Category Archives: Depression

bad weekend

I’ve had a bad weekend following a shaky week, and I pretty much fell off the internet in broad terms. I had to force myself to go shopping on Sunday, and I was shaking afterwards. There’s a few things going into this, and Jeremy still being missing is one of them. The depression spiral that leads into is a little terrifying and I actually don’t even want to voice the steps out loud out of some kind of prophetic superstition.

Today is better. I’ve cycled into work (and back home again) these last two days, and the physical activity helps, I think. Felt terrible yesterday (probably due to malnutrition over the weekend) but my energy levels are much better today.

Frustrations at non-functioning code are at a high point and that adds stress to near-breaking point. If it actually gets to the point where I know I’m going to yell at someone if they interrupt me again, that’s probably the point where I’ll need to walk out of the office. So far, so good on that point.

Bad times

I’m not having an easy time at the moment. I lack energy, I lack motivation. It’s harder to get going in the mornings, harder to get to doing things.

Everything builds up in a heavy spiral, spreading its weight across me. Little things get to me more, and I find it harder to relax.

Jeremy being missing really doesn’t help – it weighs more than everything else, and the lack of luck in finding him removes more of my motivation in general.

Between the building pressures and the business of the season, it’s tricky to keep my focus even on things I enjoy.

Tattoos and snakes

Tattoo is healing well. It’s faded, but the skin’s still healing, so it’s entirely understandable there. Really happy with it.

Jeremy still missing. Have acquired a USB inspection light[1] to have a look in some tight spaces for him in case he has got stuck behind the bookcase or something. Don’t really know where he’s gone – there are so many options, and he’s not left any trail or sign of his presence that I can see.

My worst fear is that he’s left the flat – squeezed out through the gap between the floor and the door, or found a hole somewhere that takes him out. If he’s not in the flat any more, I might never find him again. On the other hand, if he doesn’t come out in the next couple of weeks, he might starve. On the other other hand, this was something of the worst time for him to disappear as I have so many commitments stealing my time I can’t find the time for a concerted search of the entire flat even if the task wasn’t depressing in itself. I just don’t have the time I need to get things sorted.

Footnotes   [ + ]

1. bendy camera thing

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Bad experiences

So I’m kind of reblogging a reblog while I wait for my hair dye to activate. I originally wrote this in 2010, reblogged it in 2013.

Since then, I’ve had a varied “love life” with a few people passing through my life in various ways. Some I’ve screwed up, some just haven’t worked out (I’m pretty sold on the idea that I’m straight, but playing with gay guys can be fun too).

The reason I’m thinking about this right now is that I was talking to someone and realised that they didn’t know these stories – didn’t know the things I’d been through – and I couldn’t quite decide if I should tell them or not. But I made these things public for a reason – hiding it isn’t going to change things – and I know that they will read this, and can choose whether or not to follow the links above for themselves.

I was in a different place when I wrote both the original post and the comments on the reblog, but this still affects me. Today was the first time I’d thought about it in a long time, and I can now say that I’ve conquered a lot of the issues that came of it – but that doesn’t mean that they’ve gone away, or that they don’t linger – the moments that define who you are don’t just go away, they make you who you are; losing them would be losing part of who you are and I’m pretty happy with where I am at the moment.

 

Work rants

The last two days I’ve worked ten hour days. I’m currently 6 hours into what could be another. As far as I know, I’m not getting compensated for the extra time, and I’m certainly not being thanked for it by the people bitching at me about every slight “problem” they find. I rebuilt their website to work on a new data source in two hours and they’re complaining at me either because it’s doing what it did before and they expected it to somehow change or because the data is different and they haven’t cottoned on to the fact that it’s their data that’s wrong and they have to fix it before it will display right.

I am stressed, tense, and sick of dealing with this crap. I’ve had two different companies whining at me over trivial bullshit this week, and even though this week has only been three days long for me, it’s been a longer harder week than most five-day-weeks. I have come very close to taking my balls and going home the last couple of days- just walking out of the office.

It’s easy to tell when things are really getting to me – my noise tolerance goes down. When I need to plug in and blast music in my ears just to override what I’m hearing and cope, then I’m having a bad day. When I lash out at someone for touching my shoulder to try and get my attention while I’m doing this, I’m having a terrible fucking day and I recommend you leave me the fuck alone. Especially when all my attention was wanted for was to show me something I already knew about, had dug up the means to access the data I needed to verify testing and was working on fixing it. When I say “I know about that, I’ve got it on my screen and I’m working on it right now” I don’t mean “show me more of this because I haven’t seen it”.

This week is especially hard because I’m still rubbing myself raw over something that happened at the weekend. The one sour point of my weekend left me feeling physically ill for hours from my reaction to it, and I’m still considering how to address it. One of the problems is that I can’t openly discuss it, and it is affecting my moods in general, as well as potentially my continued attendance at and enjoyment of PD events. I’ve been contemplating how to put it in words, and the answer so far is that I don’t know how to, but it may be something I need to bring to PD’s attention.

Anyway, back to work. I have some side projects to work on, and music to distract me.

Soundtrack: Avril Lavigne – Rock n Roll[1]

Footnotes   [ + ]

IoD National

So it turns out I’m really bad at updating this regularly. Who’d have thought that? Oh wait, I did.

So let’s try this again. This last weekend, I went down to Buckden for the IoD National. Having found out a few days beforehand that I wasn’t playing any of the games like I thought I had been, I was in a surprisingly good mood.

On the Friday, I co-ST’d/NPC’d Geist, then NPC’d/ST’d Awakening before spending the evening playing board games and drinking cocktails (thank you Matt Sanderson). The games were fun and I met some new people through the process of NPC’ing with them and ST’ing for them. Then there was the Mage soft RP session late at night which had both some surprising IC and OOC results…

Saturday morning, I was back to NPC’ing/ST’ing Awakening which was interesting, followed by the AGM. After that, I had a bit of a breakdown. I’m not entirely sure what caused it. A perceived exclusion, a lot of noise… I just ran out of cope. I held myself together enough to get to the NPC brief for Forsaken and I took longer than I should have to get in character – it was just a lot of effort to get into costume. I’m glad I did though, as I had quite a lot of fun ranting about the unnatural abomination that was my alpha (all in fun, no real-world views given). After that, I didn’t feel like doing much but I got caught by Reb as I went to go get some of my stuff and he convinced me to NPC for him. So glad I did – I haven’t had that much fun with a character in years… Apologies to any Lost players I may have creeped out.

Sunday brought about packing and some vague NPC’ing, but I was mostly just providing some continuity as I didn’t have much I could connect to and I couldn’t bring myself to stay in character for an extended period.

Then the long journey home.

Still, I had more fun that I expected, and I met some lovely people I hadn’t met before and reconnected with some lovely people I hadn’t seen properly in a while. All-in-all, an excellent weekend.

Empire

I’m currently feeling quite a lot of apathy towards Empire. I kinda want to go, but I haven’t booked holidays for it, and I haven’t got costume and I have a severe case of “can I be arsed?”. It’s not that I don’t have other friends going or anything, but I just don’t feel connected to it in a way that makes me want to get organised for it.

It’s odd. I can get excited about Empire at times, but other times – like now, when I’ve just had an email telling me the early booking deadline is coming up – I just don’t know if I can be bothered with the effort of getting myself organised.

It’s a reflection of my depression, I’m aware, but I feel like everyone else is more involved and invested in it than I am and I can’t catch up to that. I feel like I’d be lost and not know what to do, like I can’t possibly get myself organised in time so why bother trying?

It’s hard to describe, but these things are rarely easy.

Loneliness

In a post on his blog, Stephen Fry talks about loneliness and how he feels the contradiction of both feeling alone and wanting to be left alone. That’s a sentiment I share quite often. While he has a different experience of depression than me (I have never felt particularly suicidal except on a few occasions), the feeling of loneliness is something we share – and something he describes better than I can.

In the end loneliness is the most terrible and contradictory of my problems. I hate having only myself to come home to. If I have a book to write, it’s fine. I’m up so early in the morning that even I pop out for an early supper I am happy to go straight to bed, eager to be up and writing at dawn the next day. But otherwise…

It’s not that I want a sexual partner, a long-term partner, someone to share a bed and a snuggle on the sofa with – although perhaps I do and in the past I have had and it has been joyful. But the fact is I value my privacy too. It’s a lose-lose matter. I don’t want to be alone, but I want to be left alone. Perhaps this is just a form of narcissism, vanity, overdemanding entitlement – give it whatever derogatory term you think it deserves. I don’t know the answer.

I too, often feel a lack, an urge to have someone else in my life, but I also don’t want to have someone crowding me – I need my space, my privacy. I don’t know what the answer is, and neither does Mr Fry – someone far more intellectual than I.