Direction

Big Ol’ Content Warning: I’m gonna be talking about mental health, depression, suicidal ideation, and I’ll be mentioning suicide attempts. So if that sort of thing bothers you, you may want to skip this one. Here’s a picture of a kitten I’ve stolen off the internet:

This is a very happy, very healthy, very safe kitten. If you’re still here after this, that’s your choice.

I’ve been bored for a large chunk of this weekend. I think I need to be for a while, so I haven’t been fighting it, but it’s been mildly uncomfortable.

I was supposed to publish a YouTube video yesterday, but the thing that I recorded was… Not good. And I don’t mean that it lacked for quality (though there were some things about my performance I would have done differently). It was that the original intention of the series I was building didn’t really match the content I was putting out.

I wanted to make a thing about self-improvement. I have not been improving myself very much at all. My housekeeping has been better, but it’s still awful. My exercise has been limited to the hikes I’ve been taking for photography adventures. My attempts to form habits and do something different have been largely unsuccessful. And the videos had started to become more about my mental health challenges in the past month or so. This most recent one was a jumbled, chaotic, disjointed look at how the pandemic is impacting my depression.

Last week, Thor had a cough. I was facing the very real possibility of another personal lock-down. The first lock-down was difficult. When Thor got sick and needed a Covid test was harder. This time, the very idea of locking down sent me spiraling in some weird directions.

Most of my coping mechanisms for depression are social. I visit my friends. I go to work and get my mind off of my stuff by focusing on someone else’s stuff. I play games and go out for dinner and have adventures… with people. And not having those people means that I have to try and sort out other coping mechanisms. I found myself falling back on old thought patterns, things I had managed to avoid for a lot of years.

“You could always just die.”

While distasteful, it’s always technically an option…

Part of my depression makes me feel like I’m trapped. I can’t get out of a situation no matter how hard I try. I’m stuck and things will be like this forever. When I’m depressed, I want to run away. I get a mad case of wanderlust and want to be literally anywhere that isn’t here because Here is a trap. That isn’t even a specific ‘Here’ - that’s been true of every ‘Here’ that I’ve ever experienced. And if I can’t get out, if I can’t get away, there has always been the ability to just… die about it.

Most of the time that doesn’t come with any action attached to it. In fact (it’s weird to think about it like this), it has sometimes been a crutch for me to find other ways to handle my problems. There’s always this way out if the other stuff I try doesn’t work, so let’s keep that on the backburner as a possibility, and look at other options in the meantime. That wasn’t always the case. There were definitely times in my youth where suicide was Plan A, and my attempts have left some scars on both myself and people I care about. But when it’s Plan F, it has sometimes kept me from spiraling too hard to try and find other ways to deal.

My son changed that. I’m not allowed to die. Suicide is not a way for me to escape anything, it’s just a way to push my issues onto him in the most unfair way imaginable. And more-or-less unconsciously, I’ve just been kicking those thoughts out.

“You could always just… No. No you can’t. Come up with another plan.”

And last week I was feeling kind of weird about that change, because without my other coping mechanisms, not having that to fall back on was actually sort of uncomfortable. I missed being able to have that Plan F and work on other options in the meantime. I missed the safety valve that suicide represented to my feelings of isolation and worthlessness.

So I was going to make a video about that. Which would be fine if my videos were like a public journal, but that wasn’t really what I was trying to do with those. That’s what I’m trying to do with this space, more, since I’ve stopped visiting Facebook (except when I need to link one of my blog posts there because I haven’t figured out how to share my posts to my Facebook feed yet).

So I’m going to take a bit of a break from the YouTube videos as well while I try and figure out what I want to do with those, what kind of videos I actually want to make. I have a place for a journal. Self-improvement is something I’m failing at in a way that is no fun to watch at all, and I feel like I could be using that space more effectively.

If you have ideas, let me know. In the meantime I’m going to go be bored some more and try to remember what it felt like to not have the dystopian version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in my pocket.