I am sliding into depression again and I am doing so largely without realizing it. I have been more tired than normal the past few days, and what sleep I do get is less restorative. All of this happened with out my awareness until just a few minutes ago when I suddenly thought to myself that I am depressed again.
I only recently admitted to my conscious self that I was depressive by nature. It was a startling confession to make and one that I am still sorting out. I know what the classic signs of depression are but they have been building and unfolding in my life without my conscious awareness. Now, for some reason I am able to see the signs and admit that I am sliding downwards once again.
I have been in a prolonged period of depression that varies in intensity for some time now, perhaps years. I am able for short periods of time to feel happy and to see the colors of life. When I slip down a bit though the colors fade and all I am left with are grays, muted and dark. Since this has been my default mode for so long it feels normal to me. A part of my mind is screaming to get out of this cycle, but it is so very hard to resist what has always felt good to me.
As I write these words I feel the emotions shifting inside of me, I can start to see the color of my emotions returning. The bright cheery colors of contentment, happiness, and joy are just visible around the edges. I feel that if I turn quickly enough I’ll catch a glimpse of happiness and then I’ll know what direction to head. However when I turn all I see is more gray, more dull muted shadows. How do I break these patterns? How do I rid myself of this malaise?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. For now it is enough to be able to name my nemesis and see it directly. The gremlin that is my depression hates to be seen, hates the light, the happiness, the joy of being balanced emotionally. If I don’t look to the sides and see him slinking along I will forever be trapped in this maze of depression. Only by forcing myself to constantly be aware of his presence can I see him and the poison he brings to my life.
I see my depression today. And in that seeing I am freed of its grasp for a time…
My weekend was filled with realizations, big and small. On Friday I took my Audi TT in for service. Some of the gauges were acting screwy and it needed to be diagnosed. I was given a VW Passat as a loaner car as it was likely the service would require an over the weekend stay. That evening my wife drove it and we both agreed that it was a much nicer car than we expected.
Saturday morning we took it out for our errands and as a result managed to lock ourselves out of our house. So we went by the Audi dealer to get my garage door opener out of the TT. While we were there we decided to look at Passats and the Audi A6 just for fun. As a result we had to deal with the salesman we’ve had out there before. He does not listen and is very good at a subtle hard sell. After about an hour and twenty minutes we had the information we needed and told him we were going to lunch. After we had lunch and went home I called and left a message for him saying that we decided to keep the TT, thanks anyway.
While I was out later that afternoon he called and badgered my wife about our decision. She told him our reasons why and he said that he’d call me on Monday. Obviously he feels that he will have better luck with me, another male, than with my wife. I am looking forward to shooting him down. I don’t like it when people dismiss my wife out of hand.
As a result of our encounter with this salesman, my wife got to some great new understandings about herself. The men in her family behave in much the same was as this man does. Abrupt, rude, incapable of listening, and condescending too boot. Dealing with the salesman had pushed some of her old father/brother buttons. We talked about this for quite a while and she got to some great realizations. One of the biggest was that realization that we don’t like situations where we feel like we have to take care of the seller, rather than feeling like they are taking care of us.
After a very good discussion where I got down to the childhood memories and events that helped to create my feelings about getting new things I was able to cry out a lot of old hurts and let go of them. Michele helps to create a wonderfully safe place for me to open these old wounds and heal them with love and patience.
In the end we decided to get her a new desk and let me use the one I had built for myself years ago again. Currently she is using the hand-built one, because, well, I don’t like to have the best for myself. However she feels guilty having a good one when I don’t. She wants a different one and isn’t nearly as picky about this as I, so we found one for her right away and have ordered it. When it comes and I set it up she’ll have a great new desk, which takes care of her. And I’ll have my own desk again, which takes care of me.
What is your lineage? Where are your ancestors from? My mother’s family is from Ireland and Scotland, while my father’s linage goes back to England.
Of those countries, which would you most like to visit? All three, but mostly Scotland.
Which would you least like to visit? Why? Um, England maybe. No real reason.
Do you do anything during the year to celebrate or recognize your heritage? No. My family isn’t big on celebrations so I didn’t grow up with that in mind. I’m working on it though.
Who were the first ancestors to move to your present country (parents, grandparents, etc)? Francis moved here in 1639. Woo-hoo.
It was an amazing weekend. Both Thursday and Friday evenings my wife and I had long, deep discussions about some issues that had started to build between us. We both work hard at airing out the little petty things before they become bigger, uglier issues that are impossible to deal with.
I am depressive and tend to take on more than I should as a result. I keep things in that should be said and I over react to little things making it hard to resolve issues. My wife has some fear of abandonment issues that get tweaked when I stop communicating openly with her. If only one of us is feeling out of control and responding from our negative side the other can usually provide enough support to create a safe place to fall, allowing the underlying issue to be expressed and resolved. However, when we both are feeling out of control life gets, um, interesting. Both Thursday and Friday evening we sat and talked for a long time about little things and big things. Tears were shed and hotter emotions given a place to cool. We started to come back to ourselves after about 6-weeks of gradually becoming more and more isolated. It felt good to reconnect to my best friend.
I grew up in a house that was predominately intellectual. Issues were resolved through discussion and reason; emotions rarely ever played a part. And when emotions did present themselves they were attacked. My family had two responses to emotional expression during my childhood: anger or Band-Aids. Either my parents would get angry with me for expressing an emotion, or they would try to take away the emotion so that I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Neither of these responses allowed me the opportunity to develop normal emotional responses to situations. Either I was afraid that I would get in trouble for having the emotion, or my parents would be so over concerned that I was emotional that they would try and fix what ever and not hear that all I needed was a chance to express how I felt. I grew to be afraid to express even those narrow acceptable emotions for fear of parental teasing. Showing emotions was a weakness to be avoided at all costs.
For example, as a child I was often the target of the neighborhood bully. I was scared to walk to school because I had to pass his house. I often went blocks out of my way to avoid encounters with him and his gang of friends. When I was unsuccessful in avoiding the bully and I came home in tears, I never once was allowed to cry it out, or talk about the fear I had of this person and what he was doing to me. Instead I was told to ignore him and tell the teacher. Then my parents would call his parents and virtually ensure that I’d get a repeat visit the next day from this guy. Over time I stopped telling my parents about his attacks because the aftermath of telling was worse than the attack itself.
Another example: I had mono in the 8th grade and while I spent several weeks in bed recovering I read a lot of books. One that my mother brought home from the library for me was called “Dove.” It was the story of a man who sails around the world and meets and falls in love with his wife along the way. I was captivated by the story. My father pooh-poohed the thing because, in his words, “it was a love story.” For several years afterwards I talked of wanting to sail around the world myself. My parents always were amused and sometimes made fun of this dream. I was crushed. I learned not to expose my dreams or things that I held dear for fear of ridicule and teasing.
Recently I learned that my father hated the very idea of emotional dialog. I had tried to write some letters to my parents in hopes of resolving some of the emotional issues with which I was struggling. Instead of hearing the pain and confusion that I was confronting, my father’s response was to get angry with me for “attacking” my mother and him. After a one-side discussion with my parents, where he did almost all the talking, he summed it up by saying words to this effect: “this kind of emotional dialog tears me up and I can’t do it. I refuse to do it again.”
I understand now that my entire life I have been given this message that emotional responses are bad over and over again. To the point where I believe at a very deep level that I am somehow wrong or bad for expressing any emotions. If I am not perfectly stoic and intellectual about things then I should be ashamed. All of this has left me emotionally crippled. I am unable to allow myself expression of any but a narrow band of emotions. When events unfold that push me outside the extremely narrow range of expression I felt was safe growing up, I am helpless and frustrated. I punish myself rather than express what are perfectly normal, acceptable emotions. For years I have had a terrible fear of my anger. I refused to let myself express that emotion in the moment. And when I finally did express it I did so in inappropriate ways, usually at people who weren’t deserving of it.
I can own that I am emotionally immature. I can understand the reasons why. What is harder to own and come to terms with is the fact that I have clung to this behavior for so long. I can choose to stay with my current set of behaviors and continue to be miserable at every turn. Or, I can choose to alter my responses and give myself permission to express what I am feeling in the moment.
My emotional response system was arrested at a very early age, I believe, and consequently when I am faced with the need to express a strong emotion today I revert in some sense to my scared little-boy inner child. He doesn’t know how to express strong emotions because he was prevented from learning. This is no ones fault, it is just the truth of how I grew up. Today I abdicate my emotional responsibility to myself by letting my inner child responses dictate my expressions.
I am not trying to make my parents responsible for how I respond emotionally today. That is my responsibility and mine alone. What I need to do is recognize that I have some poor emotional coping skills and that I need to allow myself to respond differently in situations rather than continue to use the same old scripts again and again. If I don’t change my responses then I have no one to blame but myself. I can change what I do and how I act. I can take the power over my emotions back from my inner child and make them mature adult expressions of emotion. I am not going to recreate the intellectual exercises in control that I grew up knowing and hating. Rather I want to build a normal, healthy range of adult emotional responses to life’s ups and downs.
My wife and I had a very difficult and important discussion last night. The past 2 months have been extremely stressful for both of us. The cause of my stress is visible and easy to point out, my job situation. The cause of hers is less open and visible. It is nonetheless just as important. The gist of our talk was about the one-sided approach we had been taking during this crisis. Most of the effort was focus on my issues and me. Far less time was devoted to her issues, feelings and needs.
She had the courage to point this out last night. It was done in a way that I could hear, a way that wasn’t accusatory, but that was honest and direct. The truth of the situation is that I had let her down in terms of being there for her. She was there for me; even though her fears were running strong and high. It wasn’t fair that I wasn’t being there for her. What was key to this discussion was her ability to present her side without attacking me, with out trying to make me feel bad about what had happened. What had happened was just the truth. It wasn’t pleasant, it didn’t feel good to either of us in the light of hindsight, but it also wasn’t something I needed to be beat up with, by her or by myself.
The other key to success here was my ability to hear the truth about myself, even when that truth wasn’t pretty. I have worked long and hard to be in a place where I can hear the truth about myself without needing to defend it or justify it. The truth isn’t good or bad, it just is the truth. I wasn’t being there for her, and I was asking her to deal with more and more of my stress by not dealing with it openly and honestly.
Before you think this was a one-sided exposure of the truth, she owned that she hadn’t been as forthcoming in expressing her needs and fears during the recent ordeal. She took responsibility for the actions and inaction she brought to the situation.
Because we each have the trust in the other to be supportive of our process and the knowledge that it is okay to be frail humans in their eyes, we are able to expose our deeper feelings openly and without reservation. It has taken a long time to build this level of trust, and it takes continuing work to keep that trust in place. Exposing your deepest self is at once liberating and terrifying. It takes a leap of faith to jump into that breach, faith in yourself to be true and honest no matter how hard it is in the moment. It takes belief in your partner that they are going to be supportive.
It takes passion about your self, as much to match the passion you have for your partner. If you fight for yourself and listen to your true needs, and if you express those needs openly and honestly then you can expect your partner to do the same. If you don’t do for yourself then you have no right to expect them to do for you. A true healthy relationship has balance. Not just between the two people involved, but within each of them.
When I first met my wife I didn’t listen to myself, and consequently I couldn’t hear others either. Now I actively listen to myself, and I am more able to hear others. I am passionate about my wife and about my relationship with her. I am also passionate about myself and my relationship with myself.
Things are calmer here than they have been for a while. My employment situation seems to have taken a turn for the better. While nothing is guaranteed all indications are I will be staying for at least another year. A new administration comes into power in January and my hope is that the financial situation next spring won’t be as dire as it was this past spring.
I’ve learned a lot about my self as a result of the past few weeks of stress and upset. It has been a great growing experience, however, it is one I hope I don’t need to repeat.
My wife and I are celebrating our 5th Wedding Anniversary tomorrow. Our time together has been magical, wondrous, and filled with laughter and love. Neither of us can believe it has been 5 years already. The honeymoon isn’t over yet. I have been extremely fortunate in that I married my best friend, my true companion, and my perfect lover. We have had to work very hard at our relationship; nothing good is ever easy or free. The work has been rewarding personally and as a couple. There is no one I would rather spend time with than Michele, and no one I want to be closer to than her. I would marry her again in a minute because I love her more deeply today than I did 5 years ago when I said, “I do.”
I have a depressive tendency to my personality. I think I have always known this subconsciously but I have only recently started to consciously think about my actions. I am not clinical, but I could slip down to that level should I stop trying to fight my inner voice.
There is listlessness to my actions and feelings most of the time. I have periods of happiness and joy, but they are not, in geek terms, the default. I am not sure if I can re-program myself to default to happy or even neutral feelings. I just know that I am tired of always fighting off depression.
I think that my depressive nature is one of the factors in the relocations my wife and I have made in the past 5 years. Being married to my best friend gives me great joy and happiness, so when the darker side to my nature starts to exert itself I want to make the cause something outside of myself. I have abdicated responsibility for myself in the past by making my job situation responsible for how I felt, rather than the other way around.
It’s like this; I get a new job and move to a new city. Everything is new and exciting, fresh and rosy. The excitement and happiness of new discovery allow me to mask my inner depression. For a time I can act and feel as happy as I want to be, and as happy as my relationship with Michele can make me. However, after the new has worn off and I realize that this new job and city are just the same as the last one I spiral down into my funk once again. So far we have moved cross-country three times in 5 years. In each case there was an alternative that would have allowed us to stay where we were. Choosing that alternative would have meant owning responsibility for my emotions. It would have meant taking a very adult stance in my personality.
Until recently I wasn’t capable of making this stance. I am faced with a decaying job situation once again. And once again my thoughts are turning towards leaving as a solution. However, I am struggling to face my inner depressive nature and find a way back to the light without having to leave. Leaving here means temporary relief only, and when the depression returns it will be even worse. Eventually, if I were to run enough times, the depression would become clinical and require outside intervention.
There is a pattern that occurs in addictive behaviors and I am following that pattern. You start by alienating family and friends then you run afoul of employers and non-criminal services. Eventually you are forced into mandated solutions. I have distance from my family, and few close friends as confidants. I have nearly reached to first stage of “losing it all.”
I want to keep it all. I want to be happy, and not be afraid all the time. I am tired of the weight of my moods and feelings. I am going to expose my process here for a very selfish reason: it prevents me from sweeping it back under the rug where it can be ignored. Also, it may help someone else who is struggling with his or her own demons.
An SGML fan, an XML fan, and an HTML fan are watching a movie when they notice smoke coming out of a trash-can.
The SGML fan says “We must convince the theater management to hire an expert to write a DTD for emergency-announcements, and sell them an expensive application for archiving announcements, and get them to hire a team to convert all their old announcements to SGML!”
The XML fan says, “There’s no time for that! We must train all the audience members to recognize XML, and then start a committee to investigate the possibility of starting negotiations to form a working group to write a paper on the future evolution of emergency-announcement semantics!”
Meanwhile, the HTML fan takes out his wireless PDA and types in:
<h1><blink><font color=red>FIRE!</font></blink></h1>
which he quickly hacks the digital projection system to display, saving the lives of everyone in the theater.
posted to comp.text.xml by Jorn Barger
I work as an independent software consultant. Currently I am sub-contracting through another company to the local state government. As consulting gigs go this is pretty cushy. The contracts are one year in length, with the cost of the two one-year extensions built in from the start. Basically if you can do the work and you don’t commit a serious political faux pas you are employed for 3 years.
However the is the slight matter of a budget crises in my home state. Contracts are not getting signed. Signed contracts are being voided. No one is safe, and no one knows what will happen next. The budget for my client agency was slashed. Only 2 of 15 people on my team survived the cut. The rest of us are in limbo, waiting for a decision about an alternate-spending plan. Under that plan my position would be restored. Only about 6 or 7 of the original 15 would still be here.
The outside firm reporting on this whole situation makes its report to the agency head today. Word is expected to filter down by tomorrow, Monday at the latest. To say that those of us in the know are tense would be a gross understatement. I came here almost 2 years ago after losing my job at a pre-IPO company that tanked. I’ve been laid off before so I know what that feels like. What I am not looking forward to is the aftermath. More than likely we will relocate (again). Springfield is just too small to risk staying when the sole source of contracts is this uncertain. We had hoped to last 9 or 10 years here before moving on again. Even if my contract is upheld do I risk staying another 12 months? Do I leave now and get the pain of relocation over with? A new administration is due in January, who knows whether that will be good for the contract climate or not.
I understood there would be risks working for myself. I weighed those against the gains for me. Even with this current crises I still feel as if the benefits the past 2 years have far outweighed the cost today. It has been a learning experience unlike any other I’ve had in 20 years as a professional. Now I need to decide if I’ve gotten the all the lessons this opportunity provides, or if there is some else to be learned.
Sigh.