Something less than diary-like here, more like fragmented musings to try and find a way out of something.
Depression is teasing at the margins of my brain these days, tendrils of it reaching across my consciousness but not yet clinging with much force. I'm not sure if it's just a product of the season: down town time from a low-key holiday, the artificiality of a calendar change (why is the switch from December to January so momentous when the switch from January to February is so mundane?), just a standard reaction to the lack of light, or is it rooted in something deeper?
The ridiculous regularity and predictability of election season might be a contributing factor. It is a disheartening and dismaying recognition to think that something as fine a human invention as democracy can be so cheaply shrink-wrapped and packaged into these four year industrial cycles of elections and campaigns. A good time to go silent and observe, in my experience, but only if one has the emotional fortitude to bear the absurdity; the dangers of falling into cynicism, melodrama, or fanaticism lurk around the edges of all this, more pressing a danger for folks like me who have to maintain a more intimate acquaintance with their emotional states than those who are blessed with a more regular brain chemistry.
A more realistic assessment would probably assign this malaise to one of the intermittent declines that folks who struggle with depression are often confronted with. In this we aren't so different from any one else. We just have to track those moods more closely, monitor and be mindful of them, and always ask the question: is this just a reasonable and understandable moment of blue, or is it something more?
And thus has my brain watch begun: checking my mood, checking my thought processes, paying attention to my sleep patterns. Am I just temporarily lazy because I don't like the current task I'm juggling at work, or is this a more long-term lethargy that requires an intervention? Am I simply tired, or it it a broader indifference that is settling into my routines and my responses?
Living alone makes the monitoring more difficult. Being online helps keep the passivity at bay. Pointless prose fragments are a more direct attempt at activity.
Cheaper than therapy, certainly. And much more easily accessible.
Everything's a tool when you need something. For that I'm grateful.
But sorry, perhaps for those who might chose to read it.