Category Archives: depression

a walk in the wet

Posted on by

The dog needs walks. I need walks too, but I’m a dumb human and I often manage to convince myself otherwise. There are other things I think I could / should be doing – things I’d rather do than leash up the dog and spend fifteen minutes stopping every five steps while he sniffs the latest intensely mysterious whatever. Again, I’m a dumb human and that’s what I convince myself of.

Some days are different, though. Sometimes I find a brief respite from myself. I can go not just out of doors, but truly outside.

The smell of mud.

The humidity rising off of the rapidly melting snow.

The rhythm of my and Junie’s feet on the tar.

The dingy quilt of lowering grey clouds.

The near-constant sigh of traffic on the interstate a short distance away.

These sensations all become amplified when I start to let myself notice them.

The dog doesn’t care where we go. He doesn’t care how fast we go. He only wants to GO. And some days I am in the right frame of mind and I understand.

It’s not about how far or how fast or what direction. It’s the going itself that matters. As long as you can keep going, you’re doing alright.

 

IMG_20160220_152352481

You’ll have to use your imagination for the mud smell and the satisfying squishing noises.

 

I don’t get it.

Posted on by
ht7dc

This is my favorite dog in the whole world other than Junior. Just FYI.

You know how sometimes someone shares a link to something, saying things like “OMG, you have to read this, IT’S HILARIOUS”, and then when you click on the link and read the thing it’s…not that funny?

Or worse, you click on the link, read the thing, and find it to be not only NOT funny, but actually pretty dumb and/or ignorant?

And then you sit there thinking back on all the past interactions you’ve had with the link-sender, trying to figure out where things went so wrong in your relationship that they picked up the impression that you would think shit like THAT was amusing?

And because you’re now well down the hyper-analytical rabbit hole, you then start wondering if you even really know ANY of your friends AT ALL, and wondering if anyone truly knows YOU at all, and what’s the point of even trying to interact with anyone socially in a world where it’s technically not acceptable to sit someone down and make them fill out a pre-screening friendship questionnaire because fuckin’ A man, life is short and ain’t nobody got time to waste laughing politely at jokes that aren’t funny?

And further to that end, are all these people who are laughing at YOUR OWN jokes just laughing politely because they’re normal and well-adjusted and don’t get annoyed when things with a build-up of “this is really funny” don’t actually pan out to any amusement whatsoever?

No? Just me? Fair enough. I kind of suspected as much.

Carry on.

showering with ghosts, aka: you can’t go home again

Posted on by

I spent this past weekend at my parents’ house. They had planned a trip out of town and we were staying at their house to keep their dogs company.We live three miles down the road from them so it’s not like we had very far to go to get there, but it was an interesting experience none the less.

Sleeping in my old room was weird but not terribly so. It’s funny how quickly you become reacquainted with things – traffic noise from the nearby road, the way the neighbor’s outside light shines in the bedroom window just so, the sounds of the house creaking and popping in the cold (it was 15 below on Saturday night, not including the wind chill). I wouldn’t say that I slept great while we were there, but it felt pretty familiar even so.

What really threw me off though, was taking a shower at their house. The shower isn’t any different than it ever was – same grey tiles, same black grout. Same creepy drain cover that isn’t actually attached but rather just sits there over the drain hole and slides off if you hit it with your toe. I read too much Stephen King as a teenager to ever be ok with anything other than firmly affixed drain covers, for what it’s worth.

Anyway – point being, nothing about the shower itself had changed appreciably since the last time I showered there many years ago. And really, it’s not like I’ve changed all that much either. But there was just something about standing there smelling the slight sulfur funk of the water, looking out the frosted glass door into the grey and blue bathroom, touching that damn drain cover with my toes and getting creeped the fuck out by it all over again. It wasn’t nostalgic as much as…just wrong feeling. It felt like I was intruding – like I had walked into a stranger’s house and gotten into their shower, but at the same time it was all incredibly familiar because I’ve done it thousands of times before.

It was like I remembered the shower, but the shower didn’t remember me. And that was a little bit sad-making.

But then I got over it because the alternative was to start taking showers at my parents’ house more often and I’m sorry but that drain cover is just WAY too fucking creepy. NO THANK YOU.

babyskunky1

Here’s a sassy baby skunk picture I found on Google after I did an image search for “creepy drains” and scared myself so badly that nothing other than a cute animal picture palate cleanser could make me feel better about life. Baby skunk says GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR!

things I’ve told myself recently

Posted on by

This is also known as my “some day list”, because most of the time when these things pop into my head they’re prefaced by the phrase, “SOME DAY when I’m (rich / famous / in better shape / truly run out of fucks to give / drunk off my ass / fill in the blank)”.

  • Some day I’m going to hire a maid to come in two days a week and clean my house.  I wouldn’t ask her to do gross stuff like clean my husband’s hairballs out of the bathtub drain or exorcise the science projects out of the back of my fridge, but everything else would be fair game. The problem with this plan is that Junior The Dog would lose his sweet tiny ever-loving mind from stranger danger if someone he didn’t know came to the house while we were gone. Or even while we were here. So basically, if I ever want a maid for real, I’m going to have to figure out how to take my dog to work for a half day twice a week (not happening – last time he went to work with me he shit in my boss’s office), or I’m going to have to start tranquilizing him twice a week (probably also not happening. Probably.)

 

  • Some day I’m going to own a house of my own rather than renting, and I’m going to paint the rooms whatever weird-ass colors I want. To be fair, our landlord is pretty easy-going and he probably wouldn’t balk if I wanted to paint walls weird colors in our apartment – the last tenants had blood-red walls in their bedroom, in fact. When we came to look at the place, everything looked totally normal and chill until we got to the bedroom and then it was like, instant bordello. But not in a good way. If you see what I mean. Anyway, I want my own house for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is usually my desire to have things like a lime green bathroom and blue living room walls and stuff.

 

  • Some day I’m going to live somewhere where the driveway is not an icy death trap of doom every winter. This one is pretty much wishful thinking in New England, honestly – even the nicest, most well-maintained driveways end up with a layer of frozen slush and hate caked to them at some point in the winter here. Unless I want to cough up beaucoup bucks for one of those crazy heated-driveway setups, I’m destined to always be disappointed on this front.

 

  • Some day I’m going to develop good habits, like washing my face before bed, writing every day, not automatically adding “fuck” to every other sentence when I’m speaking aloud, cleaning up after myself as I cook rather than just piling all the dirty dishes in the sink and pretending I don’t seem them for the next three days, exercising on a consistent basis, not drinking as much…they all sound good in theory but none of them are very fun in practice so I’m basically doomed to never achieve any of them.

 

  • Some day I’m going to hang up a coat rack so that we stop just dumping our coats and sweatshirts and other outer-wear paraphernalia on the kitchen chairs when we come inside. This one is probably the most do-able of the whole list, to be fair.

 

  • Some day I’m going to go through all my dishware and silverware, take an inventory, figure out what pieces I’m missing and buy them. I literally have three soup bowls to my name, only two of which match, and one of which is structurally unsound and will some day crumble and dump boiling hot soup all over me. Also, another example of how bad it is: my mom actually bought butter knives and put them in my Christmas stocking this year because when my folks were over for Thanksgiving and mom was setting the table she could only find two butter knives. I replied that yes, we only have two, and she just couldn’t wrap her mind around why we didn’t have a full set of them. I explained that, you know, sometimes things need to be pried out of other things and butter knives get bent and then they have to be thrown away. Or like, sometimes you REALLY need to chip the ice off your windshield and you can’t find your scraper and you’re already late for work and the butter knife is the first thing you think of and then you forget to take it back inside. Stuff happens, and butter knives sometimes pay the price.

 

eye

Some day I’m going to remember to shut the bedroom door before I do my eyeliner so that things like this don’t happen when the dog starts barking at a squirrel out of nowhere, making me jump and stab myself in the eye. And worse, screw up my eyeliner.

thirty-six

Posted on by

Today’s my birthday. I’m thirty-six years old, as of 4:32-ish this morning.

Thirty-six sounds weird to me.

It doesn’t sound bad or scary or anything. Just…weird. It might take some getting used to the sound of it, the feel of the words.

The only “milestone” birthday that has bothered me so far was when I turned twenty-five. You’d think that on the spectrum of possible age freakouts that twenty-five would be way closer to the “foot-loose and fancy-free” end than the “oh god, I’ve wasted my life” end of things, but apparently not in my case. I actually straight-up lost my shit shortly after turning twenty-five. I had a series of panic attacks that got increasingly worse until finally, one night in early February I called my parents around midnight and asked my dad to take me to the emergency room because I was quite sure I was having a heart attack. The ER doc didn’t do a whole lot to comfort me, other than to say that even a severely obese twenty-five year old like me probably wouldn’t be having an actual heart attack unless she’d been doing cocaine or something. That was followed by a very pointed look full of unspoken questions to which I replied, “if I was doing coke, don’t you think I’d be skinnier?”

Anyway – point being, twenty-five pretty much felt like rock bottom to me. While everyone else around me was partying and living it up, having adventures, making new friends, traveling the world, I was spending most nights and weekends (and no small number of days) hiding under the duvet, literally afraid that I’d drop dead at any moment. I got some help in the form of antidepressants and a wonderful dog that friends helped me adopt, and I started to slowly claw my way out of a very deep, very dark hole.

I talk about this today so that I can look around myself and more fully appreciate just how much has changed for the better in my life in the last eleven years. I’m not cured of depression, anxiety or any of the other brain fuckery that  started rearing its ugly head when I turned twenty-five. I never will be, and I’m at varying levels of peace with that – but the older I get, the better I become at accepting that this is who I am and that there’s no shame in it. I’ve learned that I don’t have to pretend to be OK just to keep those around me comfortable, and that’s a valuable lesson indeed.

View this post on Instagram

36.

A post shared by Rhubarb Swank (@ealachan) on

 

 

 

roll on, 2016

Posted on by

Christmas is over. Time to breathe the collective sigh of relief.

sigh-of-relief

This is not me, and I didn’t take this picture. Just so we’re clear.

It’s not that I dislike Christmas, even. In fact, I’m one of those sappy assholes who really DOES think that Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year.

I’m just always really glad when it’s over.

Christmas is like the pot of water that gets heated up so slowly that the frog in the pot (that’s me…ribbit) doesn’t realize it’s slowly being cooked alive until it’s just a little bit too late.

It starts with Thanksgiving and my mom asking us for our Christmas lists. Then people start posting pictures of their Christmas trees on Facebook and Instagram and I start itching to get a tree. When I finally get a tree, I spend a weekend decking the halls. Then there’s the holiday party for work. Then, Christmas shopping…and wrapping…and cooking…and planning for family holiday get-togethers…and GOING to family get-togethers, and giving gifts and sending cards and receiving cards and OMG so much mail and trying to finish gifts that I inevitably (and often wrongly) think I can get knitted / stitched / constructed by Christmas, and drinking, and eating so so many cookies and worrying if this will be another year where all I get for a bonus from work is a Jelly of the Month Club subscription and more wrapping and last-minute shopping and super panicked knitting of doom and then YAY CHRISTMAS OH MY GOURD LET’S OPEN PRESENTS AND EAT TOO MUCH FOOD HOORAY…

…and then it’s over. Just like that. What was weeks of cheerful glow is now just a quickly-fading after-image and I am left feeling…bereft.

Which, granted, feeling mildly bereft is pretty much my standard mode of operation because chronic depression is a fucking barrel of monkeys like that, but still. It’s especially noticeable directly after Christmas. Like someone has yanked the rug out from under me or something. Like emotional whiplash.

And then, just as I’m starting to get my feet back under me after all that, the “New Year, New You” bullshit starts. Ads for home exercise equipment nobody will actually use. Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, NutriSystem, Shakeology, every local and national gym and fitness center smugly implying that you are not a good enough version of you the way that you are, and pointing out that January 1st would be the most opportune time to change that for the low, low price of $49.99 a month. Asshats on Facebook making grand lists of completely fucking pretentious resolutions like, ‘be more positive’, ‘live my truth’ and ‘judge less, love more’. I hate shit like this not least of all because it implies that you only have one chance a year to change. I also detest the implication that in order for your changes to actually count, you have to announce them to the whole fucking world on social media. If I want to change, I’ll fucking change whenever I feel like it and it’s nobody’s god damned business. If I want to stay the same, that’s my prerogative and ALSO nobody’s god damned business.

So roll on, 2016. Let’s hurry up and get past this brief self-bettering phase. There’s Valentine’s Day chocolate waiting for us on the other side.

something, something, Tom Petty

Posted on by

I should probably write something.

I’m alive. That’s something.

I have a roof over my head, a fridge full of food, a family that loves me and a pretty awesome dog. Those are somethings.

I have a good job working with mostly pretty cool people and some exciting opportunities on the horizon. That’s something.

Now if I could just stop feeling so fucking hollow inside, like the world’s biggest, most echo-y-est echo chamber, that would REALLY be something.

IMG_20151222_100833124

Metaphor or dirty coffee cup? You decide.

It will eventually be ok. I know this. It all comes back around eventually. But like Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part.

Tom Petty also said “I’m barely prolific and incredibly lazy”. So, you know. He’s clearly my people and I have to believe him.

 

 

 

 

amateur proctology for fun and profit

Posted on by

I’ve been dealing with a funk lately, and one of the things the funk has decided to preoccupy me with has been failure. Failure to write, failure to keep up with household tasks, failure to take good care of myself and those that I love, failure to get shit done at work. You name it, my brain will figure out a way that I’ve failed at it and then proceed to make me feel terrible about it.

So, while I was sitting here this afternoon, mentally beating myself up over being a failure in all things, I finally thought, “You know what? Fuck it. I’m going to write. I don’t even care what comes out. I’m going to write it and I’m going to post it, and the Internet can suck a dirty donkey dick if they don’t like it”. That, of course, was false bravado, because after about 150 words the funk refused to be ignored further and proceeded to remind me that I’m a gigantic failure because I actually DO care what the Internet thinks about what I post.

As an aside, one of my habits while reading and writing is to look up words to make sure that they mean what I think they mean. This habit was partially born out of my annoyance at a former boss who used to say dumb shit like “that’s a mute point”, with no idea what the words he was saying actually meant. Although I know it’s sort of hard to tell from reading my F-bomb-riddled blog posts, I’m a certified vocabulary whore.

So, in my building panic about being a praise-seeking suck-nut, I opened up a new tab in Firefox and started looking up words for, essentially, praise-seeking behavior. This of course led me to the word ‘narcissism’ and the related psychological definition, and I sat reading with mounting horror what seemed like a near-definitive description of myself. From there, I started reading articles about how people become narcissists, what can be done to help them get over themselves, etc. I was in full-on psychological self-diagnosis mode and was getting ready to start looking up phone numbers for therapists. Things were looking BLEAK.

At that point, I noticed something down at the bottom of the page on the original description of narcissism that had prompted this snowball effect of self-diagnosis. There was a note I failed to see during my first, second and even third read through. It said, in essence, “Almost everyone will recognize some or all of these qualities in themselves when presented with this list. Self-diagnosis is dangerous and you shouldn’t do it. You’re probably fine, really…but if you think you aren’t, talk to someone about it rather than just sitting there assuming you’re the living embodiment of awfulness”.

I embellished, but you get the idea.

A light clicked on in my brain at that point. Sure, I have my funks and my self-esteem issues. I’m a perfectionist sometimes, and I DO seek praise from others sometimes. But…so do most other people. It’s called BEING HUMAN. All humans are a little bit narcissistic, otherwise we wouldn’t have survived as a species.

And just like that, my head slipped right out of my ass without even the slightest strain. I blinked at the bright light of the outside world, and once I realized what had happened, I started to laugh.

Because really, if you can’t laugh about something as personal as your own brand of crazy, you’ve probably got your head pretty far up your ass.

 

head-ass

I smell a new cross-stitch design coming on.

make your own happiness…while I punch you in the face.

Posted on by

You know what I hate?

Besides Kokomo, anyway…

I hate these “make your own happiness” memes that are all over Facebook and Pinterest. You know the type:

happiness-is-a-choice

It’s so easy. Why can’t you see that it’s so easy, Shelby? Just choose to be happy! SMILE, DAMN IT!

First of all, way to fucking grammar, (says the queen of the fragmented sentence. I KNOW. Shut up).

Second of all: this shit might have made the person who made it feel better about themselves in some ego-stroking way, but it’s sure as hell not helping me or really anybody else I know who is clinically anxious, depressed, or has some other alternate brain chemistry reality.

One of the biggest things a clinically depressed person often deals with is a sense of loneliness or isolation, even when they’re surrounded by people they care about. When you already feel deeply, utterly alone, the last thing you need to hear is another way in which you’re failing at life. That’s how these memes always make me feel – like I’m even MORE abnormal because I can’t just choose to be happy and step out of the mist-shrouded labyrinth that has been the last ten years of my life. The more of them I see, the more irrationally inferior and isolated I feel.

Telling someone who is depressed to just buck up and be positive is, at best, misguided. At worst, it’s pretty fucking offensive. If someone confined to a wheelchair told you that they wished they could walk again, would you tell them they just aren’t trying hard enough? That the ability is there within them, they just have to dig deep and find it? No you wouldn’t. At least, not unless you’re a very special kind of asshole.

Just like it’s very easy for an able-bodied person to take for granted all the things they can do physically, it’s very easy for someone with a chemically normal brain to assume that depression is a choice.

Depression is not a choice.

If it was, most of us would have chosen to get the fuck away from it by now, trust us.

 

 

 

 

better living through psychopharmacology

Posted on by

You know how when you were a kid and it was like, mid-January, and you were spacing out at your desk during Social Studies class, trying to work out how many more weeks it was until summer vacation, and then when you figured it out it kind of made you want to cry a little?

(just play along)

That’s how I’ve felt all day long.

There are glaciers moving faster than today has progressed.

I’ve sat in this chair so long that I have actually aged all the way to the end of my life, died, been REINCARNATED AND BORN AGAIN INTO A NEW EXISTENCE EXACTLY THE SAME AS MY OLD ONE, and aged all the way back up to my present age.

neverending

I don’t even know what this is, but it’s exactly what today has felt like. Also, it’s making me kind of dizzy.

 

This is what it’s like when I don’t take my ADD medication on a work day.

On a day when I’m at home it’s not a big deal if I don’t take them because a) there’s all kinds of interesting and shiny things to work on at home and if not, there’s video games, b)no one really expects me to be all that productive at home (my husband was disabused of that notion very early on in our marriage), and c) the things that I do at home, generally, do not require a high degree of accuracy or the staring at of columns of numbers for hours on end.

Work days without meds, though? They’re fucking HARD, and having to tough one out every once in a while reminds me just how obnoxious and frustrating life was for me (and probably everyone around me, to be fair) before ADD meds.

I would write more, but there’s been a squirrel in my brain doing the Macarena in double time for the last eight hours and I am frigging BURNT. OUT.