Sometimes

Sometimes I cry.
I cry because someone I never met killed another human being.
I cry because politicians use lives as gambling chips.
I cry because too often both justice and mercy are denied to victims of all kinds.
I cry because cruelty and hatred is as human as forgiveness and compassion.

Sometimes I get angry.
I get angry because a friend would rather talk than listen.
I get angry because a stranger would rather argue than debate.
I get angry because a coworker was careless of my time and energy.
I get angry because I am as flawed as the people around me.

Sometimes I laugh.
I laugh because a child giggles at falling snow.
I laugh because a friend shared something that made them think of me.
I laugh because a puppy licks my face at the end of a long work day.
I laugh because joy and love are the only antidote to despair and isolation.

Sometimes, I don't feel anything at all.

I am always grateful, to feel anything at all.

Legacy

Lately, I have been thinking about legacy.

What kind of impact do I want to leave behind, and what am I willing to sacrifice to achieve that impact? What do I want to build, or to help tear down? What constructs, whether physical or otherwise, do I want to outlive me?

I have friends writing and publishing books. I have friends directing and starring in local theater productions. I have friends who are active in politics. I have friends who build software that is used every day. And whenever I hear of some new accomplishment, even as I cheer them on, I cannot help but wonder, how will I be remembered when I am gone?

I don't mean this in a morbid way. I am only twenty-nine, and it is likely that I will live three or even four times my current number of years. Or I might have a tragic accident and die a week from now.

There is simply no way to know.

For my birthday this year, I received a copy of the Hamilton soundtrack: two CDs together comprising over an hour and a half of music from the Broadway blockbuster, with accompanying books of lyrics. Since then I have listened to the complete play something like four times, mostly in ten minute increments on my commute, and I have nearly finished a fifth repetition.

Hamilton, as presented in the musical, is obsessed with his legacy. As soon as he realizes that he has a chance to build something real, he throws himself headlong into it.

"See, I never thought I'd live past twenty
Where I come from some get half as many
.
.
.
I'm laughin' in the face of casualties and sorrow
For the first time I'm thinkin' past tomorrow!"

Later in the play, he sacrifices his personal reputation and the stability of his home life in order to protect his professional reputation, and by extension the stability of the federal banking system he designed. To him, that economic structure was his most lasting legacy, the most important thing he could leave behind.

"Cuz we'll have the banks
We're in the same spot
[Burr] You got more than you gave.
And I wanted what I got
.
.
.
God help and forgive me!
I wanna build
Something that's gonna
Outlive me!"

The first time I listened to the soundtrack, I couldn't imagine making that kind of personal sacrifice. I couldn't imagine valuing something enough to make that kind of choice. Recently, however, I realized that I was thinking of it all wrong.

Hamilton didn't feel he had a choice.

He didn't think of it as a sacrifice, nor would he have chosen differently had he been offered the opportunity with the benefit of hindsight. In his mind, it was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself. Maybe, that is what legacy really is - the impact of the actions that are so completely "us" that we don't think of them as choices anymore.

I found myself thinking about the situations where people have complimented my actions as though they were above and beyond the norm, much to my confusion at the time. The times I traveled to help a sick friend after work, or spent a day off driving someone around while they do something time sensitive or important. The times I've offered my home as a safe space for someone, for short or long term. All things that positively impacted someone without giving me any tangible benefits. None of these things felt like sacrifices, even if they inconvenienced me or otherwise impacted my life.

They were simply things I couldn't imagine not doing.

The fact that such things feel so natural to me is itself the legacy of my large, loving family and their vast network of equally loving friends. I grew up surrounded by people who would readily give a hand up to anyone who was struggling, and I became such a person myself. Now, far from my childhood home, the impact that I have is magnified.

I have changed lives, if only in my own little circle of friends. Maybe I will live another eighty years, never doing more than making these small, positive impacts on the lives of those whose paths cross mine, but ultimately affecting hundreds directly. Or maybe I will die in a freak accident tomorrow, having changed only a handful of courses and given hope to only a handful of hurting hearts. Either way, I have changed the world, and generally (I believe) left it better than I found it.

That is legacy enough for me.

Perfection and Me

**Author looks at the date of the last blog post, winces, looks again.**

Nearly four months since my last update.

OUCH.

I won't apologize this time. I've previously documented the combination of factors that leads to this kind of massive gap. There is another contributing issue, however, which I have not discussed. Ironically, it is precisely what I had intended to make this post about when I jotted down the notes for it way back in July.

"Ambition and Perfection and Depression and Inspiration"

Hello, my name is Aethelfled, and I am a perfectionist.

I have difficulty writing anything, even something just meant for myself, that I am not completely happy with. I rehearse phrases in my head to make sure they sound clever before I speak them aloud or put them to paper. In school, I took pride in the fact that my "rough drafts" were polished enough to pass as final papers.

The problem is, that kind of perfection is fleeting. It relies heavily on inspiration, which is just the luck of having the right kind of thought at the right kind of time. It requires spending hours on just a handful of ideas, because the sentence that you used at the end of paragraph three works much better at the beginning of paragraph five, but now there's no clear flow through paragraph four. Cut that one into pieces and wedge a key phrase into paragraph five and another into three, and take that last sentence and make it the beginning of a new paragraph you will now insert between two and three, because you just thought of a clever metaphor that the rearranged blocks of text now seem to be explaining.

Even worse, perfection of any kind takes work, and lots of it. And the longer the piece you want to write, the more ambitious the topic you want to tackle, the harder it is to make it perfect. Especially when you keep smothering your inspiration with the demand that that it be perfect in the very first draft, interrupting your ideas to improve their polish.

Depression makes anything that feels remotely like work much, much harder, so when I demand perfection of myself, I actually hamstring my ability to produce the kind of writing that I want to create.

And I am ambitious. I look at the works of Neil Gaiman and I weep, not only in reaction to the beauty of his words, but with admiration and envy. I yearn to create works that move and inspire people the way his move and inspire me. I want to write novels, and television shows, and movies, and comic books, and short stories, and everything else under the sun. I want to create works that catch the attention of Neil Gaiman and Tamora Pierce and Diana Gabaldon and all the other authors I admire and whose creations I enjoy.

Days like today, I believe that those ambitions are within my grasp, if I'm willing to buckle down and work for them. But, today is a green day. I know that tomorrow may be yellow, or orange, like yesterday was. And one thing is crystal clear.

I will never fulfill my Ambition while I cling to Perfection.

Anhedonia

As I have mentioned before, writing this blog has allowed me to make deeper connections with friends who struggle with depression. Often, I did not know that they had mental health problems until they reached out to me. Sometimes, those discussions lead to "ah-ha" moments, as I discover that some previously unexplained aspect of my life that is actually connected my mental illness.

Such a moment occurred several weeks ago when a friend introduced me to the term "anhedonia."

Merriam-Webster defines anhedonia as "a psychological condition characterized by an inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts." In my case, this is not a gradual disenchantment with an activity, but rather a sudden and inexplicable aversion to something I used to enjoy. Often, I will try to force myself to continue participating, because if I am just having a Code Yellow day, interacting with people enjoying my hobby will sometimes (though not always) help me to feel better about it. Unfortunately, if I repeatedly force myself into an activity without getting the pleasure of it, I start to actively dislike it.

As a result, most of my hobbies operate in a "feast or famine" mode.

When I am enjoying something, I throw myself into it completely. I binge a new show on Netflix, play a single video game exclusively for hours every night for a week, or devour every book in a series. And then, when I find I am not interested in the activity, I stop. Even if I am in the middle of an episode of a show, or three quarters of the way through a book, I simply don't return to it. I move on to something else.

For years, I described this pattern to other people by saying "I have cycles of interest. Right now I am doing [hobby]." Occasionally Jerk Brain would berate me for being 'fickle,' especially when I would abruptly leave a community and endanger tenuous friendships I had built there. In light of my new understanding that my anhedonia is a symptom, not a personality trait, I realize that my 'cycles' are actually a coping mechanism. If I stop engaging with an activity immediately, I can return to it after one or two others have run their course. If, on the other hand, I push myself until I experience an active antipathy to my formerly pleasurable hobby, it dramatically lengthens the time before I can enjoy it again, and may even prevent me from returning at all.

Hopefully, once I am receiving professional help for my depression, I won't need to trick my brain just to enjoy my hobbies.

Quantifying Depression

Early in the life of this blog, I realized that describing a day as "normal" or "average" or "ordinary" is not very useful.

My experience of ordinary is skewed by years of living with depression, most of them without acknowledging that I was depressed. Additionally, the effects of my depression are not always simple, nor are they necessarily obvious. Even trying to quantify how much it is affecting me is difficult when one of my primary symptoms is apathy or lack of motivation. How do you measure the intensity of numbness?

With help from my amazing, supportive mother, I realized that the answer is you don't. Instead, you note the presence or absence of other factors. With her help, I have worked out a color code that I hope will help me track my depression - the frequency of my good days, and the intensity of my bad ones. By recording simple notes about what color I am feeling at various points during the day, I hope to spot patterns, and eventually track whether and how much the medications I take affect those patterns.

Code Red: This is for the worst days. The times when I can't shut out Jerk Brain. The periods when everything seems hopeless, and I feel like a useless drain on the ones I love. I can feel emotions, but typically only negative ones. Self-loathing and attempts to undermine my own mental and emotional supports are common.

Code Orange: These are the days that I simply can't do anything. Restless energy fails to translate into action, and tiny tasks seem to take more effort than I can muster. Time drags on, leaving planned deadlines in the dust, and I can't even bring myself to care. Apathy drowns most emotions, and I tend to avoid human interaction lest their lack be noticed.

Code Yellow: I suspect this is where I live most days. Truly urgent tasks can be accomplished, albeit with what often feels like herculean effort, but very little else. I recognize that I should be doing more, but somehow I never seem to have the will to get much more than the bare minimum done. Emotions are muted, but not totally absent, and I can fake stronger feeling well enough to pass as "normal" in most situations.

Code Green: The goal. These are the days that I don't have to force myself to finish simple chores. The periods when I can simply think of a task and do it. The times that my emotions come freely and naturally. Green days are not always happy (menstrual cycle induced mood swings were a defining aspect of my green day yesterday), but they are mentally easy. I don't have to consciously calculate how much energy it will take to complete a task, or assess in the back of my mind whether I am expressing the appropriate emotion to the appropriate degree in conversation. Everything just comes naturally.

Code Blue: I hesitated over whether to include this label in my system. This would be for the days when I feel like a barrel runner on top of the world; days when I am driven to create lists of tasks just to cross them off, and relaxing doesn't feel like a viable option. While not strictly a symptom of depression, periods of euphoria or mania like these can point to something more complex than "simple" clinical depression. I am honestly unsure whether I have ever had a Code Blue day up to this point, but until I am formally diagnosed by a doctor (and probably even after), I think I should probably try to be aware of periods like this, just in case.

My color code is just another tool to try to understand my mental health, but somehow, it makes me feel that much more in control of myself.

Good Days Are Hard (To Write About)

At the end of my last post I mentioned that I started a new job a week ago. That is the main reason that there was a week-long silence between posts, but not for the reasons you might think.

You see, starting work with my new employer led to an immediate and drastic improvement in my mood and general sense of wellness.

I am more energetic, and my baseline stress level has dropped considerably. I no longer dread leaving for work in the morning, nor do I retreat to the isolation of my bedroom the moment I take my shoes off at the end of my shift. My roommates commented on the very first day that I was happier and more relaxed when I got home than I have been in months.

Writing about the good days is difficult.

They often don't feel remarkable, so I have trouble describing them. Partly, this is because of my tendency to minimize bad days in retrospect. Mostly, however, I think it is that (unless I have urgent tasks that were delayed by my depression) good days are just days that I can feel and act normally. I think of tasks that need doing and I do them. There is no psyching myself up, no mental workout to determine which of several chores is most essential or most complex, in case I cannot get all of them done. When I do notice how much easier a good day is, instead of celebrating it, Jerk Brain has a tendency to divert my thoughts to self-recrimination for not being able to "pull myself up by my bootstraps" and just power through my bad days.

Even worse, a string of good days (or even easier days) often makes me doubt whether I even have depression.

When you have a string of good days while treating cancer, you still have constant physical reminders of the disease, in the form of surgical scars or hair loss from chemotherapy. When you have diabetes, you regularly measure your exact blood sugar levels and have direct control over how much insulin you administer to keep them stable.

But when you have a mental illness, you don't have that kind of physical reminder. You don't have that direct, measurable evidence of how your illness or your medication is affecting your body. I think that is why there are so many stories of people deciding to stop taking their medication, often to tragic effect. I know it is one of the reasons I was able to remain in denial for as long as I did.

I refuse to fall into that trap this time.

An Apology and Some Extra Context

I need to apologize to my readers.

Even though this is a public blog, intentionally left open to whomever might find it interesting or helpful, I have a tendency to write individual posts as though they were going into my personal, private diary. Normally, this is a good thing. It helps me to express myself openly and write with a level of vulnerability that I might not achieve if I constantly remembered the public nature of my medium. However, my last entry made it clear that this approach also makes it easy to leave out details that change the way my readers interpret an incident compared to how I experienced it.

Particularly when I allow a week to lapse between entries, this can be a VERY BAD THING.

My last post described a particularly bad depressive episode with very little in the way of context for what happened afterwards or how frequently those episodes occur, and I know that several of you were quite worried about me. I want to reassure you that while that kind of negative spiral is not new to me, it is infrequent. While I do have bad days (when Jerk Brain is particularly loud), the severity of the episode I documented last week (where it actually took over) is rare enough that I have to think back roughly eighteen months to recall another. Even on the occasions when I have not had immediate support for these episodes (of whatever severity), my thoughts do not typically turn to physical self-harm, but rather push me to undermine myself mentally and emotionally, such as the efforts to push my partner away I documented in my last post.

I am sorry that the lack of crucial context in my writing caused unnecessary worry for those who love me.

I don't mean for this apology and explanation to mitigate the severity of what I experienced. I know that these incidents are not normal or healthy, and I am working toward getting professional help, including antidepressants. I started a new job last Monday, which offers health insurance. As soon as I know what company that plan will be through, I intend to start looking for a doctor/therapist that will accept both my current insurance and my new insurance (when it kicks in near the end of September).

Thank you all for your love and support as I feel my way, slowly but surely, toward better mental health.