Autumn Hedonia

I’ve been watching Californication . Scanning every internet media streaming provider for a companion through a bout of the flu, or my new series long diversion from doing the dishes. After Younger . After The Legend of Korra . I never intended to keep watching. But there is something incredibly compelling, nay magnetic, about David Duchovny’s all-smoking all-drinking sex-addicted husk of a man, Hank Moody. He stumbles through his life like a drunk through a plate glass window, grasping and cynical, blunt and lackadaisical, and always with a witty comeback. Desperately drowning in a life of leisure that would make other men replete with glee, yet it somehow makes him feel even emptier inside, and further from his muse. Maybe the show is a hollow parade of tits and arse and a glorification of the softcore drug addict – maybe that’s the point. But I saw myself in Hank, my failings and my aspirations. The irreverent, tortured, luxuriant piece of shit who needs to exercise...

When I first began my concerted effort towards recovering from depression, after I had first spoken to my doctor and been officially diagnosed, things did improve, and shift. As the heavy fog of not even having the energy to leave the house lifted, I began to (for the first time since I was 12) experience anxiety. I had these times where I was afraid to go to sleep, because I felt like bad things would happen if I did. It would just come over me in the evening and I would feel very paranoid and out-of-sorts and like sleeping was the one thing guaranteed to make it worse. I’ve never been one for nightmares or being scared of them, so it was very odd and worrying for me. I think I more subconsciously feared waking up in the middle of the night with gastro – which has happened. Eventually I would sleep, and nothing bad ever happened. I also got angrier as the depression... mutated, I think. I just stared taking a more active role in my mental illness. Less ketamine-like stupor of forbea...

Previously, in ‘ Resolve ’ I explored and lamented the fact that there was no answer to why I was depressed and that I did not have the wherewithal to overcome it. I discovered, almost immediately after I finished writing it, in conversation via email to Andrea about the blog, that there was a very big reason (though only one reason of many) why I was depressed. And I had missed it, for years.

The time has come to make a 2016 New Year’s Resolution. In 2014 I resolved that I would beat my depression. I talked to my doctor, I had therapy, I took supplements, I went to the gym, I took up a sport, I talked to my friends, I tried to change my schedule, and I tried to change the way I thought. I did a lot of things. I’d love to say that they worked or that I succeeded, but it didn’t go like that, I doubt it ever does. Things changed, for sure. And I continued, and continue, to try and find ways in which things aren’t working, and try to fix them. I explored part of that in ‘ I’m Not Saying Sorry Anymore . ’ This is a continuation of that story.

I apologise a lot. For a lot of things. All the time. In fact I do more than apologise, I inhabit my remorse in a perverse drama of penitence and self-reproach. I won’t just say sorry and try and fix the problem, I will say sorry, and sorry, and sorry, and sorry again with more desperate adverbs. I will tell you that it was all my fault, no matter what has occurred, no matter how unlikely the scenario, I will find a way and make a leap of logic you can neither follow nor repute – and blame it all on me. I will tell you what a terrible person I was to have done this thing, and all the awful things that I deserve to have come my way for having done it. I will inform you that I have been a terrible person all along, a truly worthless and defective human being from the very beginning, sinking to even greater depths with each misdeed. I will beg you to never let me be trusted with the responsibilities that have gone so awry, and further apologise for ever attempting to rise above my station...

I am not a hypocrite. My mother is a hypocrite, just like she was an alcoholic; and I revile the two things in the same way, and I have ever sought not to become either. But there is one way in which I am not taking my own advice, one way in which I am not ‘being my honest self’ or ‘living my truth’ and this that story.

This morning I woke up, and out of nowhere I just thought, “I’d really like to write a blog.” I don’t know exactly where it came from. The desire to write again (although I had no specific tale to tell)? To display who I am inside? To have my way of thinking make its mark on the internet? To see how far I’ve come? To be freer and better than I was before on my blog? To see if it really combats depression like I’ve heard writing about your feelings can? To create some pretty new web design? To feel like I was creating something tangible on my computer, some art, to show for my long days sitting in front of this machine? Definitely. All those things and more. But mainly, I just missed blogging. The view from my bed while I thought about blogging again. I used to have another blog. It was called   The Harrington Files , and I was called something different then too. You can go visit it if you like. But it is a bit of a relic, and I think it’s best left that way. I thought abo...