Guess whose alarm for writing for this blog didn’t get configured correctly somehow?

Yep, mine.

Anyhoo, I now figured out that really any time I think about mental health more deeply, I should just come here and write. Maybe just not publish immediately, but certainly come here and write.

I was watching and commenting on this video when I finally figured this out: Do You Gaslight Yourself? I highly recommend the vid to anyone interested in mental health and real life examples of how and what it means for actual self-doubt (double guessing, self-gaslighting) to manifest itself in one’s life. What it means in practice, why it’s not something as superficial as something that a “Just snap out of it!” could fix. It’s that meaningful bit that is so often forgotten in superficial, barren pop-psych misunderstandings of psychology.

Talking about Patrick Teahan videos, I also highly recommend this one about toxic parenting: 7 Examples Of Toxic Parenting

And many others.

So I am now writing multiple new drafts in parallel, and that seems like a step forward.

You know how I keep planning on writing this blog and then I don’t post for years and am surprised by finding several decently-written drafts when I then log back in for the first time?

You know how I want to make my depression my bitch, to use it against itself and come out a stubborn winner and how it apparently keeps failing if this quiet blog is anything to go by?

And then also how we don’t have to take our random negative thoughts seriously? Oh, I may not have posted that one yet…

Anyhoo, I’m taking my own advice from the previous post and writing this blog from now on.

When I remember that I should try to make an entry in my gratitude journal.

Setting a reminder on my phone… right now.

I was also thinking about YouTube for a grand long time – just like I was literally thinking about drop-shipping with amazon because I’m such an avid eBayer that I’ve regularly purchased items 1.5 years before I started seeing them elsewhere on the internet and in stores and and 1/4 the prices, making me feel like I know way too much about good products to not try to make it into a not entire waste of time by doing something lucrative with it – because I’ve come to accidentally know a bunch about how to do YouTube by listening to just so much of it on auto-play that I have to convert that unintended “investment” into SOMETHING. Not the best logic but then I got to add to that:

• But I make funny faces. People keep laughing at my faces, maybe more people might want to see and laugh at my face if given the possibility?
• But dude, you might still have a stalker. You know how he finds you on every social media? How he’s even messaged you from an account with none of the pseudonyms of his that you already know?
• Yes but the operant term there is “may”, and Churchill may have been a fallible human too but he wasn’t wrong when he said that the only thing to fear is fear. It’s true not just from the moral perspective but also from the rational optimist one. We can’t vegetate through our lives in fear of potentials and sometimes betting is the right thing to do. Which reminds me that I need to write a Perennial Bibliography post…
• Anyhoo, you’re not really a video person
• And video is a medium, just choose the right medium for you, dumbo.
• It’s unlikely to be either TT or IG, cuz one I’m boycotting and the other… well I’m not pretty enough and I don’t care for either using filters or for the parent company, just not really my jam. That’s at best a place to
• And I technically already have Etsy in the plans either way but I haven’t yet found a cost-effective production model for any of my better innovations.

Now, I recently took a new job, which got me reacquainted with LinkedIn. They now have a Creator thing, and gosh darned it, I think I’m gonna post giftwrap photos as though it was IG and post the occasional short video of stuff getting wrapped over there like a mini YT O.O

So bitch-making out of my depression (in part) through the process of creativity* and blogging about it, here I come again! XD

…that the perfect is the enemy of the good. If this turned out to be true for my job, why would it not be true for writing a blog? It’s high time I got back to this project. It is still, after all, a part of my healing process…

I feel I need to get something off my chest and I would very much appreciate some feedback on this over time:

I have been very unlucky in love – though I suspect this may apply to most people out there. I seem to have a knack for falling in love with people I have no true hope for a future with and to attract people that I don’t even know how I attract in the first place because they are not my ‘target demographic’. On the rare occasion that I do meet someone who appears to be just right for me on paper: I somehow fail to fall in love with them! It’s as though my brain insisted that there be some sort of tragic flaw to all my relationships: a challenge to overcome with an epic love story… or… an escape hatch? At the end of the day I try to make myself feel ok about it, because as far as I know my exes have all ended up in better relationships after we had broken up. I thus at least get to think to myself that some greater good has come of it all, even if that doesn’t always feel like a consolation.

Nowadays when I look at guys I like I can’t help but think: “Would I want him as an ex?” The very thought of risking wasting time dating instead of focusing on myself and making up for all the time I lost worrying about the wrong things has become overwhelmingly exhausting. I rarely set dates anymore and when I do: I usually itch to cancel!

I’m even less lucky with girls, truth be told. With them I do still get to be able to imagine: “It could last forever if only she was into me to begin with!”, but I yet have to get the chance to make myself an ex girlfriend…

So I am now choosing to stay single – despite wishing that my current reality included an established relationship. I am not sure if the following are depressive thoughts or a balanced* ones, but here are my reasons:

My last relationship was with another depressed person. He had severe lack of motivation and I had debilitating insecurities. It was a toxic mix. Still, the drop in the cup that made me agree to the breakup – instead of trying to hatch make up schemes – was the fact that my response to his episodes was more depression of my own. I ached seeing him suffer, unable to help him. It has become clear that breaking up has become, among other things, a health issue for me.

Of course there’s no rule that says I couldn’t date a more fortunate person. However, I do not wish the pain of seeing a loved one suffer onto anybody. So then why would I attract attention to myself and increase someone’s chances of getting to suffer from seeing me suffer? It feels both selfish and plain dumb, since seeing the other person suffer over my own suffering would clearly defeat the purpose of dating someone healthier than me in the first place. I don’t want that feeling of guilt, I no longer want to have to wonder whether they might be better off without me. I rather bite the bullet and try to stay single.

I feel stuck looking forward to a lonely future. I wish I could seek a relationship free of this sense of preemptive guilt one day, but for now my best hope for any joy appears to be focusing on my interests. Feel free to join me in my efforts here on my blog, I’d love an exchange of ideas!

*I think that using the word “balanced” – instead of “normal” or even “healthy” – is the most constructive choice, as it helps clear away distracting connotations and keep the struggle in focus. It may even help some to learn to see the person behind the walls of the illness.

“Hi. My name is Agnes and I am depressed.”

Depression has become one of my defining characteristics lately. I have had dysthymia for a very long time but it wasn’t part of my identity the way major depressive disorder (MDD) has become over the course of the last year and a half.

I am fairly certain that my depression is anxiety related. When I was in Grade 3, I had an academic “pants pulled down in public” moment. From that point on I developed a fear that my classmates – and later on my coworkers – must have been aware of something that I had missed and that as such I was going to deeply embarrass myself in front of them any day now. This apprehension came on top of a pre-existing distress over the fact that my classmates seemed to dislike me – which in turn was cultivating my conviction that I must have been unlovable since seemingly even my own father didn’t care about me. Never mind the fact that I was living with a loving mother, grandfather and grandmother >.<

I coped how I could. I had paint and later Paint; I had LEGO; I had science books for children before I could even read; I had modeling and later polymer clay;  I played house with dolls and friends in the garage, paying detailed attention to the interior decor and the premise of the make belief story we were going to riff on; I slowly accumulated a respectable collection of beads. My childhood was brimming with curiosity and creativity that my mother nurtured at every turn with the best books and art supplies she could afford. Who cared – or so I tried very hard to believe – what others thought about me? I could beat them all at anything but sports if I wanted to! The spawn of two engineers, creation became my solace and academic dominance my confidence. Woe to me were I to ever stumble!

But of course I stumbled. Worse: I repeatedly had to relearn things I have forgotten along the way, like the very fact that creating helped me cope with my anxiety! That particular glitch came when at the end of CEGEP I decided to pursue a career in physics. I soon started developing a sense of guilt over making, fixing or altering things instead of studying. Engaging in the very activity that used to keep me grounded made me feel as though I was letting down my future self. So, slowly but surely, I abandoned the positive half of my coping mechanism just as its ticking time bomb half started to unravel, taking me with it.

Fast forward through some rudderless years during which I have completely imploded: it has finally occurred to me to try to exploit my depression against itself and to share my journey as it unfolds, just in case it may help somebody else out there with a struggle of their own. My idea is simple: when things feel so bad that nothing feels worth it anymore I try to make myself think of the world and my circumstances in it as not mattering, because if I succeed then I chipped away another nick of the guilt I feel over wanting to work on my projects instead of doing the “right thing”. I’ll then be able to work on something creative, which is therapeutic for me, and I would then share the thought process here in case anyone else might be interested. At the very least I would like to show the world a window into depression that would help demystify the disorder to the layperson and contribute to dispelling the stigma around mental illness. It should allow me to rebuild a sense of worth and hopefully even to build a sense of legitimacy as a human being, which I have been struggling with for far longer than I care to remember >.<

In other words: I have come to realize that if life gave me not just lemons but outright rotten lemons then I had to forget about nice and easy lemonade and buckle down to brew some lemon moonshine with them instead!

*At the very least since CEGEP, which would make that… at least 9 years. I only now just realize that it has been almost 10 years. At least 1/3 of my life thus far. Minimum**! And that doesn’t even count the fact that as a child I very much fit the description of a child suffering from depression >.<

**Yes, I suffer from depression and I have a flare for the dramatic at times. No, I wouldn’t be surprised if deep down somewhere they were somehow related – and I am actually hoping to find out because I am looking for any lead that may help me get over this thing!