Category Archives: depression

how about…no

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nope

again with the bears!

 

You may have noticed that I lasted all of A WEEK AND A HALF using the NaBloPoMo writing prompts.

First of, ADD motherfuckers. I warned you.

Second of all, you can’t blame me, really, when this week’s prompts sound like a bunch of fucking Miss America pageant interview questions:

Monday, November 16 – Pretending you have the expertise to make the product a reality, what do you wish you could invent?

Answer: I’d invent a life-sized doll of your mom. 

Tuesday, November 17 – What is one place you need to see to feel like your life is complete?

Answer: I need to see…your mom.

Wednesday, November 18 – What do you hope people remember about you after you’re gone?

Answer:  My razor sharp wit. I know your mom will.

Thursday, November 19 – Where would you want to retire if money wasn’t an issue?

Answer: Your mom’s house.

Friday, November 20 – What do you hope happens by the end of this year?

Answer: I hope that rash your mom has clears up so she can hang out again.

 

I don’t want to sound like I’m directly bashing the BlogHer people who came up with the list because I get it, it’s not easy.  Shit, I do a thing called the Friday Five on a knitting forum, where I come up with five usually at least tenuously themed questions to ask everyone once a week and even THAT gets really hard sometimes.  Like, to the point where I start avoiding the internet some Fridays so that I can claim I was sick and didn’t, uhh, internet at all that day, and that’s why I didn’t do the Friday Five.  *shifty look*

Basically, I’m cool with the writing prompts until they start getting  DEEP…and making me have to like, THINK.  Or worse, FEEL.  I feel more than enough on a day to day basis already, believe you me.  I feel shit that isn’t even appropriate or, in some cases, applicable.

Examples:

Happy commercial with a cute puppy?  I FEEL OVERWHELMING SADNESS THAT THE PUPPY WILL SOME DAY GROW OLD AND DIE, JUST LIKE THE REST OF US.  LIFE IS SO POINTLESS.

Fun pop song on the radio? ANGER BECAUSE THIS SONG CLEARLY STEALS PARTS FROM TWO OTHER, BETTER SONGS, AND KIDS CALL THIS MUSIC.  WTF, ALL THE GOOD MUSIC HAS ALREADY BEEN MADE.  THERE IS NO POINT IN LISTENING TO THE RADIO ANYMORE.

Friend tells me exciting news?  I will not only be happy and excited for them but I will then proceed to WELL UP WITH TEARS BECAUSE LIFE IS SO BEAUTIFUL I JUST CAN’T HANDLE IT.

Sooo, yeah.  Sorry BlogHer writing prompts, but I feel enough feels that I can’t turn the volume down on to begin with.  Trying to expound upon how I’d invent a way to feed the world…

…or how I don’t think I’ll ever feel like my life is complete because there’s so much to see and do that it’s overwhelming and makes me really sad that I’m going to miss a whole lot of it no matter how hard I try…

…or that I’m afraid that no one will remember me for ANYTHING after I die because no one will have really known me…

…or that I can’t fathom picking a place to retire because I can’t fucking fathom retiring at all…

…or that my only hope for the end of every single year ever is that people will somehow come to their senses and stop fucking HATING AND KILLING each other…

…just isn’t something that I’ve got the emotional stamina to handle.

At least, not on the average weekday, where it’s “inappropriate” to start drinking at 10am.

 

 

 

 

 

 

on heredity, crafting and keeping (relatively) sane

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I forgot to post yesterday.  I meant to do it when I got home last night but then I got waylaid cooking dinner and doing work baking.  Then, I sat down to watch TV with my husband and, as usual, picked up the nearest craft project to start working on.

2015-11-14_20.04.47

Tiny baked goods and kitchen implements, hooray!

 

At that point, any chance of getting some writing done went straight down the drain.

Crafting, or as I like to call it, “making shit“, is something that I’m genetically predisposed to.  My dad’s always been a builder, making everything from birdhouses to, well…people houses!  My paternal grandmother was a talented knitter, quilter and seamstress, and even designed and sold dress patterns as a young woman in the early 1950’s.  Her mother before her also made braided rugs as well as knit, crocheted, sewed, and embroidered.  My great-grandmother’s specialty as a young woman was crocheted lace.  I have many examples of her very fine handiwork on the edging of finished embroidery projects like table runners and antimacassars, as well as some doilies and even a small fabric book full of swatches and motifs she did as she learned new patterns.

Making things is clearly in my blood – it’s something I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) fight – but it’s also something that helps keep me sane, a form of meditation for me.  When my ADD-and-anxiety-plagued imagination is bombarding me with a million bajillion completely unfeasible scenarios of how badly everything can go, knitting or stitching give me a way to step out of that crazy feedback loop for a while and just focus on one stitch at a time.  When I’m so, so sad or angry and I feel like I can’t do anything right, making little lines of stitches with a needle and thread or yarn shows me that actually, yes, I CAN do at least this one tiny thing right in this one moment.

Moments eventually build up to minutes, which pile up to hours, and suddenly I’ve made it through another day.

Many mental health problems are hereditary, just like other traits and predispositions.  I know my grandmother suffered from bouts of anxiety and depression throughout her life, though it was not something that was considered appropriate to talk about when she was elderly, let alone when she was my age.  I didn’t know my great-grandmother well enough to know whether she had similar issues as well. But, it does sometimes make me wonder if these women’s legacies of prolific crafting and fiber artistry may have stemmed not just from a need to express themselves creatively but also a need to self-soothe or to step out of their own mental feedback loops for a time like I do now.

 

blanket forting

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There are days when I find it really, really hard to put one foot in front of the other, figuratively speaking.  Today is very much one of those days.

Instead of boring you with the myriad ways in which I detest myself and the endless stream of things I am afraid of, I’m going to make some hot chocolate, find a documentary or three about dinosaurs to watch on NetFlix, wrap up in my blankie, and possibly hide some treats in my pocket so the dog is compelled to come sit on my lap.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Dicks.

(I was at 99 words and I couldn’t leave without taking it over 100. I could have just written another actual, topical sentence, but why do that when you can randomly say “dicks” instead?  Plus, I needed the laugh. )

on bears and unattainable meat and somehow also my brain? I’m not sure. This one might have gotten away from me a little.

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There are two major versions of my brain – Brave Me and Scared Me.  I used to think that balancing Brave Me and Scared Me would solve all my problems.  If I could just get to that magical fulcrum point on the seesaw, everything would level out and I could live a functional, well-adjusted life.  In reality, the only thing I got out of all that scooting back and forth on the seesaw trying to find that balance was splinters in my ass.

There is no perfect balance.  There is no PERFECT.  There is instead a vast and colorful spectrum of moments between radiant joy and utter despair.  Being able to experience that spectrum is a large part of what makes us human.  Mind you I’m not trying to feed anyone a cliche about how you can’t appreciate the good times if you never have any bad ones because that’s SO not helpful when you’re depressed.  At least, not to me.  If it works for you then by all means embrace that shit.

My point is more that you don’t HAVE to be balanced.  Would it maybe make life easier sometimes?  Sure.  But are you a failure if you can’t manage it?  Nope.  Not one bit.

We get this idea of perfection and balance shoved down our throats at every bloody fucking turn nowadays, and it’s bullshit.  Worse than it being bullshit, it’s largely unattainable.  It’s like dangling a piece of meat just out of reach in front of a bear for a really long time.  The bear is eventually going to get sick of chasing meat it can’t get and will fuck off to find something more productive to do.  (NOTE: I am NOT an actual bear expert. I have not tested this theory. Please do not try this experiment at home. Or in the woods. Just…maybe stay away from hungry bears in general. Good life rule there, kids).  The bear’s not going to quit life and throw itself off a cliff or anything, but it knows there’s plenty of other nourishment to be had besides that one damn dangle-y piece of meat that looks so appealing but is causing all sorts of problems.

Take-away: it’s ok to be the bear who stops chasing the unattainable meat.

It’s also ok to pretend to be a bear sometimes, as long as you’re not going around biting people.  Biting people is dangerous.

Even for non-pretend bears.

 

WTF is this bitch talking even talking about?

WTF is this bitch talking even talking about?

how bad CAN it go?

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I just did a Google image search for “how bad can it go” and among a whole bunch of pseudo-inspirational bullshit memes about adjusting a bad attitude, there was this completely random picture of butter. I really like butter and I really like completely random things, so I am linking to this picture with much delight.

When I finally decided to bite the bullet and start a new blog, I had a lot of trouble coming up with a name.  I wanted something clever and snazzy, something that was memorable and rolled off the tongue.  I’m generally neither clever nor snazzy, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t pretend to be on the Internet, right?!  The names I came up with were weak at best, though.  Finally, I put the question to a group of my favorite knitter friends on Ravelry (shout out to my LSG ALA hoars), and the suggestion of “Eat Your Words” came up.  Since eating my words in the figurative sense is something I’m all too familiar with, and since I was coming off a long (if sporadic) stint as a self-styled food blogger, it felt like a perfect name.

The Internet, however, is full of thieving rat bastards who come up with good ideas WAY faster than I do, so “Eat Your Words” was already long gone on every blogging site I searched for it. Incidentally, so were “Eat My Words”, “Eat These Words” and “Eat Some Words”.

‘Ok, Internet, I FUCKING GET IT’, I thought to myself. I started to question whether or not I should even bother with the blog at all, and had a good 45 minute grump session where-in I detailed all my life failings to myself (the list is vast but I’m so well practiced that it tends to go very quickly once I start), before finally saying, ‘Fuck it. I’m doing this. How bad can it go?’

And then it dawned on me. If I was going to write about my mental struggles, my whacked-out sense of humor…if I was going to write about ME…then “How Bad Can It Go” was actually a far better name than the ones I had originally been looking for. It fits so well because not only is it something that I actually say ridiculously frequently (usually in a sarcastic manner), but it’s also a play on how my brain works.

When you’re an analytical person, you tend to be the type that thinks through many possible outcomes of every action. When you’re analytical by nature and also have an anxiety disorder, your ability to think through multiple outcomes and weigh various options can swiftly turn from a useful asset to a crippling liability. I am a person who often quite literally cannot stop thinking of all the ways anything and everything can go badly. You could point me to a scene of utter tranquility, ask “how bad can it go?”, and I’d be able to come up with at least three nightmare scenarios right off the top of my head. Granted, they would likely be far-fetched at best, but that’s one of the supreme ass-aches of an anxiety disorder – even when you know damn well that what you’re thinking is completely fucking ridiculous and far-fetched, you can’t not think it. You can’t shut off the part of your brain that is continually saying, “what if, what if, what if, whaaaaatttt iiiiiifffff”.

One of the ways I’ve learned to deal with my anxiety and depression is to try and find the funny in it. Even if it’s the type of terrible gallows humor that I can’t explain to anyone without making them grimace and back away slowly, it still helps. It’s a little bit harder to get stuck in a “what if” feedback loop when I’m coming up with the most ludicrous and unfeasible scenarios possible on purpose in the interest of making myself or other people laugh.

Like I’ve said before, I’m really good at starting things but pretty crap at finishing them, so this is the point in my little shit-show of an essay where I’m struggling to come up with something eloquent to sum everything up. So instead, I’ll just stop writing for now and wonder how bad it can go…