a fucking sad idiot

During my adult life I have lived with depression to varying degrees. I am frustrated at failing to fix all my anxieties by myself. For the past twelve months I have steadily opened my fears and worries. I had even begun to believe I might banish the dark depressive clouds and maintain a happy head. Just when I begin to feel level and calm a small worm creeps under my skin. A previously tranquil day becomes hell on earth inside my head.

If I am angry or sad or frustrated I want to try to say what is on my mind but my words appear condescending and sulky. So I retreat into my head and stay quiet all day harbouring resentment that the cause of my irritable mood ought to be obvious but isn’t.

No one loved me as a child. I was never given praise or made to feel valuable. With that background I try too hard to be honest and compassionate so I always sound reproachful and false. I am incapable of expressing my emotions.

I deserve to be the hated person that I am.

I realise I am unlovable.

I believe myself to be valueless.

I deserve ill fortune.

…..

Starting thirty years ago my wife and I had simple sex but we never made love. Twenty years ago my lover and I had lustful sex but still we never made love.

Now I make love but I am uncomfortable as the initiator. Rejection would ruin my already pitiable self-esteem. How could anyone wish to be intimate with such an ugly old fool as me?

I can’t make decisions – why would my ideas be liked anyway? My preferences are easily over-ridden as they are ridiculous and unimportant.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I am.


***
update 20 Jun 2014
Re-reading this causes me some embarrassment! It's fair to say that I had bouts of depression several years ago but there is little in my above diatribe that I recognise as me. Today I have a good deal more self-esteem than before.

Dive-bombed by herring gulls

(What shall I listen to? Old, new, borrowed or blue..?)

... must be a herring gull chick, he thought, taking in the dull brown plumage with the huge size. Wonder why its sitting in the middle of the road.

Doctor: “What seems to be the matter with you?”
PV: “Everything doc and I’ve got it bad.”
Doctor: “Want to talk about it?”
PV: “Nope. I prefer to shut my mouth and keep my thoughts to myself all day… like I always do.”
Doctor: “Well, keep taking the pills and I’ll see you when I see you.”
PV: "Rot in hell arsehole."

Is that a pterodactyl? An ominous 4 foot six wingspan silhouetted against the scudding rain clouds made him fantasize Jurassically for a moment. With Kamikaze yells the shape plummeted toward him, veering aside at the last moment. Fuck, it’s the parent bird protecting its strayed young. Repeatedly it screamed in low and fast with raptor-like talons outstretched. Hey even the wildlife has it in for me…

It’s all downhill from here pal. You’re 49 and your best years are long over. The doc doesn’t give a damn, the world isn’t waiting for you, the gulls are suspicious of you…

He held similar conversations in his head all day. His favourites were about guilt, shame and self-recrimination. He did a good job of chastising himself. That seemed a more effective use of time than waiting for someone else to do it.

I won’t bother talking to you unless I love you, he said to no one in particular. I want to live on a desert island. He had a big heart and a head full of compassion but people barged into him in the street like he was invisible. How could he ever talk to people who were so oblivious to his sweet nature? He needed to be alone, that was the stark truth of it.

Some idiot shrink had told him, try to think of all the good things you have achieved. You have so much to be grateful for and proud of. He had never bought that. He was way off course for his usual lunchtime walk, even the gulls sensed that. The time on his wrist was well past lunch but he kept walking. Today he would make a decision.

He had a sharp plot for a novel in his head but he kept chipping away at it til all that was left was a series of fragments. Perhaps he would try piecing them together again soon.

SHUT UP! he screamed at the voices in his head. If the fools at work had only known how my depression and anxiety was crippling my physical health. Why had he never shrieked this to the banking fools, There is nothing wrong with my mental fortitude but you are hammering a square peg into a round hole and I won’t fit. I will last as long as I can but the strain you are placing on my emotional health is directly reducing my physical health. My immune system is failing – I am getting sick. It is not possible to be this miserable in my head for decades and for it to have no effect on my body.

With this admission at least now he would have a few things to say to the doc next time he went. Now, where the hell did I park my car?

Tagged by Grace

Thanks Grace, I'll take any excuse to think about music! These sprang immediately to mind but an hour from now the list would be different...

1. Street Spirit - Radiohead
2. Sweet Child of Mine - Guns n' Roses
3. Green Eyes - Coldplay
4. Time for Heroes - The Libertines
5. Guiding Light - The Veils
6. Five Years - David Bowie
7. Common People - Pulp

The eagle has landed

A secret consignment of boxes arrived by truck. We hauled them up two flights of stairs and began panting very hard. After suitable recovery time, a day was spent opening, examining and positioning a large number of items. Two old ebony elephants now stare at each other from their new niches.

Love

“If something is beyond your sphere of influence you should stop trying to control it.” This maxim makes logical sense but is a nearly impossible code to live by when it is very human to try to change something in order to improve it. When some factor stubbornly resists my efforts I feel anxious and fretful, even hurt. Everyone knows which things are indisputably beyond our power to alter (like gravity and the weather) but some things appear tantalisingly close enough to change. People, perceptions, places…

I hear you say, “There are only two certainties in life, taxes and death.” Everything else is a lottery, I know that, yet frustration sets in when I fail to improve factors which shape my daily existence. I am still learning to accept the beauty of things as they are and to stop striving for perfection. But if I regard much of my life as highly important am I doomed by the following formula? ANXIETY = UNCERTAINTY x IMPORTANCE

I suffer anxiety because I get wrapped up in a web of perceptions and misperceptions. What do people think, what do I think of people? Even those who say perceptions don’t matter are fibbing. Fundamentally the common man wants to be liked or at the very least to meet with approval. Fear of rejection makes us try to mould ourselves. Only the most selfish could truly care less.

Perhaps a new way to look at this is to say only the trivial falls short of perfection. The important things are already perfect. Like Nature, we can’t improve upon nature in all its majesty and glory. Art in all its forms only mimics nature so is close to perfection. Love is unconditional and forever – the very definition of perfection. One day soon I will learn to live in these true terms, in a state where anxiety melts away.

“But it all boils down to one quotable phrase,
if you love something give it away.”
Bright Eyes – One Foot in Front of the Other

Cold and White

There are some more pictures here.

A variety of heads

The man was adept at injuring himself and today he decided to take it to the limit. He approached the huge engineer’s vice in his garage workshop, brushing back his hair. The vice jaws yawned open as he span the fat T-bar easily. Like bobbing for apples in a bowl he pressed his head down until his nose touched cold iron. Now he wound the bar slowly clockwise, feeling the first pressure on his temples. As he turned the bar hard, high-pitched singing screamed in his ears momentarily. A loud crack silenced the sound and his vision was suddenly blurred. He stood uncertainly and lurched onto his driveway and reached with horror to feel his shattered head. Waves of nausea flooded over him as he fumbled for thoughts, would anyone notice him now…

**********
His bed felt cold and the pillow hard as stone. Where were the red digits of his alarm clock? “Hypothermia on the rocks please…” he mumbled to no one through stiff lips. Tomorrow morning paramedics would melt his cheek from the frozen sidewalk and lift his stiff corpse. His very good friends would laugh when they remembered Saturday. How he had drunk a whole bottle of scotch through his fucking nose. His eyes had been bleeding as he staggered onto the sidewalk. “If I get tired I’ll just lay down.” He tapped the side of his nose confidentially at the lamppost.

**********
You would never guess this suited gent had just lost his job, his house, his family and his wealth. He was in control now that every sensitive word in the books on self-development had prepared him for his predicament. He knew he was in a good place in his head. Life would be sweet and fair to him because he had given more then he had to give. A red-nosed beggar muttered from the pavement. The suit found two coins in his pocket and pressed them wordlessly into the beggar’s brown hand. Now he turned sharply to cross the street. A bus ploughed into him and dragged him eighty yards along the road leaving a long thin red streak.