Two-Headed Calf by Artetak

I have been dealing with depression for a week. At my best, I endure occasional spells of less than ten minutes. This one has lasted most of this week with few reprieves.

I am not hiding in my bed. I am not sleeping a disproportionate amount. I am not binging or starving myself, keeping to a healthy diet. (Amber tasked me to make all dinners, so I know exactly what I am eating.) Aside from a night full of insomnia, I have not missed any work or performed below desired. Even then, that was the first sick day I have taken this year. I can handle myself at all but my very worst.

There are strange symptoms of my depression. Aside from a short fuse and being easy to upset--and finding it a chore to release the hurt--my memory is shot. I must focus on doing simple things or I will forget I've done them, like locking the door before I leave for work. I order my brain around. "I am pushing my thumb on the knob. I will remember this sensation." Otherwise, I will strain my memory to reassure myself it has happened. I have no trouble doing mundane things, I am merely uncertain that I did afterward.

It is not that I am focusing on the contents of my depression and so cannot see what is in front of me. Instead it is that more of my mental resources are redirected to keeping the depression at bay, telling it to hush so I can live my life. To use a geeky analogy, Deadpool is riddled with fatal cancer. His healing ability is the only thing holding it at bay. If he didn't have that, he would begin rushing toward a quick death as his body overtook him. So it is with my depression.

I am offended to have to expend much of my energy--my spoons in the therapeutic parlance--teaching my juvenile delinquents and have so little remaining when I return home to my favorite person, my best friend.

Being unemployed would not help this moodiness.

This will pass. It always has. If my depression became more acute than this, I would modify my meds. If it was more acute still, I would return to therapy. This is physiological, a cold lodged in my brain and the season's frigidity both exacerbated by the disappointments of my writing career. This is not forever, but it is now. I cannot abate it totally through logic. It is not a new experience, living through the imbalance of my mind. I've had practice enough.

Before Yule, Amber asked me if I wanted a pin of a conjoined cow head in pastel, made by Artetak. I burst into sobs, a poem by Laura Gilpin rushing through me. I finally said, "That is me. The two-headed calf. I see twice as many stars, but only because that advantage, that deformity, will kill me."

Amber asked it this meant she should not gift me the pin. I insisted this was exactly why I wanted it, to externalize it while reminding me what is in me.

I am aware of how I am feeling, but my control over it is constant yet insufficient. At times, retreating so that I might not subject others to it is the best things I feel I can do. This may look like sulking, but I hope it is something less pejorative. Self-defense, perhaps, because I don't wish to make matters worse.

Writing it out helps like the pin does. It externalizes and reminds me. Once I have written it, the pressure eases. I have put another pin in the map of my mind, as it were.

Soon in Xenology: Magical thinking and witchcraft.

last watched: Bojack Horseman
reading: American Cosmic