Clearly a reason for panic

What neurotypical people don't necessarily realize is how exhausting it is to have a mental illness. I'd love to devote energy to being light and charming -- in my head, I am optimistic that this is closer to the real me -- but my resources go instead to trying to throw up nets to catch intrusive thoughts before they can ruin my day. My energy is finite, so anything going to wearing my mask (as Amber puts it) is subtracted from the pool used for all other functions. "Me," the self-image in my head, is only one of the things my mind does. I wish to believe, with varying confidence, that it is mostly under my conscious control.

Trying to keep my mental illness from spilling over, splashing around those I love, is willing every breath. I stare at blank spaces because they provide no stimuli that will distract me from inhaling. I am not fully present because I am chastising my mental illnesses as whiny children intent to cause havoc.

Amber and I bring Kristina to an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She has not seen the play before and has only a glancing scholastic familiarity with Shakespeare's work. Having only been exposed to tragedies done wrong, she is too polite to tell me outright that she doesn't think that she likes Shakespeare. I assure her that this one is a comedy. I have starred in A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed it, and named my fantasy series for it. I know it somewhat.

For all the efforts of the cast, it is not a great production. Like many before her and doubtlessly after, the director thought that music would spice up the play. It blared over the dialogue, went on too long, the actors did dances that they had barely rehearsed. Music was otherwise used to take the audience from the scene and ruin the immersion with forced cutesiness.

I am desperate to be immersed in anything other than my thoughts. I take these interruptions more personally than I ought to.

I have all but mastered wearing my mask, seeming outwardly fine. I want to preserve what of this memory that I can. I do not want to throw a fit, run into the field, and pout until someone finds me lightly sobbing. That horrid little child in my head wants a scene, though with no endgame in mind beyond my embarrassment.

What I want is to throw bon mots at Kristina, laugh where it is funny, cringe where the director has the characters make grating and nonsensical sounds in an apparent effort to convey their personalities -- which they accomplish handily without shouting and spitting after every line. I want to be Thomm and not the mental illness, so I try to focus anywhere else, even to the point of becoming overly critical of the play because irritation at it is better than wanting to fidget and growl at myself.

I don't know how much of my life was guided by my mental irregularities.

Amber said recently that she is always anxious. She will spend hours a day being the best in rigorous classes. She will choose projects -- starting a CSA, creating a community garden, redoing the bathroom in our apartment -- and will dive in with both feet as though ordained from on high.

When she told me she was always anxious, I was startled from my navel-gazing. I knew she had been, was briefly on meds for it, but she did not make an issue of it being persistent.

I would take this from her if I could, but it drives her on; she does not want to be released. Or, at least, she wouldn't ask. I have given up offering her the reprieve, telling her that we have enough money for her to live a more relaxed life. This is not the point to her.

My irregularities have made me an expert storyteller. It is a safer outlet for mind-reading and spinning out all possibilities for unlikelihoods. My depression gives my characters depth. I have a handle on my mental health most days, but I could not let it go if my literary talent and drive went with it. I overtly told my nurse practitioner that I would not take meds that would stunt my writing. That is more important than my happiness. I was fortunate that it had the opposite effect. My mental illness and creative passion might be on the same allele.

Without this imbalance, I would be a different person and, I suspect, lesser. I would have been happier and had healthier interactions, but they would not have allowed me to figure myself out in this way, to have suffered and adapted into this strength.

The rain is kind enough to keep mostly away for the duration of the play. The night is cool and comfortable, even if the chairs provided are anything but. I haven't been out this late in a long while, though we are home before eleven.

Even alone, I cannot allow this part of me free reign. It would only encourage it to act out more. I can audibly try to talk it down in private, though it doesn't want to listen to sense. It does not originate from a place where reason has much effect. It picks something I've done that was unwise and reminds me of it every step, conjuring worst-case scenarios I know are objectively unlikely.

The following day, I go to the Dutchess County Fair for the second time (Amber got superfluous tickets from her job) and dissociate while watching dogs jump into a long pool of water. I am not gone so far that I do not understand that I am being ridiculous. Though the day is cloudy, there is nothing to account for how I am feeling. Something in me would like to take me over, to swallow my own pool, and make me miserable. It is not me, though I fully comprehend shadow work. It is something else, a biological quirk fostered by moments in my upbringing that make me rejection sensitive. I can see the antecedents as easily as were this a book. But knowing and beating back are highly different matters.

My depression is -- or is the source of -- the least lovable part of me, but Amber loves me still. When I am sobbing in the bed for no external reason, she waits on the stairs with her tea until I can emerge, barely human, but enough.

Anhedonia overtakes me at these times. Things that should please me feel like nothing, and their nothingness is grating. Amber, whom I love, whose touch should be a delight, also falls victim to my lack of sensation. As I am so accustomed to her feeling good to me, the absence of it tells me that we have fallen out of love and will never fall back in again. It is a lie, but nothing else feels like anything. The stark contrast is torture.

I wait out the depression, the most mature thing I can do in the circumstances, and try to make it the least Amber's problem that I can. She doesn't need to know how hard it is to feel her kiss and have it evaporate before I can notice it.

Amber and I spend six hours at the fair -- a blip compared to the eleven we spent on Tuesday -- and I wear my mask through most of it. I walk around and am friendly. I follow Amber as she looks at the newborn animals and pig races we missed last time, as she shops for more rocks at a tent to supplement the hundred dollars' worth we bought days before. She knows that my insides feel hollowed out, filled with oil and pins, but she appreciates my pretense that I am a human being. She knows how badly I do not want to skunk her time here because, in retrospect, my mental illness will feel so silly and easily reduced to a tiny fraction of my inner life. It would be like ruining the day because I had a papercut, even if all I want to do at the moment is probe the slight injury until it is wide and gushing.

I don't feel like myself because my energy flows into keeping the worst in me at bay until something shifts and it fades away. It is a war of attrition, but I resent having to fight skirmishes when I would rather enjoy a county fair next to my doting wife, who behaves more lovingly to try to chase it away. As always, it is a battle I must fight, but I distantly appreciate the moral support. Depression is an impatient liar, knowing it will be evicted long before it can shake anything else.

Amber fingers this as a sublimated anxiety about beginning my new job in September, which I had not outwardly considered. I would rather it be about something so simple rather than what my head says, so I throw my psychic energy behind this excuse. Painful though the transition may be, it will be resolved no matter what I do. Let me cry a little about this, so I do not have another seventy-two hours of feeling a low-grade panic attack.

I don't want it to be anything more than my mental illness and a stressor I was not acknowledging. It is an easy excuse, even though I feel this inner dread for days until the mental illness passes like a fever or bad meal.

Soon in Xenology: A new job.

last watched: Venture Brothers
reading: City Magick