In my piece yesterday, I promised that today's piece would be about how the "Game of Thrones" premiere drew my focus onto the way time-shifting and the related cry of "No spoilers!" has affected the greater cultural conversation.
And I drafted a bunch about that. And I think I might have had some interesting stuff to say. But when it came time to begin the revision process, I discovered, underlying the resistance I'd been fighting recently, something unexpected: a profound sense of soul-crushing futility, giving way to utter existential despair.
"Oh shit," I said to myself. "I seem to have fallen into depression."
Looking back over the past few days, I can identify a few things that were energy leaks, the sort of things that might have been contributing causes, but I'm not sure that in this case there's anything as simple as a cause. Maybe the orbits of depressive events swing close to our own emotional orbits, and sometimes the merest impulse can deflect an event into our emotional gravity well. I don't know. I mean, I put attention into possible causes because depression sucks and I obviously want to avoid it, but on the other hand, in the midst of it, "cause" doesn't really matter that much. The important thing is to take care of myself.
I'm wondering and actually a bit worried that, to the good friends of mine who are the only for-sure regular readers of Free Refills, this piece is going to look like a desperate cry for help. It isn't, actually. I've been in worse places than this and I learned a little while back how to leave myself breadcrumbs to find my way out. So I know the sorts of things I need to do to take care of myself. I'm actually feeling pretty good that, even in the face of this feeling of despair, I'm choosing to keep my promise to publish. It's a good way of saying, "This too shall pass."
So, yeah, I'm gonna pat myself on the back for doing my work, even in the face of the feeling of "None of this shit matters at all." Furthermore, I'm going to own that this is what I'm going through--I refuse to be shamed into silence by the happy-archy and well-adjusto-normative social pressures!
(Happy-archy and well-adjusto-normative: the best I could do at parodying P.C., "I'm being oppressed" language, given the circumstances.)
But so yeah that's what's happening in my world, and now, my work done for the day, I'm going to shut off the computer and go take care of myself.