Lately I have consistently found myself in the lessthanfascinating position of being content and depressed at the same time.
Technically speaking, I'm happy. I smile a lot. I live from moment to moment. I try not to dwell on things. My moments are generally good, and when they aren't I know that they'll pass quickly. External situations always do, whether they're positive or negative in nature.
At the same time, my brain is incredibly slowed. I have trouble thinking about anything at all coherently. My thoughts plod along with huge ellipses between each space. This is painful, because I know that I am not slow. I am not dumb. At least not when I'm in my typical form.
I lie in bed for hours every night waiting to sleep. I wake up several times a night, and generally fail in the entire proposition. And still I stay in bed for hours on end. Fourteen a day, lately. And I do this because I'm too apathetic about the world to get out of bed. There are a million things I want to do, a million things I should do, but I can't bring myself to move enough to do any of them. I lie in bed. I try to sleep. And despite any actual sleeping I might do, and eventually it's at least a normal amount, I'm certain, I am always too exhausted to do much of anything.
I have trouble carrying on conversations with people because my mind doesn't process the words they're saying fast enough. I have to ask them to repeat themselves. Clarify. When I try to respond my words become a detached jumble, and normally cease making proper sense by the end of a few sentences. Fuck, I can't even read anything of length because my attention span is shot to hell.
I try to drive and my vision blurs. My reaction times are too slow to properly respond with necessary alacrity. I am, truly, a hazard. And I don't see that changing, simply because it isn't anything but the state of mood I'm in.
My depressions don't make me sad as much as they make me incapable of functioning in the world, at least lately. And it's maddening because I will go through weeks of being hyper, confident, brilliant, productive. My mind and actions work in ways diametrically opposed to their current sorry state. And then this. And it always lasts longer than the other.
And I think all of this, knowing the cycles, knowing my moods (and levels of functioning), are thus variable, I... It's a lot of what's stopping me from getting a job. I'm terrified of the idea of having a job, doing fine for a month, and then suddenly not being able to understand what I'm doing any longer. This is what happened to me the majority of high school. Between the periodic slowed brain functioning and intense apathy I found it nearly impossible to function even moderately well in school. (Not to mention I fucked with every one of my teacher's minds, because once the depressive phases switched into mania, or even a middling state, I would invariably become a star student, only to fall back into low D's and F's whenever my depression set back in again.)
Just...fuck. I don't want to end up in that situation again. It terrifies me. I am terrified of being incompetent above all things. I am. And that's exactly what this fucking does to me. Even when I do everything I can to raise my moods there is still the apathy, there is still the slowness that I can't get past.
And this isn't who I am. At all. I have always been bright. And for years I have had periods of not being bright. Completely shatters one's self-image to have the trait you've valued most in yourself since childhood be periodically snatched from you. Makes you wonder what's left. Inside, I mean. Some things are much easier to mark as constants, and for that I'm quite thankful.
revoless.
3:29 a.m.
September 17, 2003.
Listening to: Nothing.
In which I fail miserably to explain my tastes or A realisation, a plan