What Eug Thinks

Let’s not talk about 2011. Not much, at least, maybe just enough to justify why we might want to forget it. It was a year of deaths and diseases, of trying to move forward in life and—largely—failing. This wasn’t universally true, since there were high points: weddings, new friends, realizations about others and self… even in the bad years, life marches on and wisdom accumulates, even if neither moves at a regular or predictable pace. But on the whole, this was a year best left behind.

So what, then, for 2012? Resolutions? Let’s see: my one resolution for 2012 is to not rely on resolution.

Since I’ve started therapy, I’ve discovered enough flaws (and I’ll get to my usage of that word soon enough) in my character that I should probably work on. The problem is that one of them is shying away from commitment. Well, okay, no; it isn’t so much shying away from commitment as being too married to commitment, while simultaneously being terrified of it. When I make a resolution or commitment I tend to switch into all-or-nothing mode. I can’t accept anything less than optimized perfection, and if anything less seems likely, I prefer not trying at all. That’s the reason why one missed gym session leads to months (sometimes years) of dormancy, or why a late start in a morning turns into a wasted day, which turns into an empty week, or why one mistake on a project makes me want to burn it all to the ground.

It’s all well and good to try and tell myself that it’s okay to make mistakes, but I do already know that. Obviously it’s okay to make mistakes, since I’ve made plenty and am still alive. The issue, instead of any potential grotesque consequences of mistakes, is the value judgment that my inner critic assigns to them. A mistake is never simply an error, it’s an inadequacy, a flaw.

Which reminds me: I used the word “flaw” earlier because it is flaws that I’ve found in myself. There’s no real way to accurately sugarcoat it. But what I (and I’m sure many others) do is to take that word and all of its connoted value judgments and internalize them automatically.

I was scanning through a book at the Aikido dojo one night: Zen Driving. There was a phrase used in it, something to the effect of “observe without judgment”. This phrase stuck with me over the next few months. I’m pretty far from a defensive driver, and it works for me in terms of results. I cut through traffic pretty well without getting into or causing any accidents. Along the way, however, I get really irritated with other people. Passengers in my car are often treated to “conversations” between me and the other drivers on the road, ranging from brief mutters to (on occasion) one-sided yelling matches. It’s probably no surprise that this does not make Alice happy to be my passenger.

When she’d talk to me about it, though, I’d get defensive: yeah, I didn’t need to get so mad at other anonymous drivers, but come on! Look at the stupid things they were doing! Look how they were getting in my way! I thought I couldn’t let go of my righteous anger without also ceding my correctness.

One of the tenets of Zen, especially as it’s understood by laymen (including myself), is to let go of things; in effect, to avoid value judgments and just be. However, the misunderstanding is that “right” and “wrong” are value judgments—and thus to be avoided—when in reality they’re states of being. Zen Driving was telling me what my ego needed to hear, that letting go of the value judgment and the attached emotions didn’t necessitate letting go of the truth of the situation and the attached actions. If somebody cuts me off to go half the speed limit in front of me, I can change lanes and floor my way past without getting angry about it. The “good” and “bad” of the situation are not for me to judge, and really the “right” or “wrong”—while entirely in the realm of logic—are moot. All that matters is that the situation is as it is, and I should change (or not change) my actions accordingly and continue on my way.

So these characteristics I’ve discovered in myself—the avoidance behavior, the distractability, the catastrophizing, and many others—are flaws, because “flaw” is just a state of being. A characteristic can be a “flaw” without being “good” or “bad” in reflection on me; contrary to what my inner critic thinks, I and others can have flaws without reducing our value as people. The flaw is, however, part of the reality of the situation, and I should try to change my actions to compensate. A missed gym session doesn’t make me a failure as a human being, it just means I should try harder to get myself to the gym next time. Making a wrong play in a game doesn’t mean that I should scrap it all and start over, it just means I should learn from what happened and continue trying to make the best of the changed situation. A mistake isn’t a showstopper, isn’t a reason to give up, it’s just a new facet of reality to adjust to.

This is easier said than done, of course, and resolutions and lofty goals don’t exactly help in promoting the malleable nature of fallacy. Resolutions are made to be all-or-nothing. Lose fifty pounds or bust! Read ninety books this year! Make seven million dollars! The focus is constantly on the endpoint, not the progress made leading towards it.

So my resolution this year is to, while I’m trying new things and starting new projects and learning new skills and trying to make myself better in a variety of ways, not focus on the endpoints. It’s to let myself make mistakes, and to not treat those mistakes as fatal, as reasons to quit and see what happens next week, or next year, but to try my best to adapt to their effects right then, and continue onward. It’s to let go of the value judgments I apply to myself, and to instead concentrate on my state of being. So no, no resolutions… just Zen.

There are a lot of things I’m lacking in life. I’m talking about intangibles here: human interaction, productivity, mastery, fulfillment, those kinds of things. My chains of action are broken for various reasons, and when they break I often find myself thinking about exactly what it is I need in that situation, and how to go about getting it.

The thing is that I do know (in most of these cases) what I need and how to get it. But trying to get moving along the chain of action just doesn’t work. My brain fuzzes out and I feel… well, I feel a lot of things. And this post isn’t so much about disorders I may or may not have and how they’re messing with me as it is about how I feel.

I feel like shit.

One of the things I’ve identified that I need is social interaction, and the companionship and intimacy that comes with that. And it’s pretty obvious how I should go about getting it: meet people, talk to people, do things with people, get to know people. Easy, right? And I’m not even particularly shy or nervous about any of that; I’m confident (or at least I can pretend to myself and others that I’m confident) and shameless, and when I’m in the moment everything is great. However, getting to the moment is the problem. Getting up the motivation to spend the effort going out and doing things with people is really hard. Most of the time Inner Critic is screaming about how traffic and parking will be annoying and time-consuming, how food and drink will be expensive and how I shouldn’t spend that money, how terrible it will be to be away from my home and my things, how there will be people out there who I don’t trust, etc. And all that, of course, is all assuming I was able to get myself to make those plans with other people in the first place. Goddamned Inner Critic.

Even worse than all that, though, is that I can barely get myself to talk to people in the first place. Tonight I was lonely, what with Alice being in France, myself having had an unproductively bad mental day, and some other crap I won’t get into here. That scenario isn’t particularly out of the ordinary. Sometimes even when Alice is here in the room with me I’ll still feel lonely. It reminds me of the lines from Robert Haas’s poem “The Privilege of Being”: “…the woman says to the man,/I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized/that you could not, as much as I love you,/dear heart, cure my loneliness,/wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him/that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.”

Anyway, here’s what tends to happen when I feel lonely like that: I throw some IMs or text messages or phone calls at my close (read: “safe”) friends, but they aren’t responsive because they’re busy with their own lives (which is something I’m working really, REALLY hard to stop BLAMING them for; that’s one of my thought distortions that actively and unfairly hurts other people). I bounce back and forth–half-heartedly but hungrily–between social networking sites and forums between feeble attempts to do something meaningful on my own. I consider participating–writing some replies in threads that interest me, maybe asking some questions, maybe even making a thread about something–but almost invariably back down with thoughts of how much mental effort it would take to commit myself and engage and deal with potential negativity and etc. Finally, I look at my instant messenger contact list, thinking that I’ll IM someone and talk for a while, but in pretty much every instance Inner Critic will come up with a reason why I shouldn’t. Some of these reasons have to do with how I think the other person perceives me, and are usually untrue. Other reasons have to do with ways that I might find the interaction stressful, because of supposed characteristics of the other person, and those are almost always untrue. So this person thinks that I’m uncool and wouldn’t want to talk to me, that person might be too gregarious and thus annoying to talk to, and this other person has been bothered by me quite enough and should be left alone.

THOUGHT DISTORTIONS (usually).

If I’m unresponsive to you, it almost certainly has nothing to do with my having any (real) negative opinion of you. If I don’t answer your messages or return your emails or schedule lunches with you, it’s because this asshole in my head is holding me back, whether directly (via the methods above) or indirectly (via depressive lack of motivation or via anxiety-driven avoidance behavior). The truth is that I want to talk, I want to hang out, I want to get to know you and let you know me. I’m not saying do the work and compensate for my crap, I’m just saying please don’t think I’m intending to be a jerk, and please don’t give up.

Yeah, I’m talking to you.

(Lots of people say things like “I’m talking to you” or “all of you are so wonderful” or other similar generalizations in touchy-feely posts, and there’s always the people (like me) who think, “I’m sure that doesn’t include me.” I considered putting a huge list of names here to make the point that yes, I actually DO mean YOU, but on further examination that idea seemed kind of silly. Suffice it to say that I can only think of MAYBE two or three people in the world who I would not want to have an earnest conversation with, so unless you know of some giant reason for me to hate you, it’s safe to say you’re included. No, a spat over Facebook comments (to give one particular example) is not a giant reason, at least not on my end.)

Anyway, so yeah, there’s that.

I recorded myself playing Skip To My Lou, the second song I learned on piano back in mid-September. It isn’t perfect, but both my piano teacher and my therapist say I have to get used to imperfection being okay.  :P

In other musical news, Alice and I went to World of Music today and ended up walking out with instruments! I got a slightly used Jupiter alto sax after finding out that there are no baritone saxes anywhere, ever, except ones that cost thousands of dollars. Alice got herself a used French horn for super cheap. Now we’ll have instruments to play in the Saratoga Community Band! HUZZAH

19:28:41 Ryan Deal did i buy dead island?
19:29:25 me i… thought you did?
19:29:34 me during the thanksgiving sale
19:29:13 Ryan Deal …lol
19:29:14 Ryan Deal i did
19:29:15 Ryan Deal
19:29:55 me STEAMED

I decided that I wanted to record myself playing every song I learned in the course of learning to play piano, to have a record of my progress. Here’s the first song I learned, given to me at my very first lesson: Old German Dance.

In other musical news, Alice and I are considering joining the Saratoga Community Band. She’s going to play percussion, though she’s got an eye on picking the French horn up again. I might take up the baritone sax again, though I’d prefer to play alto, or pick up one of the other related woodwinds like soprano sax or clarinet. In any case, we’ve both been wanting to do something like this for a while, so why not? Should be fun. You guys should join us!  :D

Today my therapist told me that I should try doing absolutely nothing for a day. Nothing at all. No work, no play, no chores, no activity other than just being where I am. She said I might need to do this for more than one day even, maybe three or more. I know most of you are thinking that this sounds pretty sweet. Alice’s mom said that she wanted to start seeing my therapist too. But me… I don’t think I have the capability to do this.

It seems one of the major concepts in the vocabulary of Generalized Anxiety Disorder is that of the “inner critic”. The inner critic is the voice inside your head that is constantly telling you that what you’re thinking or doing is wrong. A lot of different things can fuel this voice: fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, etc. Notice a theme there? Those various fears can, in turn, come from a variety of sources: parents who were too strict (or too lax), relationship trauma, your own unsubstantiated suppositions….

Speaking of which, let’s clear up the most common and most damaging misconception about mental disorders like GAD or Major Depressive Disorder or ADHD. YES: everyone is anxious or depressed sometimes, and everyone has to deal with distractions. NO: this does not mean that these disorders are just made-up excuses to avoid dealing with feelings that “everybody has sometimes”.

GAD and MDD and ADHD are caused by imbalances in brain chemistry caused by physiological issues, the same way that diabetes is caused by an imbalance in blood sugar caused by physiological issues. Someone with GAD/MDD/ADHD can’t just get over it through willpower (“calm down”/”buck up”/”concentrate”), just as someone with diabetes can’t just get over it. A diabetic needs insulin to manage the disease, and someone with GAD/MDD/ADHD needs medication to manage those diseases as well.

The takeaway from this is two-fold. First, telling someone with GAD/MDD/ADHD that “Oh, I feel that way too sometimes, you just need to get over it” is supremely unhelpful and callous. The fact of the matter is that YOUR feelings of anxiety/depression/distraction may be normal—or they may even mean that you actually also have a disorder and are just better able to deal with it—but it has NOTHING to do with a person who has a disorder and cannot deal with it without help. It’s like having a headache; people have different levels of head pain and pain tolerance, so one person has no basis or right to judge another person’s headache intensity and tell them to just deal with it.

Second: In the above comparison between mental disorders and diabetes, it’s true that it isn’t an exact comparison. It’s true that brain chemistry and thoughts/mood affect each other in both directions. Just as brain chemistry imbalances affect a person’s thoughts and mood, the person’s thoughts and mood do alter both their momentary brain chemistry and the way their brain adapts on a long-term basis. However, this doesn’t mean that these diseases are any less serious, and that all a person needs to do is “have a positive attitude”. Rather, it means we’re fortunate that these diseases can sometimes be treated by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy IN ADDITION TO medication.

(While we’re clearing up damaging misconceptions, my having “depression” doesn’t mean that I’m “sad” and need to “cheer up”. It isn’t the same as watching a sad movie or dealing with a breakup. From a psychiatric standpoint depression has more to do with energy and acute motivation than with happiness or sadness. Sadness is an indirect effect of having depression, not a symptom of it. But that’s a discussion for another post, since this one is about anxiety and not depression.)

ANYWAY, now that I’ve digressed enough, let’s get back to the inner critic.

In my months of therapy thus far, I’ve been able to identify a lot of the reasoning behind my “thought distortions”—the CBT term for the crap that your inner critic spouts to make you feel like an idiot or a failure—and see that that reasoning is generally quite faulty. For instance: I should NOT procrastinate on things I need to do, because having to spend that time/effort later instead of right now is NOT a net gain. Or more specifically, and as a better example of how convoluted Mr. Critic can get: I should NOT avoid doing my writing, because my work will NOT always turn out to be terrible, and thus I will NOT fail utterly as a writer, and even if in the worst case I do it does NOT mean that I’m a failure at life, and my friends will NOT all abandon me, Alice will NOT leave me, and my parents will NOT stop loving me.

Identifying the thought distortions, however, isn’t enough. Being able to recognize them, I can now sometimes talk myself off the ledge with logic and reason, but that kind of success is infrequent and unreliable. For whatever reason(s), I’m holding on to my inner critic and telling myself that his advice is actually still valid and useful to me when it really isn’t: trying to improve my work or do work as well as I can will result in a finished product that may or may not be great, while thus far trying to make my work PERFECT has resulted in no finished product whatsoever.

So my therapist told me that I should stop thinking of my inner critic as a part of me that may or may not be right, but rather as an invader, someone who—right or wrong—is trying to interfere with my life and should be ignored. I should give him a name and a face, recognize him for the enemy he is, and tell him to SHUT UP.

How does this relate to doing nothing for a day? Alice (jokingly, I hope) asked me how this would be different from what I really do. The key here is that I’m not “doing nothing” for a day as much as I’m aggressively “not doing anything”. My inner critic is so pervasive, so entrenched in my thought patterns that he’s constantly whispering in my ear no matter what I’m doing or not doing, telling me that whatever I’m doing or not doing is WRONG. It doesn’t matter if it’s working at a regular job, working independently, doing chores or running errands, playing video games, reading, watching a movie, or any other form of leisure/hobby activity, hanging out with friends, or hanging out with Alice; my inner critic is always telling me that whichever thing I happen to be doing is the wrong thing. Often he even chimes in on a smaller scale: instead of reading THIS book, I should be reading THAT one. The final blow is that once my inner critic has paralyzed me into doing nothing out of fear that whatever I do will be the wrong choice, he then proceeds to yell at me ABOUT doing nothing.

My inner critic is an asshole who makes me miserable. He’s my brain’s evil roommate who sabotages everything my brain does and doesn’t even pay rent in exchange. I have to make him move out, but he won’t go willingly. So what my therapist suggested as a nuclear option is for me to spend an entire day staring him in the face and telling him to SHUT THE HELL UP.

I don’t know if I’m going to go through with it. Like I said, even when I’m not doing anything that damned inner critic is screaming at me louder than ever. I don’t know if I’d be ABLE to go through an entire day doing absolutely nothing; I’d be going crazy to do something productive or even just go play video games (which, as we covered, is still “something” in this context). But then I think about it and realize that that’s actually HIM talking, trying to sabotage me again.

I don’t know, man.

Yesterday I took that ADD test, and it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I went in thinking that they’d give me the usual questionnaire-style deal where they describe a feeling (“I often feel that my gassiness is keeping me from realizing my learning potential”) and I tell them how closely that statement fits me (“Extremely vaguely, Very vaguely, Vaguely, Somewhat vaguely, Not vaguely at all”). Instead I was given what’s apparently called the Continuous Performance Test II (CPT-II).

They sat me down in front of a computer and showed me a black screen. White letters started flashing in the center of the screen, one at a time, at varying intervals. Sometimes letters would come rapid-fire, one after the other, maybe half a second apart. Other times there would be as long as a 7-8 second pause between letters. My job was to click the mouse every time I saw any letter other than X. Cursor location didn’t matter, only the speed and accuracy of my click timing mattered. The test lasted for something like ten minutes.

I didn’t know before or during the test what they’d be looking for, but good lord did I ever fail by any metric. My response times, honed by years of martial arts, fast driving, and video games, were probably pretty decent. However, that seemed to vary a great deal. Sometimes I would get into a rhythm and start anticipating, clicking before letters appeared or even when no letter was being shown at all. Other times I could tell my attention was lapsing, and I’d be as much as a full second late on clicking for a letter. There were instances where I found myself unconsciously looking away from the screen at something else in the room in the breaks between letters. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t click nearly every single bloody X in the test.

So yes, that was unexpected and interesting. I guess in a day or two I’ll find out what they gleaned from the test, and if I’m crazy (in yet another flavor) or not. Until then, my attention issues have caused me to lose interest in writing this post, so THE END

I’m at Bitter+Sweet, the newish café that replaced Red Mango. Their hot chocolate is pretty okay. They’re a bit light on food options, but I suppose it’ll do. That chicken/cheddar/apple savory pie was quite tasty, if diminutive.

I’m really looking forward to my ADD test tomorrow, and probably not for the healthiest reasons. I’m still hoping that I’ll find my silver bullet, my ticket to a real, immediate kick-start, still waiting for the day when I wake up and think: “You mean normal people feel like THIS all the time?!” It will be pretty disheartening if I find that is not the case and I simply have a long, unhappy slog between me and mental health. Talk about unhealthy attitudes, right? I know I’m not supposed to expect quick fixes or dramatic turnarounds, that this is supposed to be a process involving commitment and effort on my part… but I can still hope, can’t I? The quick fix does happen sometimes, doesn’t it?

From my research and self-evaluations, chances are good that they will diagnose me with at least some degree of adult attention deficit disorder, and chances are reasonable that they will then prescribe me medication to treat it. From medication experience, there’s a determinedly non-zero chance that the medication will do approximately nothing for me. But in the face of that, too, I still hope. I still hope that they can give me something in a bottle that will flip on whatever switch it is in my head that’s been off all these years.

It’s appropriate that I’m at this coffee shop while writing about this, since the most bittersweet times in my life are those when I reflect on just how many things I want to do, just how many things I would be able to do if I wasn’t broken. All the projects that have been casualties of my inability to focus, all the learning that has fallen victim to my penchant for anxiety and frustration, all the hours and days and weeks that have disappeared into the black hole of my bleak lack of inertia. I feel ambitious and hopeful and excited when I bring some new plan to mind, or think about learning something new or polishing up an existing skill to be better, but it always comes crashing down when I remember that I’ve had these plans and thoughts so often over the many years in which I’ve been basically doing nothing. Music, exercise, art, video games, car and motorcycle things, all kinds of DIY projects… even such a simple thing as reading has been tainted by my mental issues.

So yes, I still hope for that silver bullet even though I know I’m not supposed to. And if it happens that my hopes are futile, well, there’ll still be time to gird myself for that slog to health.

I’ve vaguely suspected that I had sleep apnea for years now, without really knowing what it was. All I knew was that it was something that screwed with your sleep and made you tired all the time, and that snoring was one possible symptom. That seemed to fit with me. Over the years I picked up somewhere that it involved stopping breathing periodically during sleep, and Alice told me that I did that fairly regularly. Now with all this depression and anxiety stuff happening, one thing I mentioned to my doctor, psychiatrist, and therapist (that’s right, I have a TEAM now) was that I had a hard time getting to sleep, woke up often in the night, and felt tired all day no matter how much sleep I got.

Last week I went in for a sleep apnea appointment. I thought I was just going to go in and get told how I was going to be tested, and be tested. Instead, I sat down in a conference room full of about fifty people and Kaiser Homestead’s head of Pulmonary Medicine, and he told us a bunch of stuff about sleep apnea. Yes, there was a PowerPoint. So here’s what I learned:

Snoring is what happens when your airway (throat) narrows while you’re sleeping. It happens because the tissues of your throat are at rest, since you’re, y’know, resting. Sleep apnea is what happens when your airway closes completely while you’re sleeping, and you stop breathing for a little while. It usually happens many times an hour, and means that while you’re sleeping your oxygen saturation levels drop. This is bad, obviously; not only does it make your sleep less restful, thus causing problems for you when you’re awake, but it also puts you at risk of heart attacks and strokes. There’s also a corollary condition called upper respiratory resistance syndrome, in which your airway closes or starts to close, but your brain says HOLD ON and either brings you up to a less-deep level of sleep or wakes you entirely. Since you start breathing again in those instances, you don’t get the oxygen effects as much, but your sleep disruption is worse.

Doctor McPowerPoint continued on to say that there were two branches of treatment for sleep apnea. One is to try lifestyle changes. People with sleep apnea tend to be overweight (though not always), so losing weight and thus tightening up the tissues in the throat is one possibility. Another is to train yourself to sleep on your side instead of your back, since apparently snoring and sleep apnea are usually worse on your back. Other things include avoiding sedatives such as sleeping pills or alcohol, since those things make your throat tissues relax even more than usual, and quitting smoking to give your airways an easier life.

The other branch of treatment was nasal CPAP–Constant Positive Airway Pressure–which meant sleeping with a machine blowing air up your nose through a mask for the rest of your life, or at least as long as you wanted to get decent sleep and not have heart attacks and strokes and whatever else.

Once this class (complete with the eternal struggle between a teacher trying to create some class participation and students wanting nothing more than to sit still and stonewall) was finished, they set me up with another appointment to come in, learn how to use the testing equipment, and go home and sleep. That one was pretty painless; it took about five minutes for a kind-but-bored specialist to show us the arrangement of three torso straps, one fingertip monitor, and a double-nostril tubey thinger, the kind you see on medical dramas. Sleeping with all that on was interesting, especially with little plastic claws just barely threatening on the threshold of my nostrils, but it happened and I returned the equipment and they got data.

On Wednesday we all went back to class to find out what was wrong with us, if anything. Dr. McPowerPoint (sans PowerPoint this time) first spent another fifteen minutes reiterating all he had told us the last time: lifestyle changes this, exercise that, yada yada. I’ve spent my adult life hating the concept of BMI, which puts me squarely in “obese” just because I’m short and dense. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a nice layer of padding over everything which I know it wouldn’t hurt to reduce, but I’m far from “obese”. The point is that I was afraid, after all this bother, that they’d give me test results slight enough that they could tell me to just lose weight and come back in a few months.

I needn’t have worried, it turns out. I was called up, sat down, and was told unceremoniously, “You have sleep apnea. You need the machine. Take a seat in the back.”

By this point I’d made a friend in the class, a nice middle-aged Chinese woman by the last name of Tang. Her English wasn’t very good, so she’d asked me to stay with her and translate for her, though Mandarin wasn’t her primary language either and my Mandarin is awkward at best. We went to the back of the room, sat at a table covered with small black machines and bags full of tubing, and wondered what our life was about to become.

Again, however, I needn’t have worried. The CPAP machine is pretty small, about the size and shape of one of those old flat-style cassette tape recorders. The from the machine to the mask is kind of stiff and imposing, over an inch in diameter and several feet long, but oddly it works out fine in the dark. The mask itself is the biggest imposition on normal life, of course. It goes over my nose, leaving my mouth free and bracing itself on my forehead, and has a dual strap going around my head above and below ear-level. Then the machine turned on, automatically prompted by detecting breath coming through the tube.

It’s funny how little you notice that level of air pressure going in through your nose. You can hear it, from both the whirring machine and the rustling sounds through the mask, but you can barely feel it. If you open your mouth, however, it becomes a whole different story. Gentle airflow that had nowhere to go suddenly finds a release, and takes it with gusto. Air filling your sinuses and trachea suddenly rushes back up and out through your open mouth. The specialists described it as “feeling like you’re drowning”, and while I wouldn’t go that far, it did feel quite weird. But even then it wasn’t so bad; as of last night I was already used to it, shaping my mouth around escaping air to say “I love you” to Alice in an alien voice, and then giggling uncontrollably. The doctors are going to get some weird data from my machine.

So now I’ve gone two nights with a rubber air mask. It actually hasn’t been too disruptive, but on the other hand I’m not really sure it’s working. I’ve still been waking up in the middle of the night (though that could definitely be a result of having a rubber mold strapped to my face), and I’ve still been tired in the morning and throughout the day. My sleep apnea isn’t on the very severe end of the scale though, so it could just take some time for my body to adjust. That said, I’ve got an appointment next Wednesday to go back in with my loaner machine so that they can take its data and apply it to a permanent machine (which will cost me seven hundred bucks!), and if I haven’t really seen a difference by then I’ll be asking some pointed questions. Maybe in an alien voice.

The worst part of depression is the lack of energy. All the therapy in the world, all the identifying of thought distortions and anxiety loops and whatnot is useless if I can’t do or fix anything because I feel exhausted all the time.

This morning I couldn’t get out of bed. When this happens (which is almost every day), it isn’t just that I want to sleep more. Often I actually don’t; I’d much rather get out of bed and start my day. Instead I feel like I can’t seem to move, can’t seem to muster the energy to do any more than roll over slightly, maybe mutter a goodbye to Alice when she leaves for school. Sometimes I don’t even go back to sleep at all, and instead just lie there for hours at a time, unable to do anything other than just be inert and hate myself a little bit more with every passing minute.

This morning, I did sleep… sort of. I lolled there for two hours, drifting in and out of consciousness. When I was awake, I kept telling myself that I needed to get up and start my day, needed to cut off the cycle of dysfunction and neuroses and impotent self-hate. Some of my friends try to help me by giving me more new things to do (hi James), but the problem isn’t that I don’t have things to do or that I don’t know what to do. I have work to do for myself and for others, I have weights I want to lift and goals I want to accomplish and hobbies I want to pursue… I have a lot of missed life to catch up on, a lot of years I’ve wasted on depression and anxiety, and I sure as hell know it. It weighs on me every moment of every day. Other people try to help me by telling me that I just need to eat better or exercise more or just get over my “laziness” and just do what I need to do. But I know how to eat well, and I do it. I’m not as good as some people I know, but I get my fruits and veggies and I’m careful about my macronutrient ratios and I’m decent at accommodating my metabolism and keeping my blood sugar up (usually). I know about serotonin boosts from exercise, I know a LOT about lifting routines and interval training, and I love the pump. And I know about willpower and enduring suffering and building self-esteem.

I know all of that, and yet I still didn’t move–still COULDN’T move.

When I was asleep this morning, I kept slipping back into the same dream. I was in my house, but it was a lot bigger than in reality. It was filled with all kinds of stuff, toys and tools and mementos from my whole life all gathered together. Alice was there, and my parents were there, and friends old and new were scattered around the house. My mom told me to vacuum the house, told me that I’d left it for too long and had let so much dust and dirt and cruft gather in every corner. She told me I had to move everything, all the big, heavy, scattered objects of my life littering this miles-long dream-metaphor-house, and vacuum and mop every square inch until everything was spotlessly clean. If I didn’t, she would get really mad at me. If I didn’t, Alice added, I was a bad and worthless person.

I went to do as they said, but before I even started I was filled with anger and hate and despair. My parents didn’t care, Alice didn’t care, and all the friends wandering around watched me for a bit before shrugging and moving on. Rather than doing much actual cleaning, dream-me spent a lot of time and energy just screaming, or at least trying to. I don’t know who I was more enraged at: my family and friends for demanding all this of me, or for not helping, or myself for not having kept things clean and not being able to clean them now. The core of the remembered dream comes down to me, clutching the trunk of the vacuum cleaner for support,  reaching inside myself and clawing out every last bit of breath and strength and thought and emotion, and trying with everything I had to scream.

I screamed, but nobody could hear me. Over and over and over and over.

The problem with depression, the one thing that makes it nearly impossible to both handle alone and explain to anyone who hasn’t been there is this: If you really can just get up and do all the things people tell you will help, if you really can just psych yourself up and enact all those solutions you know about, without any problems… well, you probably don’t actually have depression.