Thoughtworms: From Belief To Delusion
Back at work today. The depression got so bad yesterday I had to take the day off. I knew, as I sat on the side of the bed, staring down at my feet, unable to even put my slippers on, that I could not face work. Fired off an email to my boss, as I couldn't even face the phone and lay staring at the ceiling for a while.
This depression wasn't lifting. I was going to have to do something. A friend posted a link to a site which listed things to do in the event of depression. It's funny how, even though you *know* that these things work, when you're that depressed, you don't even think to do them.
5. Eat healthy food. Sugar is the devil - I love it, I love its heightening and drugging effects on me and my mood, but the crashes, the up and down cycle, it's poison for a bipolar. No chocolate, no sodapop, no profilterols.
2. and 3. Exercise, and get some sunlight. It took me a couple of hours to force myself, but I climbed out of bed and up to the park, sat in full sunlight for nearly an hour. Everything screamed RED at me. Japanese maples. Berries on trees. A pack of Irish Setters that accosted me, drawn by the smell of menstral blood, and forced me to throw a ball for them.
11. avoid negative people who make you feel bad or irritated.
Oh god, this is the hardest. I'd been asking for days to be removed or blocked from the Erol forum. Blank refusal, and then a terse note saying that it wasn't technically possible. I didn't handle this well, I confess. I was an utter brat. A childish fantasy of some dinner party, where you and the host get into an argument - and the other guests stand around and cluck their tongues or hiss at you like outraged monkeys. So what do I fantasise of doing? Sneak back into the house while everyone is asleep and leave a perfect pile of human faeces fresh on the dinner table for their breakfast.
Well, not really. I took all of my bile and read every single one of those insults again and thought "you want condescension, you want 'issues' - OK, you can have it" and wrote a horrible mean nasty, condescending satire of a parody of a post and left it, a deliberate troll in a blatant attempt to commit suicide by mod.
Did it work, was I banned? Of course not. I can seemingly only ever troll by accident. I'm getting to the point where I think I could post links to nazi sites advocating the castration of Turkish Cypriot males and not get banned. But it was a kind of Rubicon, a burning of bridges to keep *myself* from going back.
That place is not for me. There's only so long you can try and squish yourself as a round peg into a square hole. The world has changed. It's not 2002 any more. You're nearly 40, you're well beyond the world of clubbing, leave it to 18 year olds and move on. You're only upsetting yourself, staying somewhere you stick out like such a sore thumb. But I found the quote in a Carol Shields novel, that perfectly describes the situation: "I know nobody likes me. People can't stand me, and that's a fact. So I make sure they really and truly can't stand me."
It's not good to wind myself into such a frenzy. It's a terrifying thing to admit, but the thoughtworms have managed to get inside the things I believe most fervently. I used to recognise it in my brother, when he was at his worst, going really mad, that his bipolar disorder would latch onto a certain kind of politics that would infect his brain like a virus. Sure, he was always big-C Conservative, and these views were deeply held and carefully rationed beliefs - but there was a line it would cross, that it would become not a philosophy, but a symptom of his madness. An obsession, a delusion that held him in a vice-like grip.
There's a line, somewhere, that I cross, and I don't know where, that goes from mine own deeply held beliefs on Feminism and the role of Misogyny, in culture and especially in music - and crosses over, clicks into thoughtworm mode. Where it goes round and round, and repeats itself on this little track, eating away at my brain like soul cancer, destroying my belief in myself and my faith in other people. It stops being a thought, and starts being an obsession.
I'm not saying that my belief in Feminism is a delusion - FAR FROM IT. But the depression, the thoughtworms have learned to take advantage of these beliefs and turn them into a stick to beat myself with, and a rant to exclude myself from the world and distance myself from other people.
In this instance, I have to preserve my sanity first, and idealism second.
Anyway. Number 6. Divert yourself from negative thoughts by doing something you really enjoy.
I finished Larry's Party by Carol Shields, and I'm quite sad that I have run out of Shields books at my local library. She has that sense of Austen, of painting on a tiny piece of ivory, and yet somehow capturing the whole world. Her work leaves me thrilled and inspired.
And I discovered a musician I'd never heard of before, but fell instantly in love with: a pioneer of electronic music (and also visual artist and computer theorist) named Laurie Spiegel. Go and dig out the album The Expanding Universe, a landmark of ambient electronica that makes the Aphex Twin sound like a wibbling schoolboy.
This depression wasn't lifting. I was going to have to do something. A friend posted a link to a site which listed things to do in the event of depression. It's funny how, even though you *know* that these things work, when you're that depressed, you don't even think to do them.
5. Eat healthy food. Sugar is the devil - I love it, I love its heightening and drugging effects on me and my mood, but the crashes, the up and down cycle, it's poison for a bipolar. No chocolate, no sodapop, no profilterols.
2. and 3. Exercise, and get some sunlight. It took me a couple of hours to force myself, but I climbed out of bed and up to the park, sat in full sunlight for nearly an hour. Everything screamed RED at me. Japanese maples. Berries on trees. A pack of Irish Setters that accosted me, drawn by the smell of menstral blood, and forced me to throw a ball for them.
11. avoid negative people who make you feel bad or irritated.
Oh god, this is the hardest. I'd been asking for days to be removed or blocked from the Erol forum. Blank refusal, and then a terse note saying that it wasn't technically possible. I didn't handle this well, I confess. I was an utter brat. A childish fantasy of some dinner party, where you and the host get into an argument - and the other guests stand around and cluck their tongues or hiss at you like outraged monkeys. So what do I fantasise of doing? Sneak back into the house while everyone is asleep and leave a perfect pile of human faeces fresh on the dinner table for their breakfast.
Well, not really. I took all of my bile and read every single one of those insults again and thought "you want condescension, you want 'issues' - OK, you can have it" and wrote a horrible mean nasty, condescending satire of a parody of a post and left it, a deliberate troll in a blatant attempt to commit suicide by mod.
Did it work, was I banned? Of course not. I can seemingly only ever troll by accident. I'm getting to the point where I think I could post links to nazi sites advocating the castration of Turkish Cypriot males and not get banned. But it was a kind of Rubicon, a burning of bridges to keep *myself* from going back.
That place is not for me. There's only so long you can try and squish yourself as a round peg into a square hole. The world has changed. It's not 2002 any more. You're nearly 40, you're well beyond the world of clubbing, leave it to 18 year olds and move on. You're only upsetting yourself, staying somewhere you stick out like such a sore thumb. But I found the quote in a Carol Shields novel, that perfectly describes the situation: "I know nobody likes me. People can't stand me, and that's a fact. So I make sure they really and truly can't stand me."
It's not good to wind myself into such a frenzy. It's a terrifying thing to admit, but the thoughtworms have managed to get inside the things I believe most fervently. I used to recognise it in my brother, when he was at his worst, going really mad, that his bipolar disorder would latch onto a certain kind of politics that would infect his brain like a virus. Sure, he was always big-C Conservative, and these views were deeply held and carefully rationed beliefs - but there was a line it would cross, that it would become not a philosophy, but a symptom of his madness. An obsession, a delusion that held him in a vice-like grip.
There's a line, somewhere, that I cross, and I don't know where, that goes from mine own deeply held beliefs on Feminism and the role of Misogyny, in culture and especially in music - and crosses over, clicks into thoughtworm mode. Where it goes round and round, and repeats itself on this little track, eating away at my brain like soul cancer, destroying my belief in myself and my faith in other people. It stops being a thought, and starts being an obsession.
I'm not saying that my belief in Feminism is a delusion - FAR FROM IT. But the depression, the thoughtworms have learned to take advantage of these beliefs and turn them into a stick to beat myself with, and a rant to exclude myself from the world and distance myself from other people.
In this instance, I have to preserve my sanity first, and idealism second.
Anyway. Number 6. Divert yourself from negative thoughts by doing something you really enjoy.
I finished Larry's Party by Carol Shields, and I'm quite sad that I have run out of Shields books at my local library. She has that sense of Austen, of painting on a tiny piece of ivory, and yet somehow capturing the whole world. Her work leaves me thrilled and inspired.
And I discovered a musician I'd never heard of before, but fell instantly in love with: a pioneer of electronic music (and also visual artist and computer theorist) named Laurie Spiegel. Go and dig out the album The Expanding Universe, a landmark of ambient electronica that makes the Aphex Twin sound like a wibbling schoolboy.
posted by Masonic Boom | 2:10 pm
2 Comments:
Small beer I know but, would it help if you got someone to log in to the Erol forum, change your password and not tell you the new one?
I did actually quite seriously contemplate giving my password to Dale or someone with the explicit instructions to get me banned, since I'm clearly such a rubbish troll when I try to be one.
Anyway, in effect, time is doing the healing. I look at it less and less, and when I do, I tend to see fewer threads I'm actually interested in clicking on. So it will pass. Perhaps it's a lesson to teach me patience. Something I was never very good at.
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