So, I’m Depressed. So What?

I say I’m depressed. Not right now, about a particular thing, but depressed, period. But what does that mean?

Most essentially, in the first place, I inherited from my mother and her mother a hyper-active panic response. There’s a little place at the stem of the brain that controls the “fight or flee” response. Theirs, and mine, err on the side of great caution and tend to panic quickly, and frequently. It can be in response to something appropriate, like some kind of emergency, or it can be to something ordinary, like an electric bill that seems a little high.

Secondly, I, like many people in my milieu growing up, spent most of my time afraid of one thing or another. This left me with fear as a default position.

There is a chemical reality to each of these conditions. Maybe other people, maybe you, find it easy to maintain an even keel in life. I, on the other hand, am constantly responding to things with inappropriate chemical reactions that leave me with shaking hands, a tightening in the stomach, a whistling in my ears, red cheeks, a pounding heart, general tremors, near tears, with uncomfortable, deeply negative ideation.

In blogging, I have read, you should get to the point in two hundred words or less. That was about two hundred words.

So at this point in time I am depressed, as usual, but now I am also in a blind funk, due to the fact that fate has been twisting my nipples with great impudence for over a month now. It has all left me desperately trying to find reasonable responses to the preposterously disrespectful input coming from numerous directions. And “reasonable” is not something that I am good at when life presents anything like aggression, or contention, or condescension, or weird, otherworldly ambiguity.

So wish me luck, my friends, dealing with this bullshit tomorrow, and in the days to come.