Doing Things

I have spent most of my illustrious blog-writing career, I think, complaining about people's oppressive and unwarranted demands of me and my annoying tendency to yield to them. I believe it's fair to say that I have managed to reverse this tendency, but this achievement appears to have less to do with courage than with an exasperated pigheadedness. I have stopped doing what people want through stopping to do more or less everything. And it occurs to me that this process is probably something of a more verbalised, more rationalised recreation of what started my depression in the first place.

It's certainly less chaotic, and this time there's a girlfriend, which is an improvement. It's less drastic in general, but it's ridiculously similar, to an extent that can almost make me empathise with the idiots who go on about how everybody gets like this and "just pull yourself out" of it. It seems that when fear no longer motivates you to function like a person or else, you run the risk of undergoing a bewilderingly much more comprehensive demotivation.

One reason, I think, is that like I said, it's not that I've stopped being afraid of "standing out instead of fitting in" - like I saw suggested the other day on one of those over-formatted-sentences-pretending-to-be-pictures on facebook - or found some way of actually dealing with it, so it's mainly just down to pretending it isn't there. This is difficult, and it makes life in general that much scarier, which is also difficult, so it's kind of an exhausting prospect in general. An overwhelming pessimistic mood makes the effort seem not worth it, thereby also handily evading the scary stuff.

Another reason may be that sinking into indolence is kind of addictive, and you just need to pull yourself out of it. When I manage to drag myself out of the house for a walk, or to talk to someone, or to read or work on something, they end up, overwhelmingly, as positive experiences, but every day they struggle anew, not incredibly successfully, to justify my effort for them. In the absence of some kind of coercive force, everything is a real challenge.

This probably has to do with not separating the things I do because it's expected from the things that I do because I want to do them - effort in general seems to have humiliating hollowness associated with it. Learning to do things freely might be an uphill struggle.