[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 14 April 2018.]
TL;DR Fuck depression.
I'm taking a leave from my job, starting Thursday, for 2–4 months, not sure exactly. Afterwards, I will return to Plethora because I like it there.
I have found that my demons' power is magnified when they are allowed to fight in the dark, so I try to fight them out here in the light. My perfectionist leanings are mortified on so many levels right now. But I need to normalize talking about this shit.
I refer to my experience as depression. But it is a stubborn and intelligent adversary that contains multitudes, finding creative ways to evade the progress I make and mount new challenges. So sometimes it is outright depression, sometimes it is anxious or obsessive-compulsive, sometimes it feels like a cloak of Asperger's, and sometimes I just can't fucking deal. My mind feels like my own private Flanders Fields; I have watched the lines move from side to side so many times, the ruins of old trenches compounding like meander scars.
A term that echoes in me when I hear it is "high-functioning depression". Somehow I managed to make grades, pay bills, and achieve a few things here and there. My need to connect and be genuine has been strong enough to push through the anxiety. I have good days, good years even. Often I do well and badly in parallel. So asking me "How are you doing?" doesn't really make sense, and I'd probably just refuse to answer it if it didn't make me more difficult.
I have memory of being this way about as far back as I have memory at all. But somewhere around my postdoc years things eased up quite a lot. Divesting of my family gave me the upper hand. I managed fine through the divorce. I met Liz and we shared an unreasonably long honeymoon.
I had an episode in late 2014, while spending a semester in SF within my road trip. Was it a foreshock? Was it just being off SSRIs for several months? In early 2015 I scored some SSRIs by walking into Mexico, en route to moving to Tucson for a while, and the situation solved itself.
Half a year later I moved to SF for real and got a job. I've posted already about the difficulty in the time since: there have definitely been external reasons that anyone could point to. But most of those reasons have passed, and after much work I can't seem to find my restoration. I am still deep in emotional debt. Under these sustained conditions, the demons have had success reforming and consolidating a lot of power. They have established themselves. No matter what I do, I feel stuck with them. Of course I've grown steadily more wary of this outcome. I've dug ever deeper in search of the roots I'm trying to pull out, and time and again they have surprised me with their depth and stubbornness. At each new setback I felt another layer of failure was added, that I had let myself believe I was surmounting it, and, worse, misled others to believe it too.
Over the past few weeks, maybe months, I'm not sure, I've heard myself saying more and more frequently that I'm growing desperate, that I need to GTFO, that I need a hard reset. I need to get away from stimuli, from the city and my connections, so that in the quiet I might hear myself. So that's what I'm going to try. That is what this sabbatical is for.
If you and I have prior commitments over the next few months, I still intend to meet them, but I will avoid making new ones. I hope to go on walkabout—maybe in the Coast Ranges, maybe in the Great Basin. Not extremely far from the Bay because of said commitments, wanting to see Liz, etc. (I wouldn't mind some low-key company, a sidekick, sometimes. Let me know if you have time free.) When in town I'll mostly hide in plain sight, at my place and LL. I'll do my best to write. Some of that writing will be shared. I promise nothing more. I'll have to figure it out as I go.
If you're wanting to help, please know this. Translating my state into a description for you, or my needs into actionable instructions for you, is a tax on me. By all means, offer something, but please don't ask for an elaboration of how I am doing or why I think all this is, or for what I need. The offer, the You, is more important than it being the right offer. If it's not helpful I'm free to counteroffer or decline.