Note to Self: On Keeping a Journal and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Samara O’Shea

One way I’ve been keeping the beasts on my back from completely dragging me under has been to keep a journal. Paper is patient, paper is kind, paper does not judge, or worse, tell you to buck up.

Inspired by Samara O’Shea’s Note to Self: On Keeping a Journal and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which my friend Felicia kindly sent along, I’ve taken to putting pen to paper in an attempt to pluck the nebulous threads of dread, doubt, and anxiety that have been swirling in my mental belfry ever since I got pregnant—and coincidentally, stopped taking my medication. It’s better than stress eating, anyway. The waddle of shame, it isn’t pretty.

Several nights ago, I hauled out a small cache of ZIP disks from under my desk, one of which contained the on-and-off digital meanderings of my 19- and 20-year-old incarnations, back in the pre-blogging Pleistocene when we had “homepages” and my e-mail handle was “starbuck” because I was an X-Files-loving nerd. (Not that I don’t rock out my nerdtastic self on occasion today; as that old chestnut goes, the truth will always out.)

Rifling through my own past, I was startled at some of the wisdom I manifested almost 10 years ago. Here’s one passage, dated March 28, 1999, that gave me pause:

Sometimes I wonder what the big deal is all about but I always come up empty when I try to think of an answer. Causes, peope need causes. Reasons, points of being, compass needles, central foci. What if the universe just is and we should stop trying to fathom some deep, inexplicable answer that in all likelihood doesn’t exist, isn’t there; nada, zip, bust.

What if we’re all just running around in circles, chasing our own tails, drunk with ourselves, going nowhere. Everywhere. Anywhere. But always in the same place. Back where we’ve started. Because we’re all fooled into thinking that there’s a means of escaping, but how the hell do you run away from yourself?

I also found my mother’s no-bake-cheesecake recipe, so I declared the spelunking session a win.

Photo by n.askren, used with permission

Where have I been? And where am I going? Those are the questions that have writ large in my mind of late. These past few months have seen a considerable amount of change—I left the world of full-time, professional blogging, a little worse for the wear; I found myself unexpectedly pregnant despite our best precautions; and I’m trapped in a kind of career limbo, caught between editorial odd jobs and a desire for a vocational overhaul, except that my proverbial turkey thermometer will pop in December and I have few options until this strange, inexplicably foreign creature springs forth from my uterus.

When I first started The Worsted Witch, “green” was still a buzz word, not the ubiquitous force of nature (and let’s face it, marketing) it has become today. Few sites focused on living la vida eco; now, there are hundreds. It’s s murkier milieu, though, where it’s become increasingly difficult to tell if you’re being told to or sold to. I wonder if there’s still room for a voice like mine (my personal voice, that is, not my professional one, which is boisterous enough when it realizes there are bills to be paid). Looking through the archives of this site, I’m no longer sure what I set out to achieve: Was I trying to capture snapshots of my own life, aggregate green news and information, or just provide an outlet for my love of pretty things? The perfectionist side of me—a side that has gotten mouthier now that I’m living antidepressant-free for obvious reasons—is tempted to scrape the whole thing, start from scratch. I’m still waffling over what to do, however; depression clouds decision making, too.

But enough about me, gentle reader, what have you been up to all this time?

Photo by Kim Westerskov/Getty Images

I completely missed the fact that October was Depression Awareness Month. (December is Seasonal Depression Awareness Month, for what it’s worth.) I’ve never spoken explicitly about struggling (never was there a more apt word) with depression here even though it’s such a defining facet of my life—and has been since the age of 12. I often approach the subject with the same measure of temerity and shame one associates with an unplanned teen pregnancy, though I’m not sure why. (I had an old roommate with MS who was the same way about being “outed,” so to speak.) Perhaps it’s something to do with invisible disabilities; you have no tangible, ostensible proof so people can easily choose not to believe you, and instead regard the quagmire you’re in as imagined or exaggerated.

And so little is understood by most about depression. I’ve variously described the feeling as “wading upstream against a current of thick molasses,” “living in a haunted house,” and “the mad wife in your attic.” When you feel like you’re pinned under Mauna Loa getting your liver pecked out by a ravenous vulture—when it physically hurts to exist—it takes every iota of willpower simply to swing one foot in front of the other. The worst part is that oftentimes you have no rational reason for feeling this way. No one to blame, nothing to finger for the ground suddenly opening below you. For the crying jags. For the sudden fits of anger that spiral so beyond your control that you’re smothering your screams with your pillow. For when you’re staring into nothingness trying shakily to hold together the strands of your sanity in the face of unspeakable despair.

The people who don’t get it view it as some kind of character flaw. They want you to “get over it,” “just be happy,” or, my favorite, “just pray to God.” If only it were that easy to repair someone’s faulty wiring and stop their synapses from misfiring. Or buy an emotional filter. Depression is a disease like any other; you wouldn’t tell someone with diabetes to just get over it, would you? Or say cancer schmancer, just think pink, bubbly anticancer thoughts and you’ll have that thing licked in no time? It simply doesn’t work that way.

Along for the ride is a debilitating fatigue that constantly frustrates me. It took a while not to feel horribly betrayed by my own body—to learn that I had to mete out my energy like it was currency, jealously horde spoons where I could, and wrestle with the fact that I couldn’t do everything. While I’ve become far less impulsive and more accepting of delayed gratification with time, I’m certain that without my husband or medication the raging beast on my back would have stuck my head into a food processor a long time ago.

And so this is me, pregnant with words but with no coherent explanation to offer, pulling myself through each and every day, often in shadow but always desperately craning my neck towards the sun. To the rest of you lot I say: You lucky, lucky bastards.