Early December Monte Report

I'm going through a pretty bumpy time this past week or so. The desire to cease to exist plagues my thoughts much of the time. I don't think I'm in danger of actually (or, at least, intentionally) injuring myself, but when I get this way I tend to start popping pills until I knock myself out. One day this week I hit the extreme end of that sort of thing when I left work after just two hours and then ended up sleeping for 15 straight hours -- and probably would have slept more had my alarm not gone off. The vague silver lining is that it doesn't feel like I'm being just randomly hit with depressive symptoms, since that tends to reinforce the feelings of hopelessness in a big way. Instead, I've got a pretty good sense of what's triggering me. At the bookstore yesterday, for example, I was repeatedly set off merely by seeing individual books that dealt with certain topics, leading to a practically instantaneous cascade of associations in my head, and ending in a spot where I was left feeling inadequate, inferior and worthless. I wish I could recall a specific example, because the next step in the process of course is to challenge these negative and irrational "cognitions" in some way.

This coming week I expect that my boss and I will work together on making a significant reduction in the hours that I'm working, and hopefully that will provide me with the downtime necessary to rebuild my energy for fighting these irrational thoughts.

In the meantime, however, I feel stuck in a depressed and suicidal space that I can't escape from.

Today's bird of the day is the Labrador Duck, former denizen of the North Atlantic coast. Extinct as of 1871. (Painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes.)