Dealing with chronic mental illness–for me, at least–is more like living on a continuum of feelings as opposed to the stop-and-start of specific events.
There’s always a certain level of what I describe as “background radiation” within one’s perceptions that doesn’t quite line up with reality, there’s always a certain amount of discomfort, and you just sort of learn to battle through it as many days as you possibly can.
Today, after practice, my depression did really get the better of me, hitting me as if it was a big, heavy wave that knocked me over, and feeling gloomy about being such a tiny little blog of so little importance that has to kick and scream and fight to fund-raise every month…It just kind of hit me that I may always be small-market–the Lucas Raymond story going over the heads of the “in crowd” certainly illustrated that–and I just didn’t want to do anything.
It turns out that, when I woke up, I found an aunt in an equally foul mood, and she reminded me of course that this little blog and its little community isn’t all about me. The whole damn reason I do this is because I want to share the level at which I would be following the Wings anyway with the small community of readers that are the whole reason TMR exists.
I’m not sure what the answer to feeling inferior about “being small” is, but I think that I could have found a less clunky way of dealing with the wave of depression that hit me than simply letting it knock me down and not getting back up.
I’m sorry for the interruption in service, but this was a bad day for me, and sometimes the way my brain responds to having a bit of an existential crisis is to get depressed, and there are days that I can fight through the chemical wave, and there are days that it knocks me down. And I stay down sometimes, because there are days that hurt more than others.
