Things I have learned this week
A few weeks ago I started to fall off of the "well-maintained depression and brain chemistry" train and basically landed in the "missed a couple of days of Celexa just in time for insomnia and stress" ditch.
Which, you know, I was aware of as it was happening, but it's the same kind of awareness you have when you're doing home repair and the thing you're doing above your head comes loose and everything moves SUPER SLOW but there is nothing you can do but watch while it happens. And let's face it, I'm a popcorn kind of guy with the human condition (See Also: my ridiculous and awful Greyhound stories), including my own condition as someone living as human.
In any case, I learned some things this week that I'm finding amusing enough to share.
1) There is a liminal block of time in my day in which I am Very Eloquent with my hands and utterly useless with my mouth.
It runs roughly from 4-7 AM, after which I obtain the power of human speech. I've now got multiple proofs of this, including from this morning's adventure to Starbucks (because they open at 5 AM and I have some funds on my card and I wanted to write away from the house) in which I knew what I wanted and had to try something like four times to get the words "grande Earl Grey" out of my mouth. To his credit, the barista was very kind and did not laugh at me too much.
2) I have really strong feelings about blogging platforms.
During a workshop, I actually questioned a presenter who contrasted a WordPress-style blog (which looked like a slick and traditional website) and a Tumblr-style blog (which had stylistically consistent photography but was more magazine-style) who tried to use the Tumbl-blog as an example of website fail. I don't know if it's a generational thing, or if I'm just more inured to social media than I thought, but people, neither of these things is "better" than the other except that you'll have different audiences, and different intentions, and just because this one individual gave up on her project does not prove your thesis when I can point to more successful examples than I have fingers.
3) Getting Better is a Ridiculous Process
As things improve incrementally, I keep noticing that when I stumble, I react differently. Like, this week instead of just going silent and having panic attacks, I was joking about how I had "exhausted my vulnerability pool and moved on to my hostility pool." I mean, things were still raw, but they were raw in ways that allowed me to simply behave in possibly socially inappropriate ways rather than removing myself from society completely.
4) Falling Down the Fanfic Rabbit Hole is Both Satisfying and Frustrating
Satisfying because I really do love it as an art form and reaction to media, and the culture has many things to recommend it within the in-group once you abandon the stigma (which, let's be honest, is all about misogyny). Frustrating because being more or less not involved in this side of things for a while means that the signal to noise ratio in my reading attempts aren't yet well-tuned.
5) Sometimes People Pick Up When I Drop the Ball, and Those People are Awesome
So yeah. That thing with the train and the ditch? Means I am not always doing simple things in appropriate ways. Like, little stuff that supports bigger stuff? Comes apart. Gets ignored. Big stuff gets put off. Good choices get replaced by bad ones. And then someone is like, "Hey, so I have seven cakes in my car for the thing" and I am like, "HOLY FUCK, THANK YOU UNIVERSE FOR THIS INDIVIDUAL, AND THANK YOU INDIVIDUAL FOR SAVING ME AND OTHERS FROM ME." This is not a thing I ever want to expect, or to feel entitled to, but so grateful. Wow.
So yeah. That's...yeah. That happened.
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This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com