I'm mildly depressed. Or as I put it when it happens, I'm "cycling down." I call it that because it comes in cycles. Or epicycles, I guess, but I'm mathematically inclined: the big cycles aren't quite annual, and they don't happen on a schedule, so they're not SAD; the small cycles are fairly predictable with six-to-eight week lengths between the high and low points. The high points are manic, and I treasure them when they occur; the low points are, well, basically, this week.
I knew it was oncoming Monday morning, before the announcement of Robin Williams's death; the symptoms are familiar by now: multiple hits to the snooze alarm, a "fuck it all" attitude toward my morning meditation ritual, forgetting to do any physical upkeep beyond the bare minimum (I remember to brush my teeth, but working out, shaving or using moisturizer is just too damned much work—first world problems indeed), apathy toward my projects.
Certainly the depth of it is bad this week. I have all sorts of external excuses: I've hit an inflection point in a novella where now I have to knuckle down and marshal the 38,000 words I already have into, you know, an actual goddamned story; I've hit that point in my personal software project where, to get to the next adventure I'll have to do work and maybe write stuff I know I'll have to throw away; my professional workload is full of vaguaries and office politics, neither of which I know how to handle well.
Anyway, I'm not clinical. I have hope, and not that meta-hope some depressives get. I know how to manage it, step one being move the morning meditation to the evening so I don't have to think about it when I climb out of bed. Go to bed at 10pm, not 10:30pm. Checklists and timers. I'll climb out of this, like usual, and a few weeks from now I'll be back in fully high-functioning mode, writing a thousand words a day, finishing the do() operator in my compiler (really, it's a simple thing, I should just, er, do it), and producing lots of silliness.
But for now... sigh.
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