Addicted to misery?

Well. That was a slightly longer hiatus than I intended. It seems that my body chose almost the exact moment that I handed in my final assignment (well, the exact day anyway) to have me come down with the mother of all colds. And of course I've been way too busy at work to even contemplate taking proper time off to get better, so I've been shuffling and snivelling along as best as I could. Finally starting to feel a bit better, but still really tired. Which has been fairly fatal for my motivation and energy levels. I was so looking forward to getting my course over with so that I could get started on the million of other things I want to do, then I have to take to my sick bed. Typical!

What's also typical is that I'm writing this when I should be working. In fairness, it's after 9pm at night and I'm at home so I really shouldn't *have* to be working, but there you go. It's just one of those weeks and my lack of productivity due to this lovely lurgy I've had has gotten me really far behind.

But anyway. None of that is remotely interesting or informative, unless you had a desperate desire to know what's up with my work schedule and immune system. And frankly, if that is the case, I think you might need a little more help than reading this blog can possibly give you.

I've had a post floating around my mind for the past week or so. I'm still not sure if I'm ready to write it, but I guess we'll see by the end of this.

It's occurred to me lately that my depression and anxiety issues have a lot in common with addiction, for me at least. I've been thinking about how come I've changed now; how come I've had this revelation, this clarity now and not before? Or later? And is it just sheer luck - do you just have to sit around waiting for this revelation to hit? It seems to me that it's a lot like when addicts reach that last straw, their rock bottom or whichever other cliche you choose to use, that finally makes them want to change and gives them the strength to be more successful with change than they were before.

But the problem with that is that it suggests that it's up to the fates to decide when that moment is. That doesn't seem quite right.  Or fair. But I honestly don't know why I came to my sense now instead of years ago. I know that I had a bigger wake up call than I've had in a long time - someone was incredibly honest with me and (after hours of crying and wailing) that somehow finally made me see things more clearly. It made me realise how much of my life I was wasting, how many opportunities were being ruined and how this would never change if I didn't change.

But I have no idea how anyone else is supposed to get to that moment. Part of the reason that this has been floating around my head was that I was wondering if maybe I should consider doing some sort of voluntary work within the mental health/counselling sector. I have no idea if I'd be any good at it, as I'm not generally a very touchy feely sort of person, but I feel like I'd like to make my experiences count for something. But if having this sort of moment of clarity is so arbitrary, what could I really do for someone?

And whilst I'm talking about this in terms of addiction, it brings up the whole idea of balance. I've never been very good with balance - always been all or nothing. That's part of the perfectionist trait in me, I suppose - that it's completely perfect, or it's completely shit. No in betweens. But this is more like an eating disorder than an alcohol or drug addiction - I may have gotten addicted to misery to some degree, but I can't avoid negative emotions anymore than an anorexic can avoid food. So I have to find some way to balance things. To know when it's ok to be upset, and let myself feel that, and when enough is enough.

I've been struggling a little with that lately. Being sick but having so much to do at work wiped me out, and now I'm finding it hard to get out of that 'just make it home and crawl into bed' phase, even though I'm mostly better by now. It's been too easy to slip back into old habits of spending the entire night in various states of consciousness in front of a tv and/or computer screen.

And there's lots of other things where I find it hard to find some acceptable balance. I shan't go into all of that now, because I don't have the time (and this post has been in my drafts folder for far too long), and I don't really have the mental energy for it either. I'm finding less impetus to think or write about what's going on in my head. I can't quite figure out if that's part of the post-cold laziness, or if I'm getting sick of talking about it, and whether either of those is a good thing or a bad thing.

All in all, that's a rather meandering, pointless post, for which I apologise. I have funner posts in the works but I apparently now have a slightly busy weekend ahead of me involving hyperactive children, so it may be a while before those come to complete fruition. In the meantime, I'm thanking the big spaghetti monster in the sky that it's Friday and I'm gonna enjoy the hell out of this Wispa that's been in my office drawer for two days. It's the little things, y'know?

The Fear.

I've been having some trouble thinking of anything to blog about recently. I've got ideas for scripts that I want to write, but I don't really want to write too much about that here. Not that I think anyone is about to run off with my ideas, but I'd just rather keep all of that contained until I'm ready to unleash it onto an unsuspecting world.

Writing is a funny thing. It's something that I've wanted to do all of my life, yet it's also something that I've struggled with for much of my life. As the saying goes, I don't like to write, I like to have written. And that's not uncommon for successful and talented writers, so I believe. For me, writing isn't this enormous, overpowering passionate endeavour - the sort of thing that it pains me not to do. It's simply the way I communicate and engage with the world. It's not all that dramatic, it's just the way I best express myself (I hope, anyway) and the way my head works. I hope that's a vaguely positive thing for my ambitions to be a writer, I don't really know.

I've always had a bit of a fear about writing as well. I was good at academic writing - really good. And one day, when I finally find my dissertations from uni, I'll throw them up here and prove that. I wasn't any kind of a genius, but I was a good writer when it came to essays and dissertations on arts subjects. But I've always struggled with anything more personal and more creative. There's several reasons for that. A great deal of it is simply laziness and lack of motivation. Part of it is that I don't do well without structure and deadlines imposed externally for this sort of thing. But a really big bit of it is just fear. Fear of failing. I've wanted to be a writer my whole life - what if I try and it turns out I'm shit? Easier to just make excuses about why I can't write, n'est-ce pas?

But I'm sick of that. I'm sick of living in limbo all the time, in some sort of suspended animation. And I've finally realised that it doesn't have to be so all or nothing. A huge part of my problems are that I make everything black and white; all or nothing. It's perfect or it's the worst thing in the world. I'm slowly starting to see that things aren't quite like that. Insert some cliche about life being about the journey, not the destination, here. I don't have to be a perfect writer right now. I don't have to sit down, write the most amazing script in the world, have it commissioned and win a bunch of awards for it. At least, not right now. I need to practice. It's a muscle that needs exercised, whichever part of my brain that deals with the writing end of things. The only way that I'll get to be a good writer is to keep trying and to learn.

And that's how I feel about a lot of things now. I've spent so much of my (adult) life with these ridiculous perfectionist standards. Either it's perfect, or it's shit. No in between, no second chances. But that's just beyond daft. Life doesn't work that way - and nor should it. We have to continually strive to be better, to get better, to learn. To not beat ourselves up for not being the perfect person that we want to be right.this.second, but to keep trying to be the person we want to be. We won't ever reach perfection, but we might at least get to something approaching happy. And that's got to be worth trying, right?

Hmm, this was supposed to be about writing and it ended up being about my head, again. I'm not sure if that's because writing is so tied into my personality, or because I'm in danger of becoming obsessed with the inner workings of my mind. It may not appear obvious, but I truly am trying not to be self-involved with this - I'm trying to be self-aware instead.

Anyway, if any of the two or three of you reading this feel like giving me writing assignments to try to give me some sort of deadline or structure, please feel free! I'm not writing your essays for uni, though. Not without payment, at least.

And something else while it occurs to me...

Something else that I left out of that previous post, or that I didn't fully formulate in my head or something - can anyone tell me why it is that we whine so much to other people when we're depressed? Whether it's people who know about the depression, or just general complaints about life to other people, I don't think I'm the only depression sufferer who does this.

I just complain all the bloody time. It's like a compulsion. What is that? A cry for help and/or attention? Some sort of need to wave my arms about and say "someone look at me, I'm special, I'm different, I have all these problems"? I mean, it's just weird to me, and I'm the one doing it. It's weird that I am so protective and secretive about this on the one hand, yet don't bloody shut up about it (implicitly or explicitly) on the other.

I'm trying to figure out why it is that I have felt the need to bombard people with my misery. Because it's more than just a mere statement of how I'm feeling. There's some fucked up part of me that almost *likes* doing this, that wants to keep complaining to other people. I suppose it's for the attention, it's to have people feel sorry for me and be nice to me. And then I think it just takes on a life of its own. I was talking to my friend last night - an incredibly patient and wonderful person, who has had a lot to deal with from me lately! - and I said that my head feels like a separate entity sometimes, an independent being with an agenda of its own. Mainly, to fuck me over.

I feel now like it's almost as if I have some sort of symbiotic parasite (is that the one where you feed off each other? I can't remember and can't be arsed wikipedia-ing it). Or is there a parasite where you feed off each other but it eventually kills you? That's what I feel like. I keep giving into this familiar and almost compulsive behaviour, because I have some sort of bizarre need to do this, yet it is cumulatively (is that even a word? Clearly I'd be shit at Countdown) damaging me. But I can't cut it out, it doesn't work like that. I need to train it to leave or something. I'm not sure, my analogy has now completely fallen down.

But I really have to pay more attention to that. I know I can't bottle everything up, but I just perpetuate the cycle if I'm constantly complaining and dwelling on the negatives. But there's just something in me that feels like that's something that I need to do sometimes. This has all made me realise that I can't be like that anymore. I need to be "special" or whatever by kicking this thing's ass, not by letting it kick mine.