Journal

I think it’s Wednesday. It feels Wednesday-ish. I don’t know for sure because I’ve slipped into that blissful, holiday fugue where you lose track of days and time and schedules. I’ve watched a lot of television since finishing work for the Christmas break. I’ve finished reading a bunch of books. At random intervals, I leave the house to collect food and see the outside world and celebrate things.

Today is pulling me out of that. Today I have read stories for friends and engaged with page proofs and generally started thinking about what’s going to happen when the holidays are over. I am preparing to rewrite a white-board and outline the projects that need to get done in January.

Time to shake off the holiday inertia and reboot.

I’m rolling into plans for 2017 now that the broad strokes of the coming year have been defined. Planning things this late is weird for me – ordinarily I have ambitions and schedules and goals already mapped out in my head.

I am burning through books that I’d left half-read, thinking through ways that I can start arranging notes, building a mental to-do list when it comes to my thesis topic so I’ve got some relatively clear research goals when the lights turn green and it’s time to go.

December has become a weird, in-between state. I’m working out my contract on the current day-job, counting down the days until I can stop wearing real shoes and go back to my sneaker-clad existence. I’ve not yet started the thesis. Writing projects are scattered about, waiting to be corralled and planned.

These are the ways I trick myself into thinking I can assert control over the universe.

This morning I spent some quality time looking back at the tenets I tried to apply to 2016 and realising I did really well on two of them, okay on the third, and not so good on the fourth. I blame people far less for things that I watch or read. I don’t use the television as background noise as often, although I have slipped back into the habit of using social media while watching movies or NXT. I finished a handful of stories this year, but none of the bigger projects.

And so I start looking ahead. Figuring out what to try next year that will enact changes in my life. I’m pretty sure one off these will be fail more.

But probably not the way you’re thinking.

Back in November I posted about going into a mild depressive episode. As many folks may have surmised from the Friday post a few weeks back, it turned out to be not-so-goddamn mild. I lost the first half of December to an incredibly irritating funk, which only really clicked as a more-than-mild depressive episode when a friend messaged me last week and asked how I was doing.

At the time I’d just come home from a book launch, after what had already been a pretty kick-ass day at work, and I’d settled into my couch to cry for the third evening that week. I had not written anything creative for the better part of a month. I’d been cancelling or avoiding social events for two straight weeks. I was not sleeping properly. I avoided going to bed until very late in the AM, then woke up a few hours later. And since the friend who asked how I was doing is one of the handful of people where I don’t automatically try to answer with yeah, okay out of misguided defensive instincts and crushing self-stigma, there was a minute or so where I looked at everything that was happening and went oh, right, instead.

I forget, sometimes, that this is still relatively new. That just being on antidepressants is not automatically going to fix every goddamn thing, and that just having a name for what’s happening is not automatically going to stop it from happening. It also doesn’t stop me from using this idealised vision of what I should be capable of as a tool for the kind of self-flagellation that can make things considerably worse.

The diagnosis may be new, but this thing with not writing? It’s agonisingly familiar. I’ve spent years getting incredibly frustrated with myself, again and again, because every time I found a process that was productive and consistent, it would eventually fall apart for no real apparent reason. The Other Peter would come out, and his process was not terribly efficient. It starts with doing less new writing and more rewriting, pulling apart the beginnings of things because nothing was right. When that didn’t fix things, he started writing new projects. When that didn’t fix things, he retreated into the most mindless distractions he could find.

When that didn’t work, he loathed himself. He assumed the failing was his, and as he emerged from the endless meh he’d start rebuilding his process from scratch to try and prevent that failure from happening again.

As they say in Waiting for Godot: We’ve been here before. I recognise that tree.

I did not write this week, not really. I tinkered with blog posts or did a page or two of scribble in a notebook, but I wasn’t really pushing to finish things or make them good. I was just keeping the muscle memory alive, or revisiting old projects to make sure they were still viable. I spent what would have been my writing time cleaning the house, or clearing email programs, or clearing out systems that had been clogged up when I started retreating from writing, social media, and the vast bulk of the world.

I worked on improving my sleep hygiene and went to bed on time. I finished my Christmas shopping. I drafted some blog content for my personal blog. I patched together all the little things, minor drags on productivity that I never truly get around to doing, and waited calmly for things to pass and the desire to work returned. I started looking at all the things that need to be done, like exercise and eating right and getting enough sleep, that will keep me relative even and productive instead of disappearing into the mire.

And if I’m looking for silver linings right now – and I am – there are two. The first is that I’m going back to the things that have worked for me, for the bulk of the year, and resisting the urge to rebuild anything. Because it’s possible that it was never anything wrong with the system, aside from the shit bouncing around inside my head.

The other is that it’s finally occurred to me that managing this shit isn’t easy, and I should probably stop expecting it to be. There will always be options that are far more seductive than practising self-care – options that are more fun and seem like a better short-term solution for propping up my mood – but the math never quite works out.