I’ll try in this blog to tell the truth without wallowing or chirping.
Here’s my truth for today: “Looking forward” to a gathering with friends is a fraught concept for me.
While I don’t want to want to lie on the couch again tomorrow and watch movie after movie after movie on Netflix, I admit I’d be a tiny bit more than a tad relieved if I found out that tomorrow’s picnic is cancelled.
Here’s all I have to do tomorrow, here’s the big scary plan:
Get out of bed. [Soooooo much packed into that little sentence, that little, tiny action: getting out of bed.]
Shower. [It shames me to have to tell you this, but I haven’t showered since Monday~although I have taken what my gramma used to refer to as “cat baths” (which I only did out of pure terror of stinking out my colleagues. I would have gone entirely without showering if I thought I could have got away with it).]
Assemble fruit salad from ingredients already obtained through highly anxious shopping this afternoon: “Am I getting enough fruit?” “Am I getting too much fruit?” “Am I spending too much for the fruit?” “Am I getting appropriate fruits?” “Do people really like kiwi, or are people only pretending to like kiwi because it’s semi-exotic?” “Has kiwi become too mainstream and cliched?” “Do I have to buy one of these exotic star fruits for $4.99?” Assembly of the fruit salad will involve such terrors as “Are these chunks too big?” “Are these chunks too small?” “Do normal people like nuts as much as I do?” “How many nuts can I legally add to this salad?” “Should I have got the pomegranate yogurt instead of this stupid mango yogurt?” “What will this salad look like after having been in the sun for 15 minutes?”
Seriously, Indiana. It’s time to start calling this game “Bean Bag Toss.”
Dress. [It’s a picnic and it will be hot, but I don’t wear shorts because shorts are short for pants and pants give me camel toe~which, hey, I’m not judging, I’m just sayin’: it’s not a look I like to rock. So it’ll be a skirt. So, “What about games?” “Will I be expected to play games?” “Will people see my panties while I’m cornhole-ing?”]
Enjoy my friends. [The park does not allow alcohol, but xanax (mercifully) is not banned.]
Right now this all seems semi-doable — but each of the above steps are monumental to me.
For most people a picnic with friends would be, unequivocally, something to look forward to. Depression and anxiety make it, for me, something not only to be viewed with some trepidation, but to be examined for potential pitfalls.
Look, I don’t know anything more about Kim Davis than the headlines I see on my FB feed and what I gather from the blurbs of the articles I click on and scan through quickly before moving on to the next complaint about special snowflakes or the latest time-suck of a loop from which I awaken 17 “replays” later.
But I feel a little bit sorry for her.
I suspect I wouldn’t if I knew more about her. I suspect she’d repel me if I sought out video of her speaking her loathsome nonsense (I assume she’s been on the news? I don’t get commercial television, so I’m not sure). I suspect I’d be grossed out if I took the time to read more about her (to me) cartoonish beliefs about what her Imaginary Sky Friend tells her to do or not do.
But from my comfortable remove, I feel sorry for her.
Here’s what I know:
Kim Davis is a County Clerk.
Part of her job is to issue marriage licenses.
She’s got an Imaginary Sky Friend (ISF).
She imagines that her ISF doesn’t like homosexuals.
She imagines that homosexuals should be unhappy because her ISF is on record as disliking them.
She imagines that her ISF is so impotent that he needs her to do his policing for him. [I’m just guessing here, but I imagine that she imagines that her ISF will reward her for this policing.]
She imagines that she is making her ISF happy by refusing to do her job.
Here’s why I feel sorry for her:
If it is true that this woman believes that she cannot, in good faith, do her job in the case of signing a form that will allow same-sex couples to marry, she is a very stupid woman. Her stupidity is pitiable. If she cannot understand the difference between signing a paper that allows others to live a life she would not want for herself and condoning that life, she is a very stupid woman. Her stupidity is pitiable.
In a remarkable case of the exception proving the rule, one can judge this book by her cover. She is a physically ugly woman and people are calling her out on that fact. But her ugliness is beside the point of this case and I feel sad for her that she is facing ad hominem attacks. She’s a victim of a shallow culture that slips too quickly and much too merrily into name calling and insult slinging. I pity her for that.
This point should be obvious from the main gripe that web culture is holding against her (outside of her unprofessionalism and her ugliness): she has been spectacularly unsuccessful in exercising the very right she would like to deny to others. She’s been married four times. That’s sad. It’s pitiable. Those of us who’ve been there know how draining one divorce is. She’s been through three (four? Is she currently married? I don’t even care. I don’t like her, but I don’t have an ISF telling me that I should want her to be unhappy).
And again: she’s stupid. It’s sad and pitiable that she places all her intellectual eggs in the basket of one very old, dated, and strange book~it’s even worse that she understands that book so inadequately and yet is so persistent in her willingness to open herself to the cruel wraths of today’s media hot seat in defense of what she thinks it is telling her to think. If I (or you, or any intelligent person) was jeopardizing my job and facing so much scorn and public humiliation, I would take another good, hard look at that book in order to get my talking points in order. We (you and I, oh fellow intellectual, my Reader) would find what we know from having looked into it before: that the hero of that book has absolutely nothing to say about same-sex marriage. We also know that the hero’s dad, who says a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with the way we live now, does seem to dislike homosexuality~but he expresses a similar level of dislike for tattoos and shellfish, making his opinions a bit difficult to take seriously. So again, Kim Davis is pitiable; she’s holding on to a weird passage from a dated book that fewer and fewer and fewer people are taking seriously~and she’s risking her job and has opened herself up to ridicule in order to do it. That’s sad.
She’s proud of herself now; she’s got supporters~but where will she be left when the frenzy dies down, when all the gay men and lesbians in Kentucky are back from their honeymoons and she wakes up unemployed (still in prison?) and on the wrong side of history? She’s infamous now. She’ll go down on the same side of history as those idiots who were against desegregation of public schools. Her friends and family will be ashamed to say they know her. She’s a symbol of the stupidity of a stupid moment in history.
In short: Kim Davis is (as we used to say) “a hot mess.” She’s pitiable.
UPDATE, November 9, 2017
But wow! Kim Davis looks like a freakin’ genius now! We never saw this comin’:
I can’t shake the inclination to believe that humans are not the best candidate for domination of this planet. I assume we Astute Wonderers/Thinkers can proceed under the understanding (courtesy of elementary logic) that the fact that we have achieved domination is no evidence that such we “deserve” it or are doing a good job with it.
Set phasers to “homily.”
Remember the old Star Trek? Here’s how I’d sum up the point of every episode: Humans are cretinous villains (who are capable of beauty). I can’t point to a specific storyline, but that’s my over-arching memory of a series that probably had a part in forming my worldview.
Humans are mean (anyone who has ever seen a two-year-old will admit that). We say that many are “evil”~although that seems to me to be going too far.
If asked for an example of human evil, most people will jump to this schlub:
⇐⇐⇐⇐
I’ve written a tiny bit before on sympathy for the worst people. This is a theme I wish I knew better how to develop: bad people can be inhumane, but they are not inhuman, so what can we do to make things better instead of worse?
Look: I’ve just thrown out the most obvious example of human “evil.” Very few credible people will deny that if such a thing as human evil exists, Hitler was it.
Fine. If human evil exists, Hitler was evil~but does human evil exist?
What is “evil”?
What worries me about the concept of human evil is that people talk about it as though purportedly evil people are not human~and what worries me about that is that if we deny that the capacity for evil is an all-too-real human capability we’re never going to be able to get past it, to corral or control it, let alone cure it and keep it from happening.
I worry that it’s too easy to pronounce someone “evil” and thereby excise him from humanity: We (we humans) would never do such a thing. That man is evil.
But even as we accuse someone like Hitler of being evil, we know we can’t go too terribly far with this tenuous string before it breaks. Were all Nazis evil? Our knee-jerk response is probably “Yes.” But we know that’s not true. We know there were people who were happy, thrilled, titillated, satisfied, eager to follow orders~but we also know that there were people like ourselves who (although they were too glad to scapegoat the Jews) were people like ourselves.
People get scared and frustrated and confused~and it feels good to have a place to dump all that baggage. People like to feel superior and chosen and loved~and it feels good to have others to exclude from our unique worth.
But what do we gain through exclusion?
I think there are scholars who would say that the human tendency to want to “other” and thereby exclude others is ultimately about resources~and it might have made mighty good sense, back in the early-human days, to horde resources through exclusion~but now we have the technology to make it possible to share the over-abundance we create.
We don’t have to fabricate outcasts.
Please hum to yourselves for a sec. I’m thinking….
Let me back up a bit here~I’m pulling in too many threads for what I thought was going to be a short meditation.
Here’s the upshot: As a species, people are mean and scary. Individually people are good and bad. It’s complicated.
I started this post by worrying that people are not doing well by the planet~I then rambled into the worry that people don’t do well by each other. These worries are related.
Two themes too huge to wrap up in one post.
Sorry. Life is not as tidy as I want it to be.
We’ve got a lot to sort out.
UPDATE: November 9, 2017
And now there’s this guy. This poster child for the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I think we’re right to fear him.
The Barbaric Yawp brought in a semi-live cicada yesterday. It was huge.
It was on its back, but I knew it was still alive~it was its buzzing that drew my attention to the hall where The BY and The Bitey Priss had it trapped.
I live alone. So I don’t have the option to act the enormous wienie and squeal while someone else handles the ickies. So I did what I always do when the Gruesome bring their work home with them: I grabbed a dishtowel, threw it over the thing, and stood back to see what would happen.
I thank the cicada [thank you, Cicada. I thank you wherever you are now in this world or another] for not moving. It helps when the dishtowel doesn’t move. It gives me some (minimal) courage for what has to happen next.
What has to happen next is that I have to gather the dishtowel around the insect awesomely immobilized by my super-awesome trapping skills and get it outside~and next comes the part I’m haunted by.
To review: thus far things have gone as usual:
The BY has brought a Playmate home. Since this play date is unauthorized and likely to end in bloody death, I . . .
Trap the playmate and . . .
Take a moment to catch my breath and prepare for . . .
The wrapping of the Playmate for it’s “ride home.”
So far so good.
Now . . . .
The “ride home” is a different experience for different Playmates depending on a) the attitude of the Playmate (e.g. is it angry?), and b) the earthly configuration of the Playmate (e.g. is it a mammal?), and c) the disposition of the Playmate (i.e. is it alive?). The “ride home” can range from a “burial at sea” to a release (including salute of honor and sincere well-wishing) under a bush on the other side of the parking lot. It is this, the “ride home” part of the process of life in the Tower, that brings us to the subject of today’s post and explication of yet another way in which I am an asshole.
I knew the Cicada wasn’t dead~so it didn’t get the royal burial at sea~but I also knew it was an insect and (this is the precise point at which I become an asshole in this story) I’m lazy and so I just didn’t feel like walking all the way downstairs (I live in a 3rd-floor walk-up) to afford it/her/him the full rite of the Release With Honor.
So. There I was, with a semi-live cicada in a dishtowel, standing on my fire-escape. What did I do? I shook out the dishtowel.
Did I fantasize that the cicada would take wing from the towel and go on to whoop it up Hemiptera-style for 13-17 years? Yes. Yes, I most certainly did.
You’re welcome.
Did I know it most probably would not do so? Also yes.
And so, I shook out the towel and the cicada plummeted three floors to land on the concrete at the bottom of the stairwell with a hard and (I imagine shell-cracking) thk.
Which was not only yesterday’s proof that I’m an asshole, but which is also the subject of the wonderment I present to you today.
Despite the fact that I’m not afraid to admit I’m an asshole, I do (honestly! Oh, too honestly!) try to do the right thing when I know what the right thing to do is. And I knew the right thing to do by this cicada was to walk it downstairs and put it down gently, giving it every opportunity to recover from The BY’s foul shenanigans~but I didn’t do it. I didn’t do the right thing. And I wonder about all the other people who don’t do the right thing.
That asshole dentist who killed Cecil the Lion. That stupid, cult-reared Duggar guy. Jeffrey Dahmer. All these people who know they’re doing the wrong thing, but who do it anyway; I feel sorry for them.
Of course I feel more sorry for Cecil and Duggar’s sisters and Dahmer’s victims (and even Dahmer’s father and his neighbors~good Christ! That’ll give you nightmares!). But I think we have enough sympathy for everyone. Sympathy is not in limited supply.
I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me because I feel sorry that I didn’t do right by the cicada~I’ve just got to thinkin’ since that incident (actually, I’ve been thinking of this for quite some time now) about all the assholes no one feels sorry for. Like Ariel Castro. No one feels sorry for him. But I can imagine that he suffered~and imagining his suffering makes me feel sorry for him.
I know, I know, I know (so please don’t bother commenting to tell me) that he brought so much suffering on others and that that suffering was well-far-and-away beyond what we want to tolerate from a human and that therefore he deserved whatever suffering he felt.
We can’t allow humans to treat other humans (or majestic animals or icky insects) the way Castro and Dahmer and Duggar and that Dentist and I did. But humans do do the wrong thing even when they know what the right thing to do is. And when humans treat other humans (or animals or insects) inhumanely it’s probably because they’re suffering too.
I have “an invisible illness.” I have pain, fatigue, dry mouth, headaches, etc.~various symptoms that don’t (or haven’t yet) coalesced into a diagnosis. They affect my daily life, but I hold down a job and am always lively when within my group of friends.
I don’t talk about my symptoms much. I miss work often for doctor appointments and for “bad days” (I am undeservedly fortunate enough to have very understanding and accommodating colleagues), but when I’m around people I do all I can to avoid being that woman who won’t shut the freakin’ hell up about her illness.
My Attorney [i.e. the current bf] knows, in a very general way, about what I’m going through. The other night I got frustrated and cried and blurted out, “I’m in pain all the time!”
“You are?” he asked. He sounded a bit surprised.
I didn’t blame him. Actually, I was a bit proud of this proof that I’m not “that woman” whose illness is the center of creation.
I have friends who know about the concept of invisible illness. We wryly like each others’ wistful posts on FB.
But here’s the part that’s hard to admit: the part that I’m able to write because this blog is anonymous: I harshly judge others who don’t suck it up and perform to the level to which I visually assess them to be capable.
Even worse: I have someone in particular in mind as I write this~and she has an actual diagnosis; she has that magic blessing from a physician that explains (and thereby allows) her illness, her symptoms, her weakness, her limitations. And I still judge her.
I think, “Why doesn’t she quit eating all that pizza and drinking all that soda if she’s so upset about how her weight affects her illness?”
I think, “Why doesn’t she get a job if she’s so worried about being poor?”
I think, “For Chrissake! Can’t she imagine a topic of conversation outside of her adventures with the Affordable Care Act?!”
You (oh, generous, sweet-minded you) may think I have these thoughts about this woman because I’m jealous. You may think I’m jealous that she has a diagnosis to hang her complaints on. And I guess you’re not entirely wrong; I do wish I had a diagnosis too. I wish I had something to point to to explain and help excuse my (many~oh, too many) failings.
But jealousy is only part of it. A small part of it. The main part of it is that I’m an asshole.
I judge that woman for not doing more, for not trying harder. For not sucking it up and doing everything I have to do.
Which is exactly how many people view those with invisible illness.
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an example of human evil, most people will jump to this schlub:
Sedem Xosi 