Trying to Describe Depression

I really wish I had the words to explain what this depression feels like.  Perhaps I am experiencing some magical belief that if I could encompass it in language, I could control it the way I control my fiction.  Or the more rational belief that by explaining it to others, I can come to understand it myself. 

And I really don't understand the feelings.  They come out of nowhere, profound sadness, self-loathing, hopelessness, surging up in my chest whenever I'm not fully immersed in something else like a good movie or a book or my Sims.  I feel like I'm just about to start crying, but then I don't, and it's as physically frustrating as very nearly sneezing and then freezing on the threshold.

The feelings are accompanied by thoughts that I know aren't mine.  I constantly think about — no, I imagine, I almost feel it — killing myself with knives to the more vulnerable blood vessels in arm, thigh, and neck.  I imagine shooting myself right under the chin.  I imagine going limp at the top of a flight of stairs or the edge of a roof and letting myself fall.

I'm not going to do it, I don't want to do it, but I keep thinking about it anyway, keep imagining it, keeping thinking what it would feel like...and mostly keep thinking about not feeling these feelings anymore, afterward. 

I force myself to recite why I don't want to, apply Reason to the feeling: the impact it would have on my loved ones, the things I want to do that I haven't done yet; but then sometimes those things turn on me: I start thinking my loved ones would be better off without me, that I'm a failure and everything I try to do will fail.  People will be sad and miss me, but only for a little while, that I've made no lasting difference ever, and I will not make a lasting difference by staying.

In those instances, it's harder to resist.  I recite the next lines, that suicide is a coward's way, that it's a  permanent solution to a temporary problem, that I'll miss the possibility that it might just get better somehow.  Don't quit before the miracle.  And I can't even be sure it will stop: I may very well continue to suffer after death, I have no way of knowing what lies beyond.

But that I can describe, and have heard described by other sufferers.  What I find baffling and difficult to encompass with words is the lack of pain. None of this actually hurts, this isn't real emotional suffering.  I know what that feels like, I remember what it feels like, and that's not what I'm feeling. 

I always thought when people killed themselves, they must be suffering agonies of emotional pain,  pain so bad that you'd do absolutely anything to make it stop.  Pain like a kidney-stone, or a gunshot wound, or being tortured.  But it's nothing like that. 

But what is it more like?  I just can't come up with a simile, a metaphor, an analogy.  And I'm particularly good at creating analogies.  But this just defies my ability to describe things. 

Perhaps it's a skewing of perspective, magnifying the impact of minor pain in some way?  Or perhaps it's a sort of ghost feeling, some chemical trigger that imitates or echoes emotional pain, a passenger of a feeling without its vehicle?  But isn't real pain and so doesn't hurt like real pain?

Or is it real pain, after all, and I am just unable to feel it fully?  The way I don't feel joy, or hope, or love as acutely and completely as I used to.  That the thing causing the pain is also giving an anesthetic, like the dentist does with a needle full of Novocain.

I don't know.  All I know is that I want it to stop so badly.  Not badly enough to do anything to stop it, but I feel like I'm approaching that level.  How much more attractive will death be if I did want it that badly?  And that scares the hell out of me.  I don't want to die, I know I don't.  But when it's your own body telling you something, how easy it is to believe what it says.

I'll hang in there.  Keep fighting the fight.  I just wish I understood what it was I was fighting.

Picture Post: This & That

The Winds of Change

Well, friends, a lot has changed in the last few months.  I think it's changing for the better now, but that comes after a very rough patch of very unpleasant changes over the last few months.

The main change is that I've resigned my job and have decided to not look for another one.  I have come to believe that full-time work is simply not possible for me anymore.  My depression and my lack of energy have gone on for so long that I can't even remember what it's like to come home after work and feel like doing anything more strenuous than sitting up in a chair and eating dinner.  I haven't even got the energy to cook dinner, anymore, and Grandmother and I live off of takeout and ready-made meals.  Weekends are almost invariably spent recuperating from the week, too tired to do laundry or even get dressed, much less clean my house or go out and have fun.  The only time I ever get anything done at all is when a hypomanic episode comes along to goose me into action.

I think I might have chugged along like that for a couple more years before I realized that I wasn't living anymore, I was just sleeping and working, with a few hours of mild entertainment in between.  But then my work changed, so drastically that it forced the issue.

To start (as I shared two posts back), our Office Manager, who is also my supervisor and office-mate, went out on medical leave at the beginning of April.  I knew she was going, and we were prepared for her to be gone a while, I had cross-trained with her to be able to cover most of her functions while she was gone.  The leave was to be six weeks, and I figured I could survive anything for six weeks.

But then two other departures happened, things I was not expecting and not prepared for.  First, just before my supervisor went out on leave, her supervisor and our program manager resigned.  This didn't really have much of an effect on my day-to-day existence, since she wasn't my supervisor; but in the interim, her functions were being covered by the brand-new division director, who (being so new) was rather overwhelmed, and was not in much of a position to be of support to me.

Then our Assets Intern, who worked twenty hours a week in the Resource Room (my bête noire, as the only part of my job I actually hate is covering that room for the RR Coordinator's breaks and sick-days, which is always busy with tons of people and absolutely sucks the life out of me) left us as well.  So there I was covering the Office Manager's position, my position, and the Intern's position without a direct supervisor who could help out.  But it was only for six weeks, and I did have some help from other sites to cover some of the Office Manager's accounting duties and my filing duties, so I figured I could tough it out.

But then at the end of the six weeks, the Office Manager's leave was extended another six weeks.  I was already worn out, there was no way I was going to survive another six weeks of that.  And then, at the same time, the program manager's position was filled, and she became my direct supervisor—and there was a bit of a personality clash.

Not to say that we disliked each other, or that she's not a nice person; it's just that after four and a half years of being supervised by my office-mate and friend, someone with whom I got along excellently, and who held my position before I did and so knew exactly what I was doing, it was a shock to find myself supervised by someone brand-new, whose job was massively different from mine, who was not around all the time, who was new to the agency, and who had a wildly different managing style from any manager I've ever had before.  There was bound to be a clash.

The first clash came when the program-manager began requiring us to keep exact hours, where in the past we'd always had a fifteen-minute grace-period at either end of the day, and I was able to stay later if I got in later than that, a perq that I greatly valued.  And then, when I started complaining about being overworked, we had a problem:  I got angry, she got angry back, and it turned into some bad feelings on both sides.  However, despite my seniority in years served, she is the program manager and I the lowly administrative assistant, so her view of the situation prevailed—and I found myself on the wrong end of disciplinary actions.

It was that last bit right there that is the root of the problem: when I went to work for this agency, there was no such thing as higher-ups and lower-downs, everyone was an equal, with different functions and different pay scales related to different levels of responsibility; but over the last three years, a managerial culture has taken hold, hierarchy has taken the place of collegiality, and a very corporate/bureaucratic mindset has become the norm.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is most certainly not my thing.  The way I see it is that if I'm going to be subjected to a corporate management style, I should be getting corporate pay.  Instead, I am making below average pay for an entry-level position in a nonprofit, after four years of service with ten years of prior experience; and in the last months had been doing three jobs at once, one of which was at a higher pay-grade and responsibility-level, without overtime, differential pay, or comp time.  "Disgruntled" doesn't even begin to cover it.  As a result, I was in constant conflict with management—not just my manager, but her manager (the division director) and the HR Director as well.

That conflict was making me even more sick than the overwork was.  Before the Office Manager's leave, I was starting to get a bit better: I was attending weekly group therapy and had changed my meds; my energy was better, my suicidal ideation was lower, and I was sleeping through the night again.  But by the end of May, just a month and a half later, I was right back where I started: more frequently depressed than not, with rushes of anxiety that were almost panic, and the suicidal ideation was so strong that I had to avoid using knives and driving on freeways for fear of hurting myself; making things even worse, I gave up my weekly group and dropped out of the stress-coping class I was taking, because I didn't have the time to do it and the most essential functions of my work.

I was ready to quit at the beginning of June, but I made myself stick it out to see if it might get better when the Office Manager's leave was over.  And then management hired two temps, who took the pressure of the filing and the Resource Room coverage off my plate, so I started to feel like maybe I might survive after all.  Things were looking up, I was getting along better with the program manager, and it all seemed sort of OK.

But no: at the end of June, the Office Manager's leave was extended again—this time for six months.  However, we were able to keep one of the temps because of this, and so I waited to see what happened.  Nevertheless, while I was trying to recover from the months of overwork and the weeks of interpersonal conflict, my job performance was suffering.  I was making mistakes, leaving things lying around in a mess, missing more days sick, and not getting very much work done when I was there.

Mid-July, this erupted into another disciplinary action, part of which I thought so monstrously unfair that I spent the next week in a mindless rage, unable to think of anything else, unable to sleep, and unable to function properly.  It made me so sick that I actually developed pneumonia-like symptoms, short of breath and coughing like Camille, sweating like a racehorse, and unable to stand up without getting dizzy or to walk farther than the kitchen or bathroom without having to sit down.

When that was over, after I had burned off my rage and could look at things calmly—and after I met with my manager one last time in response to the disciplinary action, and came to realize that things were never going to get any easier—I decided it was time to go.  One more of those episodes would likely kill me.  So I gave two weeks' notice.

The moment I did so, this huge weight that I didn't even realize I was carrying was lifted from my shoulders.  Looking back over the last two years, I saw that I had just barely been holding on all that time, had sacrificed all of my energy just to working, and had nothing to show for it but a lot of clothes and jewelry that I never wear.  It took this change of circumstances at work to finally force me out of the rut and to see that my job was simply not worth the energy I was pouring into it—and that if I kept on going the way I was, I'd be either in the loony-bin or the morgue by the end of the year.

So that's that.  I had my five-year anniversary in June, and now my last day is next Wednesday.  But I'm leaving on good terms instead of in a rage, I'm training my replacement and organizing the office for a smooth transition, and looking forward to a going-away party at the end of my tenure.  There will be pie!

So what do I do instead?  I don't pay rent or utilities or groceries, and my credit-card debt isn't near as bad as it was; but there's still about eight thousand left, as having to replace my dentures increased the debt unpleasantly.  And of course I still need health coverage.  But that's what Disability is for: I'm applying for SSDI as well as State Disability, unemployment, worker's comp, whatever I can get my hands on.  I can take on temporary part-time jobs as well, and I plan to start selling my jewelry, drag, books, and extraneous decoratives on eBay over the next few months to build up the kitty.

I've also decided to go ahead and self-publish Lord Foxbridge Butts In, in order to monetize it sooner rather than later.  I might make less in the long run than if I'd got it accepted by a publisher, but self-publishing is so common nowadays, and gay-interest literature so small an audience, that I don't know that a publisher would make that big a difference.  Besides which, with more time to actually write, instead of squeezing it in between work and sleep, I will be able to get more books out—I can have a whole stable of books out earning royalties instead of creeping one out every three years.

This whole new life just opened up before me with this decision to quit work: I can write, I can take proper care of Grandmother, I can take care of the house, and I can take care of myself.  It will be a real life where I'm doing real things that are important to me, not just hanging on by the skin of my teeth to a job that's just going to get harder and harder, making me sicker and sicker.

Wow, is all I can say.  I'm so unbelievably relieved.

So anyway, you can look forward to hearing more from me in the coming months.  And in the meantime, here's a little something pretty to reward you for reading all those words.

Only Connect

If you've never read the illustrated blog Hyperbole and a Half, I suggest you do so.  Right now.  I'll wait for you to come back.

A few months ago, its authoress posted "Adventures in Depression," one of the most spot-on and eloquent descriptions of the beginning stages of depression that I have ever read.  After ages and ages with that on top of her page, she followed up with "Depression Part Two," detailing her experiences, and her perceptions of those experiences, since writing the previous post.

In that follow-up post, she talked about losing access to the things that used to make her happy, and in her usual inimitable way, she banged the nail on the head: her first reference was to the pure childhood fun of playing with toys, of relating to those toys with your imagination; and then one day some years later, playing with toys just isn't fun anymore. The toys haven't changed, you've changed.

I hadn't ever though of my own situation in those terms.  I thought of it as a side-effect of my depression that I was uncomfortable in groups, or the medications giving me social anxiety, or something like that; but now I see that it isn't the groups that are making me uncomfortable, it's my inability to connect to the groups — particularly groups that were once a major source of happiness in my life, like AA or the Ducal Court — that makes me uncomfortable.

Drag is another example: one day I was walking to a court function, and looking at my shadow on the ground, and it suddenly occurred to me, "What an odd thing to do, dressing up like this and lip-synching, and making up a whole Drag Courts system around it.  What does it mean?"  And every time I dressed after that, I enjoyed it a little less and a little less until the very idea of going to all that effort for absolutely no reason just gave me a headache.

Many other pastimes that I've discussed on this page have gone the same way: Second Life, which you may remember was my overriding obsession for several months, all of a sudden wasn't fun anymore.  Nothing happened, there was no change in the environment, nor any loss of friends, nor any kind of insupportable drama.  I simply lost the key to the enjoyment of it.  And all the FaceBook games I used to play, one day I realized I wasn't enjoying them anymore, and just stopped cold.

The same thing happened with most of my friends: I lost the connection to them.  The urge to call them, to see them, to write to them simply vanished.  I still like them all, love them even, but I cannot connect to that emotion in any kind of real, active way.  Liking and loving have become abstract concepts instead of emotions. With only two exceptions, the only way I still relate to my friends is through FaceBook, because I can join in when I feel like a human being and then run silent when I don't.

And that's what it's really about: genuine feelings.  I don't have the factory-issued set of normal human emotions anymore; in some cases I can go weeks without feeling one real feeling that relates to something outside myself.  I feel depressed or manic, weepy or angry or anxious or blah, but these have absolutely nothing to do with what's going on around me, they're just a script running in the background that I can't turn off or edit.

Well, sometimes the emotion has an external source, but only the negative emotions: anger and loathing, in particular.  I am angry at my work, I loathe my parents, and those things take up a lot of room in my head; saying I love my job or love my parents is just words, an abstract response that has no effect on the visceral feeling; without the love to balance it out, the anger and loathing are my only feelings for these things.  And while it's easy to avoid my parents, and only mildly inconvenient to leave my job, I fear that it's going to keep on going, like a cancer, and eat up all the good feelings that I still have.

Like what happens if my intense love for Grandmother become an abstract word instead of a real emotion?  Or my love for my best friend Caroline?  Could I stand being around them?  What if food or orgasms became meaningless chores instead of makes-life-worth-living pleasures?  What if I suddenly find no more enjoyment in writing? If Lord Foxbridge and Danny Vandervere buggered off and left me alone, if I couldn't explicate my feelings here or on my message-board? What would be the point of life if I couldn't write?

How would I avoid suicide if I didn't have these things to live for?  I mean, these are the things I remind myself of when I'm feeling suicidal.  It's kind of scary, really.  To kill oneself not because one is in pain or despair, but because one can no longer feel and so why bother with the work of it all?

Unlike Allie at Hyperbole and a Half, I don't have an uplifting note to end on.  I'm in a long downswing right now and feeling nothing but an occasional spurt of anger.  I'll try being positive some other time.  Until then, here's something else I haven't quite lost interest in:

Quarterly Update?

It's been quite a while since I checked in here, but all of my writing-energy has been going into Lord Foxbridge Butts In.  I've been slogging along pretty steadily, finishing up the third chapter begun during NaNoWriMo, and adding a fourth chapter and an epilogue.  Once I completed the epilogue, the little red button popped up and I felt the thing was Done with a capital D.

So what do you do with a Done with a capital D novel?  You revise, of course!  I printed it out and found a dozen or so typos, and some clunky sentences, and some unclear passages, which I then spent the following couple of weeks doctoring.  It's funny how you can see things on paper that you can't see on a computer screen. I made three front-to-end passes at minor revisions; at the third pass, I got a feeling that if I didn't stop there, I'd fuck it up...it was an instinct, and only time will tell if the instinct was correct.

Since I couldn't fiddle with it any longer, I had to ponder next steps: I knew I wanted a paper book this time, not just an electronic publication (though there will of course be a Kindle once I have the book); so do I self-publish, or do I hunt up a publisher?  I took some advice from friends and family on FaceBook, and got a lot of great responses, the bulk of which was to submit to a publisher or two first, and if that doesn't get me anywhere, go ahead and self-publish.

Which then leaves one with the question of which publisher?  And should I try to get an agent first?  I looked at a lot of the agencies that seem to specialize in gay fiction, and discovered that they are all looking for "fresh new voices," styles that have never been tried before, what I consider avant-garde sort of stuff.  Since Lord Foxbridge is a redux of a style long dead, I didn't think any of them would really be interested.  Besides, a novel such as this would most likely end up being handled by a small house, anyway, and small houses don't really need agents.

So focusing on the small publishers who specialize in gay and lesbian fiction, I made a short list and started investigating them.  Most of the places I found were only actively seeking romance novels and erotica; and though my novel has some romance and some minor eroticism, that's really not the focus or the point.  I narrowed my search down to two houses, one of which published a friend's novel, and one of which was local.

I went with the local one first, Cleis Press, again largely due to instinct: I got a warm fuzzy feeling looking over their website.  Also, they published two series that had a certain influence on my creation of Lord Foxbridge: James Lear's Mitch Mitchell series and Mabel Maney's Nancy Clue series, both of which harken back to either the time of which I'm writing (the 20s and 30s) or the language of a long-gone writing style (the fulsome simplicity of the Nancy Drew stories), and which combine humor and homoeroticism with good old-fashioned mysteries.

But now I'm in the waiting pattern: the publishers are in receipt of my manuscript, but with a small house, a yea/nay response can take a while.  And it's considered bad form to submit to multiple small houses at once.  But the excitement attendant on having done something so decisive as to submit a manuscript to a publisher has carried me through the last week.  I'm doing that hope-for-the-best-but-brace-for-the-worst thing that is so much harder to do than it sounds like (and it sounds pretty hard).

Since I can't do any more to LFBI, I am starting to cogitate on the next installment in the series.  This will be a nice tidy country-house mystery, which will take place at Foxbridge Castle in the autumn of 1927.  The chief character introduced in the epilogue of LFBI, Mr. Silenus (AKA Lord Arthur Longueville) will be a major player in this second novel, as well as Sebastian's developing romantic relationship with Twister (Sir Oliver Paget), and his developing social/semierotic relationship with Caro (Lady Caroline Chatroy).  I'm going to have to come up with some more characters as well, since Sebastian only met ten people in the first novel who could possibly carry through to the second, and ten people just isn't enough for a proper house-party mystery.

We'll also be learning a great deal more about Sebastian's family, particularly Aunt Emily and Nanny, as well as his late mother and his distant father... as is usual for me, the mystery will be a scaffolding for a story about relationships and growing up. But at the moment, I am stuck for that spark of inspiration from which a story starts to grow; I have the house pretty much laid out, and that's not inspiring me, nor are the characters themselves.  I need a vision, a compelling parthenogenesis of an idea, to move me forward.

So that's what's going on with my writing.  The other major player in my life is, of course, my depression.  After several months of really severe depressive episodes interspersed with mild depressive episodes and the brief and rare hypomanic episode, I have finally changed one of my medications, and it has already caused an immense improvement: I've switched out my Zoloft for Lexapro, and the difference has been dramatic.  Over the last month, I've experienced a total of two days of feeling down, and only about twenty minutes of suicidal/sobbing depression--and even then, only after having slept poorly. 

And while I have been kind of extra-grouchy, without being depressed, I think that might be attributable to a side-effect of the new medication that is affecting my sexual function.  New medications often have such an effect, to which I eventually adapt, so I'm not too worried about it; but being really horny yet not feeling like doing much of anything about it does make one a bit edgy.

I've also started using a new NSAID pain reliever for my joint pain (nabumetone), and it has made a difference as well.  I'm still experiencing the joint-pain, which seems to be more stress-related than depression-related (at least lately), but I have whole days where I don't hurt at all.

The stress thing is my main issue right now, and it's almost all from work.  My office manager and office-mate is on leave for six weeks, our program manager resigned, and our front-desk intern was reassigned: so I find myself wearing a lot of hats without very much in the way of backup.  And while that is somewhat stressful, it's not really the basis of the bulk of my stress: that seems to be based in the simple fact that I feel I cannot under any circumstances call in sick.  Of course, I can call in sick, there are other backups, but the feeling that I can't weighs heavily on me.

This week I've had a lot more backup, people from other sites are coming in for two days a week, one who is expert at a huge facet of my office-manager's job (all dealings with Accounting, which are terrifically baroque as non-profit finances always are), and one who is experienced with the admin/clerical side of things who is helping me stay on top of my filing and data entry.  Knowing that there is backup available in case I do get sick will, I hope, prevent a lot of sick-making stress.

And that is pretty much all that's going on with me.  Seems like a lot, now I write it down, so it's no wonder I'm so tired.  Until we meet again, don't take any wooden igloos.

Seven Christmas Colds

I'd rather have the swans a-swimming, of course... when I came down with a new chest-cold this weekend, Caroline asked me when was the last time I wasn't sick on Christmas; I didn't know, so had to look through the archives here to find out: it was in 2005.  I've been sick on Christmas seven years in a row, and eight altogether in the eleven years I've had a blog.  That's kind of amazing... no wonder I've got where I hate Christmas, it has become the Season of Suffering.

I should be used to it by now:  I've been sick more often than not for the last thirteen months. And I knew before I started on Christmas stuff this year that I wasn't going to be up to much, so we were able to keep it simple: a smaller than usual tree, one gift only, dinner in a restaurant.  It was actually really nice and almost hassle-free.

However, my depression has made even this much Christmas a trial.  Not only am I always sick on Christmas, I'm very often depressed as well.  This year, I not only lacked Christmas Spirit, I lacked any kind of joy at all.  "Mildly pleased" was the best I've been able to manage this month.  I've also missed four days of work so far just this month, on mornings that I just could not make myself get out of bed, or couldn't stop crying, or both.

The depression is pretty much my whole life right now, and I'm ever so tired of it.  I have an appointment with my psychiatrist in a few months, but we're tweaking my meds in the meantime (increase the Wellbutrin, decrease the Zoloft); also, I was able to see my new GP this week (my former GP, whom you may remember as Dr. McHottie, retired this summer due to personal issues), and he gave me some things to do to improve my health.

Exercise was of course the first part, as everyone always tells me.  Even if I'm so depressed I can barely breathe, if I can only make myself do one thing on any given day, that one thing should be to walk briskly for fifteen minutes.  It will improve me mood, as I well know (but knowing and doing are such different things), and might help some of the ache in my joints.  But he also prescribed a steroid nasal spray (Flonase is the brand name, I forget the generic name) which should get these interminable head-colds in order.

The main problem with my nose is allergies, and Flonase is an allergy medication (I think), but the good doctor felt that if I could get my allergies under control, I will be less liable to catching colds nasally.  I got the impression that the steroids "strengthen" the nasal passages as well as keeping them clear.  Or something to that effect.  It will also help with the sleep apnea, which will hopefully give me better bedrest,  The stuff is awful, though; it smells like acetone and turpentine, with a bottom note of model-airplane glue; but now I can walk around saying that I'm on steroids.

Well, that's really all I have to report on.  I'll probably pop in to do a birthday/new-year's thing, or I might not.  Either way, I will have a new picture near the top of the screen.

Picture Post: Utter Randomonium

I'm still not in the mood to write here, so here are some piccies to hold you over... random stuff found around the web, and some of it is really random.  And if you're still craving some words from me, please visit Lord Foxbridge Butts In to bask in my brilliance.