No Shoes

I have all this stuff I want to write about, and right now, I'm just angry with the world.

Angry with myself.

The depression is in one of those states where if I don't get one practical thing accomplished each day -- one bit of vacuuming, one load of laundry, one cycle of the dishwasher, whatever -- I will sink into this pit of utter conviction of my own worthlessness.

And getting the one thing done doesn't, as it does when the depression is breaking, start me towards a positive cycle of energetic progress -- the "I did this thing! I can now do that too!" cycle. It's just standing on the shore building levees out of sand castles to keep the tide from coming in. It works for a little while, but the only thing that keeps the tide from coming in further is the tide actually turning. Or serious construction. And I don't know how to build the sea wall.

And I'm sitting here going, "It's not like I'm trying to hold down a 9-5, I just need to keep this damn household running", and "It's not like anything I'd be doing is actually important" which is a good sign that I'm utterly fucked up, because 'what I'd be doing' is the creative work of my fiction, the religious work of my theology stuff, the small business that I'd start if I had the money to actually do it and do I want to do the research to see if I can get a small business loan or should I just scrimp and save up what I need for the equipment, the occasional trying to dig up a part-time job to bring in a little more money and mostly failing at that like I'm failing at everything else and ... well, there's the cycle, now, isn't it? I can't even say I'm genuinely good at this shit, either, I'm not one of those people who is a genuinely inspired homemaker.

I was talking with my husband the other day about depression, about sorting out where all this crap in my head came from, about wanting to lay it all out and find some way of fixing it. Medical treatment. And maybe, somewhere, getting a sound enough diagnosis that I can maybe try to find a reasonable level of expectation of what someone with my condition can be reasonably expected to be able to do.

It's popular to make comparisons to physical disabilities with depression -- someone on usenet pointed out that "can't we just compromise on what we used to do" with depression was like saying "I know we used to run marathons together, but now you've got a broken leg, can't we compromise and just run for ten minutes" -- but they're so much more nebulous and hard to pin down in some ways.

Okay, my brain is broken. Some level of depression, some level of probably-PTSD, some level of "Oh, by the way, my mother is almost certainly a Borderline and I worry that I may be too" that doesn't chart out nice and simple. But is my sense of my inability a coddling of my weakness, a cop-out and laziness, a way to duck out of my responsibility to be a Good Woman, a Responsible Adult, a Credit To The Family, to Not Waste My Intellect or whatever the fuck else I'm supposed to be doing with myself, or am I genuinely so fucking crazy that whatever I get accomplished is bonus? What is reasonable to expect of someone with my level of defective neurowhateverage?

It doesn't help that the stuff that I want to be doing isn't the stuff that gets the "Oh, you're gainfully employed" hits going. It's not like I'm going to be paid the big bucks or indeed much at all for theology research, writing novels, making pots, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. Culturally speaking, that's the frivolous stuff, stuff that should be set aside for the good of someone or other, who it is varies -- humankind or the company or the family or something else. It's easy to blow it off as not enough to make me not-a-failure, even if I were actually getting it done, especially on days like this.

There's that joke-saying thing, "I used to be upset about having no shoes, until I met a man with no feet." I have no idea what my mental leg condition is whatsoever -- I don't know how to tell -- I don't know whether I'm bitching myself for being unable to walk because I have no shoes, an achey knee, or because I have no goddamn feet.

I'll write something interesting and worthwhile some other time. For now I'm angry at the world, and not capable of contributing anything of any fucking value to it.