Since last time...

I’ve had a rough few weeks. Something I’ve probably mentioned before is that it is very hard for me to blog about my mental state when it’s at its lowest. Thus this blog has never served the purpose that I hoped it would when I first set it up. But it does have some value to me and, quite surprisingly, to others. So I keep it up.

A few truths about this blog have developed recently. I’m sharing these because since my last entry a few weeks ago some readers have communicated to me their dissatisfaction with the sporadic nature of this project. Knowing how I write this thing might help these readers understand why I dip in an out of it as I do.

• I never read old entries. I don’t like reading what I’ve written here. This is unusual; typically I read and reread what I’ve written endlessly, especially editable web content. But I learned early on that if I look back on this blog then I just want to delete it all. I’m glad I had the foresight to do this anonymously or there’s no way I’d let some/most of the whining that I’ve done here stand.


• I don’t always blog when I want to. There have been a number of times over the last few weeks when I really did want to sit down and pour out an entry but I didn’t. Mainly because my proper writing career is becoming busier all of the time and for most of the past few weeks I was dealing with looming deadlines. Right now my nearest deadline is two months out; my latest deadline was yesterday and I just made that one. So, I couldn’t spend my writing energy here. Think I’m depressed now? Check with me when the electric company has cut power because I stopped paying the bill!


• I only blog when I want to. I tried to establish a regimented schedule for this blog as I do with my professional blogs but that just didn’t work. Any value that this project has evaporates when I try to put it on a schedule.

Oh, and one more thing. As evidenced by my previous entry I will from time to time be posting sponsored entries. I will maintain the honest, confessional voice that I’ve established here but the topics might seem a bit strange. Please just bear with me on these; can’t fault me for making a buck, right? Between us, you’ll always know that they are sponsored by the last line of the entry, ok?

OK, back to the last few weeks. As I mentioned above I’ve had a lot of deadlines. This means more work and that’s a good thing. But it also means that a lot of different people have been depending on me for lots of different things. I learned that this can be a source of anxiety. It makes sense – if I get anxious in social situations then it seems natural that I’d get pretty anxious when others in my society are counting on me for something.

Another source of stress is the fact that with each advancement I make in my career I find myself with a whole new audience to disappoint. It never occurs to me when I’m trying to get that next great gig but when I do I always tell myself that here’s another first impression for me to totally screw up.

And the cycle starts – I get anxious and nervous, I start to feel stress because I just know that this time I won’t be able to pull it off, nervousness turns to self-loathing which turns into a full-on fit of depression. Then I spend a day or two curled up in bed or, more likely, drunk. Then I roust myself, develop a plan and execute it - usually just in time for the deadline.

Now, imagine going through that over and over with overlapping deadlines and you’ll have an idea of how I spent July and the first week of August.

I refused a new job offer last week for obvious reasons.

Oh, and regarding the St. John’s Wort… As you know I’ve been trying to find a brand that I like. Here in the US herbals aren’t regulated so I never know if I’m getting the same thing from brand to brand. I tried a few different ones and found that I preferred Nature Made. I’d bought a new bottle back in June but it just didn’t seem to be doing the job this time around. Around mid-July I crashed really hard. As I was slogging through my emotional fog it suddenly occurred to me that I might be taking the wrong dose.

I checked the bottle and sure enough it said two pills three times a day. My previous bottle – a different brand – had been one times three and it just didn’t occur to me to check when I switched back. Things improved noticeably after that.

One more thing before I close this behemoth of an entry. Suicide returned during the darkest days of July. I hadn’t even noticed that it had left but it had and I can now say SJW really works. For months I hadn’t thought about suicide and it was lovely, looking back. But now its back and it’s probably going to take me a while to shake it. But now I know that I can.

Until next time,
Yours,
Ray

Dealing With an Audience

Something unexpected has happened with this little blog. It has a readership. Now of course this was the ultimate intention – it is a blog, after all – I just didn’t expect it to happen so very soon.

Blogging about my depression was really the natural choice for me. I’ve tried writing personal journals about the problem but they invariably turned into ponderous, unreadable and ultimately unwritable examinations of the minutiae of my emotional life; nobody-understands-me manifestos. Blogging and the possibility that others would find and read it, awareness of a potential audience, kept that from happening. The possible pitfall of a blog is to swing too far towards pleasing the reader. The same impulse that drives me to answer “fine” whenever asked how I am has the danger of making this exercise vapidly meaningless.

But back to my small audience. I’ve been submitting my entries to social indexing sites like technorati and digg so my blog wouldn’t be allowed to retreat into comfortable, naval gazing anonymity and I knew that doing so would eventually lead to a readership. I just didn’t expect it to happen quite so quickly. And in referring to my readership don’t think that I’m getting swept up in anything here. I maintain quite a few blogs whose readerships range from two or three a day to ten thousand a day. The point about this audience is that it is huge in my mind when I write. Even though I’ve taken steps to remove the safety net, the fact of a real readership that exists now instead of in the hypothetical future substantially changes the way that I think about this project and, more importantly, how and what I write about.

Take this entry, for example.

So, where do I go from here? Initially I’d planned on a mixture of entries that more or less chronicled depressive events from life, sort of A Portrait of the Depressed Blogger as a Young Man, and entries about my current attempts at self help therapies. This would have all been foundation building. Not that my eventual readers would have cared. I really wouldn’t have expected them to find my blog six months in and go back to read all of the previous entries. But I would have had the foundation making blogging about my ongoing Portrait of a Middle Aged Man easier to maintain.

But the fact of the sudden readership makes me reconsider this plan. This isn’t a intellectual decision; it really happens at a gut level. When I sit down to write or even think about writing this current audience as already standing over my shoulder. Who really wants, I ask myself, to read about what would have been a non-event to anyone else in eighth grade algebra but turned into a festering thorn that took me fifteen years to come to terms with? As much as I’d like to be selfish and can theoretically defend selfishness in this case, now that I have readers with personalities everything’s changed.

Plus the huge amount about depression and the wide variety of therapies available (Light therapy? Really?) is staggering. So many seem to hold promise making it difficult to decide where to start. Dwelling on the past seems like a waste of time when there’s so much to deal with in the present.

What this hell is this entry about anyway? Well, I really can’t say except that I intended it to help me work out the new dynamic of the audience. (An audience for which I’m incredibly grateful, in case that wasn’t clear.) I’m really not sure if I’ve done that.