Going to talk to the doc about antidepressants tomorrow.  Will Read More work this time?

I’ve had a sort of complex about stuff like antidepressants since I started thinking I might have some mental problem (which I apparently actually have, go figure).  It seems like the usual thinking is something like, you have a normal person, and then you have a layer of depression/schizophrenia/whatever on top of that, and drugs and therapy are to get rid of that, so you get a normal person again.  But I can’t think of it like that.  It’s more like that there’s a different and sick person, and healing makes them into a normal person.  The sickness is part of the mind, not something else.  You can’t just remove it, you have to put a full scale alteration into place.

I’m rambling.  Too much countercultural stuff.  The point is that, irrational as it is (since I don’t feel as worried about e.g. therapy) I really don’t like the idea that I’m thinking incorrectly and this needs to be fixed.  It makes me sad when my parents or anyone else are even cautiously enthusiastic about drugs.  It’s saying that I’m thinking in a wrong way, unsoundly and invalidly, and that really bothers me, even though of course they aren’t thinking so negatively.

So, uh.  I’m marking down my emotional state somewhere out of the superstitious belief that this is a thing worth doing in the event that (again, superstitious belief) antidepressants make me a soulless smiling automaton.

The basic thing is that I don’t really talk to anybody.  I mean, I’ve never talked to anybody much, I’ve been doing it less and less.  I don’t often leave the house, and when I do it’s basically to walk around aimlessly (nominally, to look for jobs, but I don’t honestly care).  This is really sort of a conscious effort.  Almost all of the time I talk directly with people, I’ve never talked about anything I think or care about much at all, just opting for banal things.  So it’s seemed pointless.  I still talk to people online a lot, but it feels automatic.  I don’t know how normal this is or what, but it make me feel lonely.  I don’t want to join a book club or a gym or any of the other things suggested to me because I really, really don’t want to spend even more time shooting the shit.  It feels dishonest and empty?  Ramble ramble.

I’m being pessimistic.  I do sort of like it.  Still wrong.

Most of the time I don’t really feel anything.  I’d say something like “worthless” or whatever but that doesn’t describe it, I just don’t care.  I’m not in school and jobless, not going anywhere, and I don’t really care about it, though I’m supposed to.  I feel very detached most of the time, basically.  Suicide seems like an obvious thing to do - the analogy that comes to mind is cell apoptosis.  Since I’m such a horrible nerd I often think of my life situation in fiction terms, and I’ve never felt like I was the main character, so to speak, just something that happened to other people.  I know I have impacted a few people’s lives so far.  So it’s like my role is over and I should remove myself from the stage, I guess?  Cleanup, discarded waste, a short-lived and directed-purpose automaton turning itself in for scrap recycling.  But I don’t really have any plans to kill myself, it being a lot of work to do cleanly and me being apathetic and lazy, so I just continue.  Making suicidal ideation more of a nuisance than anything.  My doctor’s office referred me to an emergency specialist on the phone when I was trying to make an appointment, just because I was honest, how pointless is that?

And occasionally, I feel very bad.  A few days ago somebody I like gave me the idea that I was being stupid on the internet, and for the rest of the day I just laid in bed thinking about how disgusting I was, which, I believe, is an extreme reaction.  Sometimes I’ll just think things repeatedly, like “die” or “hello, you disgusting sack of shit, how are you today” (sometimes they’re kind of weird like that) for a couple minutes, or recurring between the banal things I occupy my mind with.  I actually kind of hate driving now, since it doesn’t distract me as much as the computer, so those sorts of things always come up.  I guess that’s what they mean by intrusive thoughts?  I get obsessive about how people view me, try not to say anything that could be remotely considered offensive, interpret everything negatively, etc., which doesn’t help with the communication problems.  The most I can do to reassure myself is thinking “it doesn’t matter, nobody cares about you, it doesn’t matter,” that I am just a minor blip in people’s lives, etc., which isn’t really that reassuring.  That’s sort of what I’m doing now to justify angsting on the internet, or it’s what I would be doing if I wasn’t feeling very “mellow” at the moment.

I guess the worst thing about this is that it’s really nothing new to me.  I’ve been writing parts of this post in my journals (which I don’t do any more) for I guess five years now.  Sometimes I’ll pick one up and flip through it and feel sad about how little I’ve changed in that time.  Back then I had maybe one or two “friends” I would talk mostly non-evasively about my emotional state or politics or whatever with, now it’s basically zero, but I still felt all this sort of thing.  I guess it’s good that I marked something down since depression is supposed to mess up your ability to recall things so that you can only remember negative things, so I don’t really trust my memory any more.  But yeah.  I’m still quite childish in my outlook on life.  I have no idea how real people live through their twenties, just exceptional people fictional and not who went and started a revolution or did heroic/tragic/horrible things in a war or got sent to the gulag or whatever.  (Another thing: I count up how often I use certain phrases, like “or whatever”.  Quite often.)  I still don’t have any idea how to work a job or have a normal social life or any number of things that I think adults are supposed to have as a standard structure.  I don’t have any strong goals or wants, and so coupled with probability and my outlook I’m of course not going to be exceptional, so instead I’m just completely clueless.  It’s like I missed a class somewhere and now don’t know how to live.

Oh and yeah, relating to the memories thing, and the talking thing.  I think I do feel happy when I’m talking with friends.  Not sure I remember right.  Sometimes I’d go to social events and feel happy, and then as it went on and afterwards I’d feel horribly disgusting.  Disgust is what I feel about a lot of things, not even just myself.  This contradicts an earlier sentence.

I don’t want to feel like this.  It’s not like there’s any real reason I couldn’t have a happy life.  I’m pretty smart and know lots of things, and I’m weirdly affable and talkative when the situation calls for it, I think, so there’s no problem there, I’m just… not invested?  And that’s of course what drugs are supposed to do, make me care about things.  But I’m still scared.  Not really right now, right now I don’t feel anything, that’s biased this whole thing and probably rendered it even more pointless.  But I was, I remember that.  I don’t want to change?  I don’t want to die.  This gloomy and sarcastic persona and this uninvolved persona and this smiling person are all facets of me?  I hate how that sounds, I’m not that complicated.  I’ve been thinking lately that people aren’t conscious.  But uh.  Should I let this dive into incoherence like those other things I wrote.  Oh, other thing.  This isn’t really with any purposed audience in mind.  I don’t care who reads this.  It would be best if there was no response, like I was just writing in my journal in the aether, that I got replies in my journal nonwithstanding.  I’m just going to stop now, this is automatic too.

Oh.  Yeah.  One other, edited in thing.  The other day I remembered the münchhausen trilemma and got cheered up some.  My life right now is following arbitrary rules.  Overspending is bad, death is bad, whatever, things follow from them.  But the axioms are arbitrary.  I don’t remember where I was going with this, where I intended to go with this when I wrote “Oh.  Yeah.” above there, and when I was cheered up by the trilemma it was for other reasons.  To escape.  I don’t know, I’m tired.  ”I’m always tired” was the first thing I wrote in my journal.