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December 23, 2013

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I agree, you can tell. My own experience going up and down depending on whether I could afford my SAMe enabled me to clearly identify the sort of thinking that went on during depressive episodes. A kind of logical spiral that I didn't otherwise engage in.

"For me, it's really painful, in a very physical way -- it feels like wearing a lead vest, so that every breath requires exertion and stress. And yes, it is *intensely* boring -- boring and painful, the worst combination. And it stretches out in front of you, forever, nothing but pain and crushing boredom as far as your imagination can reach."

I can attest to that. And I have relatives who know immediately when they are about to slide into it.

I've taken a med for relatively short periods of time in the past when things became clinical, but no longer do (that'll be enough with the rolling of eyes, people).

Mainly because, I think, that when I came to myself at the mid-point of my life (no, it's always been that way) of a dark wood where the straight way was lost, I found some sort of perverse compensatory contentment in the beauty of the wood itself and the crooked path looping back on itself, and the occasional Beatrice, because it was a crack of light between two eternities of darkness, as Nabokov wrote, or maybe just a practical joke without a point, which is merely amusing, and if amusement is all I get between now and the extinguishing of the light, then that's O.K.

Here comes the sun.

I like George's formulation but Paul's and John's bipolar "It's getting better all the time (it can't get no worse)" will be my epitaph.

Have any of you all read Hyperbole and a Holf? It started out as a blog and is now a book. Very funny, with charming illustratins but with one of the scariest and most insightful first hand descriptions of depression that I have ever read.

humans have a very complex nervous system, which is prone to a lot of weird frailties. and just to raise the ante, we have a capacity for self-reflection, which means we get to observe ourselves being complicated fragile and weird.

we might be the only beings who can suffer while contemplating themselves suffering. yay for us. :(

i'm inclined to agree that there's a palpable difference between spiraling down the rathole of clinical depression, and just having the plain old blues. the clinical thing not only puts you in the hole, it robs you of the tools to dig yourself out.

and yeah, there are meds that can fix that, and if you need 'em, take 'em and don't look back. life's too short as it is.

in the meantime, here on the northern side of the axial tilt, as of about a day or two ago, we're heading back into the light. so. yay.

in the spirit of that, and inspired by the count's comment, a brief musical offering.

may it lift your spirits.

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