Category Archives: Depression

A Sunken Place, A Hollow On A Surface

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This definition — one of many — of a depression, of a physical place, comes with many synonyms: indentation, dent, cavity, dip, pit, hole, trough, crater. Their commonality? A location and a displacement. If something is sunken, then what was there is there no longer. A hole is an absence: it’s less than a whole. I picture an evaporated lake, or the overgrown and barely noticeable craters (the result of a dramatic impact) left by shells in Vietnam.
It makes sense that the most-used term for a low state of mind is also depression.  When you’re in that sunken place, you know you’re lacking. You know that you were once happy, but that cheerful substance has been displaced. And you certainly feel lacking as a human being: enjoying a standard of living far better than most of the world, but barely able to drag yourself out of bed.
But maybe thinking about depression as a specific location can help with the healing. If it’s a place, you can compartmentalize. You could change the pejorative nature: maybe the hole becomes a safe place that protects you. Or a cozy nest where you can curl up and sleep things off. Maybe you can visualize climbing out of it, or slowly form it in your mind as a very shallow and barely noticeable indentation. You could list the gifts a depression leaves: fossils, salt — maybe a spring? The crater could fill with water and become a pond.

 

This is Your Brain on Boredom

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For 24 hours now, my brain has felt fried. Sizzled. Frayed. Dried out and ragged.

I have nothing to do at work except read the Internet. It’s overstimulating and exhausting to be bored, to stare at a screen and try to fill (or kill?) time. It’s such a waste, and I have half a mind to go home early so I can let myself cry, but I need the money and can’t waste the vacation hours.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me; it started when trying to book my Lonely Planet Alaska trip yesterday, which was like trying to put together a Chinese puzzle as I lined up flight times and ferry schedules, and crammed eight towns (with ten flights and two ferry rides) into a two-week trip. It was exhausting, but I figured it out and assumed that my brain would feel back to normal after a good night’s sleep. And I’ve been sleeping really well. But I woke up still feeling like I was wearing a too-tight swim cap on my head; all my muscles — my jaw, my forehead, the back of my head, my neck — feel taut. My eyes are dry. I thought maybe my glasses had been pinching me, that maybe this tension was external rather than internal. But as my day goes on, I feel myself deteriorating.

I visited the Genius Bar for my very slow, less-than-a-year-old Mac, and they couldn’t help me except to try “one more thing” that required me to leave my computer for four days, which I can’t do until Lonely Planet is due, four months from now. This situation threw me — the problem is that when I start to spiral, my resilience is low and situations that are fairly benign become giant, threatening to ruin my entire day and cause me to miss work.

And as soon as I feel weak and emotional, my head goes straight to “single for four years.” That repeats like a mantra, over and over and over, and I think about all the times I was dumped, the people who don’t love me back, the tragic flaw I must have, the beauty I lack, and my dwindling fertility and I erupt in a hot mess of failure and shame and start to cry, but have to pull myself together because I’m at work. The act of keeping myself together usually exhausts me to the point where all I can do after work is go home and sleep.

Three hours and twenty minutes of work left.