Well, you don't read that every day...

Just got back from gigglechick, where I caught up on my blog reading and discovered Erin's sordid struggle with depression.

...And I was prompted to sit quietly for a few seconds, and consider my own by-comparison-meager depressiveness, and the fact that I've never been on Lithium, and was only on Prozac for a month four years ago or so, because the doctor thought it might help with my weight. There's a part of me that wants to pull a Wendy, and be thankful for my small roster of problems, and my myriad blessings (health, relative wealth, etc.).

My dad loves to tell how he left college comparing himself unfavorably to the upper five or ten percent of the achieving population, and being pretty severely down on himself. One thing led to another, and he wound up a chemist in the Air Force (no mental slouch, my dad), where he was able to compare himself to the upper ninety percent, and realize that in the grand scheme of things he was fairly well off, and had a lot better raw material in terms of background, talent, familial support and the like than the vast majority of the populace. A little perspective can be great at times.

Still, as I sit here within forty days of being 32 years old (my parents were working on producing my brother Matt by this point in their lives, and I was their huge-eyed toddler), divorced, single, largely alone and unhappy, possessing many of the advantages my dad had (and several he didn't), I find it hard to be optimistic. I suppose I know in the back of my head somewhere that life will improve (those bullheaded Taurian rose-colored glasses), that (for example) I'll find some sweet young thing and we'll make each other very happy, but for the time being prospects are looking pretty bleak.

And I'm not sure what to do to break myself out of this rut, either... You see, my tendency when things get emotionally rough is to withdraw; always has been, since those hellacious fight-or-flight years of Catholic-grade-school "play"ground. When by rights I should be reaching out to others to help myself feel better, I switch off and hide. Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb was a revelatory touchstone for me, back in the halcyon days of naive adolescence. (How naive, BTW? I didn't figure out until college that it was a song about embarking on a drug addiction. Ah, youth.)

So anyway, I've been less and less involved with the blog and other social activities lately, due to the complete cessation of dating activity and my bummedness about that, and due to the subsequent realization that my life really is just working, eating, farting around in the evenings and on weekends for lack of anything constructive I feel like doing, and sleeping.

So where's this going? I have to get back to work here.

...I dunno. Am I suicidal, considering ending it all? Hell, no - who would feed my puppies? Still, am I feeling any better for having unburdened my soul to the general populace? Nope.

I'm just numb. I turn that stuff off.

-Rich