Unfurled

I took a writing class a few years ago. One of our assigned exercises was to write spontaneously for five minutes in hopes that something about the physical act of writing might reconnect neuronal connections and unblock pent-up writers. This is essentially what I’ve been doing for the last five days. Lots of gibberish. I use this as a metric for my state of mind. Later I hope to be able to trace my psychic undulations over time. Periods of silence = shitty situation; shit posts about me = slow, painful recovery; banal posts about my friends and world-view = cured!  Since I hate feeling like shit, I’ll take it as a good sign that I’m sustaining this logorrhea.   Sort of the mental equivalent of having a deeply seated tooth extracted by a novice dentist.

I did read a NYT article today. In fact, I’ve read several which is way more than I’ve done in the last few months.  On an aside re: depression: I’ve noticed that as my mood worsens, I’m less interested in the world outside of me (or myself, I suppose).  But as I lose contact with the world,  my mood worsens even more. And the downward spiral begins.

I’ve never considered myself a depressed person. In fact, the only time I recall being depressed was in the first week of my freshman year in college. I remember having no appetite and never getting out of bed. This lasted only that week, but it wasn’t until I got to the depression chapter in my Psych 101 class in sophomore year that I realized that I was depressed. Up until then, I’d always thought it was because my bed was so comfortable.

Mood meter:

Blog posts today: 1

News articles read: 5

Real news articles I read: 1