It feels like forever since I posted something of a more personal nature here… While, yes, this is my ‘professional’ blog, I’ve also been pretty adamant that my conception of ‘professional’ includes the (non)obvious fact of my humanity.

On that thought, I figured I’d mention that I’m depressed (again). Depression is something I’ve struggled with on and off since I was a teen. It happens enough that I sort of live my life like I’m depressed all the time. What I mean by this is that my coping mechanisms for surviving and living with depression are things that I try to keep operational even when I’m not depressed. It makes things easier for myself. One of my main coping mechanisms is sticking to a fairly strict schedule. I go to bed and wake up around the same times. I have little rituals that I observe daily. Things like this. My desire to maintain these behavioural patterns is usually what (these days) gets me out of bed.

Even so… sometimes I just can’t. Especially since I have to carefully watch how much time/effort I put into things to make sure I can still get stuff finished. Great example for how this plays out: last weekend I went to the Gender and Sexuality in information studies colloquium, which meant that by the end of my ‘weekend’ I didn’t have the energy and motivation to clean the apartment (this is something I do every week). Of course, now this means I’m feeling excessive guilt over not doing it and irritated by the mess (and feeling de-motivated because cleaning this week will take even more effort because of the build up). None of this is really helping, as you can imagine.

And there is the “omg, I just want to lie around in bed and eat junk food’ feels that I’m having a lot of the time. While my life, at the moment, does mean that I could spend a lot of time in bed if I wanted, I’m trying not to indulge this too often. Which also means super fun (and unproductive) hours just sitting at my desk and staring at nothing, while wishing I was in bed. Maybe if I refresh my tumblr dashboard one more time (even though there is no notification of new posts) there’ll be something interesting to look at…

This isn’t (in general) a great place to be since I actually have quite a few things I ought to be doing. And I really wish that I could just… give up my commitment to a bunch of the things I said I’d do (can I give up on life yet?). I will probably have to drop some stuff because in my current state I’m just barely getting the minimum amount of stuff accomplished.

My job is suffering from my general lack of motivation and focus. And with my ever present anxiety, getting criticism about my shitty performance at work generally leads to spirals of “omg, I wonder how soon I’m going to get fired? I’m a barely functional human being and what happens when MPOW notices that tasks that should take me a certain amount of time are actually taking me double/triple the amount of time?”. I can’t even blame my colleagues for their “wtf?” about some of the stuff I’ve been doing because I know that my overall performance has been subpar for longer than I’d really like to admit.

(How many times a day can you wish you were dead before you should start worrying?)

It feels a little weird to write this all out when I know that my ‘professional’ contacts (yes, some of you are friends!) will be reading this. As a (neglected and abused) kid, I grew up knowing that my feelings didn’t matter and that whining is a punishable offense¹. I also know that nobody truly cares about these sorts of struggles, especially not in the workplace. I can only hope that I can continue to fool my colleagues into thinking that I’m worth keeping around…

One thing I spend a lot of time doing when I’m depressed is daydreaming. I think a lot about how the world could be different. About how great it would be to get ‘sick days’. About how life would be so much different for me if I could have time to rest, recover, and heal. If everything didn’t feel so hard all the time. I think about contacting a bunch of people to tell them “hey, so this thing I’d said I’d do… I can’t because I’m depressed and it is taking most of my energy to not die and keep a roof over my head”. I think about what it’d be like to not worry all the time about everything. I think about all the hours I have until I can sleep… and all the days left until my final rest. I think about how my ancestors must be disappointed that I haven’t set up an alter yet and left offerings.

Oops… I started listing anxieties rather than daydreams.

shrugs