‘You! hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frère!’
Categories: uncategorized, depression-health
Tags: pretentious waffle, depression
Date: 15 January 2006 15:08:00
THINGS I DO WHEN I'M DEPRESSED THAT DON'T HELP
- Dress stupidly, eg. t-shirt in winter
- Read the most punishing, impenetrable prose I can find, and hate myself for not concentrating properly
- Misinterpret everything: people's gestures, scripture, roadsigns, everything
- Think out long reasoned discussions of why everything is my fault
- --CLASSIFIED--
- Flirt to generate some emotional warmth
- Isolate myself to avoid flirting
- Ignore diet and exercise, or focus on them to the exclusion of all else
- Try to force a prayerful meditative state upon myself by sheer willpower, even when it's the last thing I'm capable of
- Lean too heavily on people close to me
THINGS I DO WHEN I'M DEPRESSED THAT DO HELP
- Exercise and eat wisely
- Do something I love, like a taizé sung prayer meeting or a long, long walk or an expedition to second-hand bookshops
- Play with children
- Explain to people that I'm ill, take help if it's offered, don't take offence if it isn't
- Concentrate on interpreting others' behaviour as charitably as possible. Always attribute the best possible intentions to people wherever possible. Actually this is quite good advice anyway.
- Recognise that I feel needy, see it as a sign of depression, and treat the depression, not the neediness
- Tell it to God. Or shout at Him. And admit to myself when I don't know what His answer is, or if He's saying anything at all. And if I seem to stop believing in Him, I don't panic
- Pay bills, finish assignments
- Talk about something I'm really interested in with someone who really cares about it too
- Hug something
This is my new userpicture. I haven't got it properly formatted yet, I'd like a better quality jpeg. But it seems to have a certain something about it that I identify with quite strongly. It's the trudge of it, the crowd of it, the hunch and the innocence of it. Somehow to have become responsible for bearing something so precious in a world that grows ever more full with the dead.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
TS Eliot
The Waste Land
Part I: The Burial of the Dead