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depressed
Comments still not working. My hosting service has been notified; we'll see how long it takes them to get back to me.
Yesterday, after I failed to get them working, I crawled back into bed, and stayed there until about 5 pm. I didn't get dressed or leave the house all day.
Today I continue to feel completely unproductive. I spent maybe an hour or two trying to write the Imaginary Year update before giving up in disgust.
This seems to happen to me all the time: I soldier on through periods where I'm intensely busy and stressed, just trying to hold on until I have an expanse of free time to call my own, only then when I get the free time I don't put it to any kind of use. Last week I was grading tons of papers, meeting with students in conferences, worrying about keeping my job, and I still managed to get the Number None CD put together. This weekend I found myself between batches of papers, with the CD done, and the job worries at rest—suddenly I had free time, and I found myself mainly just sitting around, utterly uninspired.
Am I just simply experiencing a period of creative / physical / emotional exhaustion? And using the free time, perhaps sensibly, as time to rest up? The funny thing is that these periods of idleness don't really help me to feel rested: when I'm unproductive I worry about it. The lack of interest in working on my own personal projects—or in fact in engaging with the world at all—seems to border on depression, and then I worry both about feeling idle and about feeling depressed.
I doubt that feeling worried about feeling depressed is of any use at all. It seems like it would be better to just let yourself feel depressed, riding it out instead of fighting it. I suspect that I shouldn't worry about the idleness, either—it probably is a necessary "resting up," and the anxiety about it may be a key cause of the depression-like symptoms.
Other people let themselves take time off, and they spend that time just sitting around doing nothing, and they don't spend the whole time worrying about it. I think?
I have to admit that the idea seems alien to me. Labels: mental_illness, personal |
Monday, April 22, 2002
12:18 PM
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