Words are inadequate

Okay well that was extremely not fun and I am gonna vote for not doing it again, as soon as I figure out what it was and how to not do it.

Three weeks? Two and a half. Whatever. I spent another week or so recovering from covid. I honestly don't know if I'm fully recovered even yet: Shortness Of Breath is still a thing. As is Tires Easily, but, well. I spent the entirety of last week and probably a little more in a depressive episode. Bit of chicken and egg there, or vicious cycle maybe. Lots of sitting on the couch not doing anything, including classwork (finished the assignment by yelling at myself a lot, and I'm not particularly happy with it but at least it's done).

Putting Myself Out There is, it turns out, a reliable depression trigger. Dating, brand-new social situations, writing submissions... and jobhunting is perhaps the worst case for this. Against my best efforts I absorbed a lot of "if you don't support yourself then no one will ever love you" messages growning up. So jobhunting is just a desperate quest for external validation with extra steps. Jobhunting while not having a job, and in a brand-new-to-me field while the economy circles the drain, is just depression-fuel icing on the depression-fuel cake.

I try the normal things and mostly they're just more difficult and less fulfilling. Got a little sun, until it started clouding and raining in the middle of the week. Staying on top of ishes / apartment-tidying was more or less a lost cause. I went out to role-playing on Saturday but that didn't shake it either. It lifted, more or less, Saturday night or Sunday, and on Sunday I went over to Noel's for a full day of boardgaming and that was actually quite good.

My depression is very clearly situational and triggered, so I keep thinking I can manage it by managing my situations. That's of course not possible, not fully. And when it hits me it knocks me out -so- hard. Once job etc is sorted I am gonna have to look into pharmaceutical intervention.

Need to take my last midterm tomorrow; been reviewing notes etc today EDIT or I could just knock it out right now, that was not too terrible /EDIT. Need to wrap up the practicum stuff as well but there's no huge rush on that. Maybe this coming week.

Bah.

Not journaling is a bad sign but usually I read it as a depressed bad sign, and I don't think that's what's going on right now. So I've mostly I guess ignored it. "Well, I'm not writing, but even accounting for my resistance to admitting I'm depressed I don't think I'm depressed, so it's probably okay?" There's something going on, though. The last ... week and a half, since Erin went back home, I've been feeling exceptionally unfocused.

Maybe before that as well, it's hard to tell from here. Before Erin came down in early May I felt like I was keeping together pretty well, though. I got my classwork done ahead of time so that I wouldn't have to worry about it while we were down at Sherry's. And then ... the chaos of the next week happened and it feels like that threw me just completely out of whack, and I haven't managed to re-center myself.

I am ... let's say 'not falling behind in a damaging way' in classes. That is: I'm doing fine on tests/quizzes. As for assignments: of the five, I'm keeping fully up to date in two. A third has moved into Group Work mode; the first of two assignments there is due later this week and it's complete, ready to be submitted once the other members of the group say "yep, looks good to go." The last two are Rob's two classes, in which I am behind but for which due dates are more like suggestions. I do exceptionally poorly with trying to -learn- from Rob's fragmented lectures. I got by in fall because I already knew half and could functionally teach myself the rest. The 'already knew' part is much smaller this time, so the teaching-myself is correspondingly larger. But at least the dates are flexible.

Apart from that. I went to a small larp on Saturday and had a great deal of fun. I'd like to get that written up in more detail but, again, difficulty Sitting Down And Doing It. Food last week was extremely catch-as-can, and I overcompensated by Cooking All The Things over the weekend and yesterday: cookies which went to larp and to Julianne who's gone back east (her mother is in hospital and may or not be coming back out again), freezer burgers, more bread, a pork tenderloin in the fridge to make into sammiches.

Money's been bad/scary, in both the short-term (running out of funds with no job relatively soon) and long-term (having done math it is unlikely that BC Gov, my desired/preferred employer, will pay me enough to live on). Doubtless some background stress around that kicking up, as well.

I have not missed feeding the cat, since he lets me know when food is supposed to be and conveniently it is also at my food-times, but I have missed the litterbox, more than once (not more than once in a row, thankfully). I put off going to get more cat litter for nearly a week, unrelated to not cleaning the litterbox. Objects are beginning to pile up on flat surfaces.

I seem to be not doing well and I don't know what to do about it.

Deep breath.

This is all sounding like at minimum a resurgence of ADHD problems. It's entirely possible that I need a meds adjustment. I am on not quite the lowest possible dose of Concerta, and I do notice a difference on big-pill days vs small-pill days.

Mm. Noted: This is not good. Will attempt to get a meds adjustment this week: calling tomorrow morning.

Shoutout to all the people who went undiagnosed in their childhood because despite never fitting in and feeling like you belonged, you got good grades, and that was all that mattered to anyone.

--@ skyler @ furry.engineer, 2023-09-23

This is of course an exaggeration. Other things also mattered, including "going to church every Sunday," "practicing cello," and, later, "Boy Scouts". But it was made real clear to me early on that "feeling like I belonged" was pretty much irrelevant.

(This isn't really about that. It's about ADHD. But that's a part of the story, so, here we are. CW: historical casual suicide talk below the cut.)

( AD(H)D, etc )

Twenty-twenty-two. "A dim year," is how I described it elsewhere. Not really a dark year, as such. Just not one as bright as I'd hoped.

( state of the tucker )

Last night I emptied one more Office/Misc box. I'm down to three of those, plus some random stuff on top of the dresser that needs to be sorted and sent to storage. I think I can get the Office/Misc down to two boxen but beyond that I'll need a hanging file or something.

Among the things I excavated was the blue folder of memories. I no longer remember where the folder came from, but when I moved out of my dorm room I took down my photos of people I knew off the wall and stuck them in there, along with a couple of letters and such things. Over the years it's become the repository for Things From Important People.

A brief and incomplete list of what I dug up:

• A card from my parents on the occasion of the death of Tommy (the family cat), including a few photos of him.
  
• A list of things my Calculus teacher said during class, including "The AP exam will be the easiest test you take all year" (accurate), "The numbers are getting bigger and bigger in a negative sense," "We're going to start out with the concept of ... of needing more chalk," and "Never use a physics equation in my classroom again!" Educationally speaking the back half of high school was an almost unmitigated disaster, but I really, really liked Dr Stallings.
  
• Rare photographs of me: Lion In Winter (I was Richard), pre-Homecoming-dance in fairegarb with Shaye and Scott and Kirsten, me and Mo looking content.
  
• A certificate from college confirming that I made the Dean's List one semester in 2004. (As opposed to the Dean's Other List, which I made repeatedly between 1996 and 2000, and which eventually resulted in me taking the Dean's Vacation.)
  
• A photograph of the apartment building in Fürth that I lived in from 1979 to 1982. I remember it as being this towering edifice but no, it's a three-storey walkup.
  
• A couple of the photos I took in photography class senior year, including one of Jynx looking impish through the spokes of a bicycle wheel she's holding.
  
• A postcard from tam_nonlinear.
  
• Stuff from Andy McCoy's Eagle Scout Court of Honor, over which I was privileged to preside.
  
• And of course letters and cards from high school and college girlfriends and friends, including one from someone I hadn't thought I'd had any written relics of at all.

This was easier than the journals were. It's the view from outside, and that's always been easier on me. Even the pictures of me, something I usually hate with a passion, are ... jeez, that guy. He had no idea.

Notably absent are any relics of Kelly, with whom I had a rocky relationship and very bad breakup in the 2000s. Those are all in a bag in a different box, specifically to keep them away from the good memories. And while it's getting on time to revisit those so I can finally discard most of them and filter the rest to the folder... not yet, not yet.

So my maternal aunt Susan sent me a thumbdrive with a whole mess of scanned-and-digitized photos from her side of the family (Shackelfords and McKinnons). It's pretty neat: it goes back, oh, I guess over a hundred years now, there's a bunch of photos from Carl Oscar Bergholm in there.

(Sidenote: Carl Oscar Bergholm emigrated to the US from Sweden via Finland. He fetched up in Minnesota like ya do, and married my great-grandmother Iris McKinnon from whom I take my name. They moved back to Texas for his health, and then he died of heart trouble in 1929, when my grandmother was seven. C.O. then turned up in a Supreme Court case, Bergholm v. Peoria Life Insurance Company, in which Iris / Grandmother Bergholm tried and failed to recover C.O.'s life insurance payout. The case still gets cited from time to time. Immortality of a sort, though not the kind that buys food in the Depression.)

Anyway. I recognise maybe half of the names and can put recognisable faces to maybe half of those, but it is definitely interesting to see Gram and Pop, and Susan and Mom and Jim and later Bill, through stages of their lives.

At first glance it looked like the most recent batch was from Xmas '77 (labeled '76 but I'm pretty sure it's '77, I'm in those and I look closer to thirteen months than to one month). I tossed one of those with baby-Tucker in up on Facebook. Susan saw it and posted another from Xmas '82, when my sister was about that age and I was in first grade and had just gotten glasses.

I took a look at that one, enjoyed seeing my relations look like my first memories of them. And then I registered which one in the photo was me and got a sudden shocking reminder of just why I hated pictures of me for so long. Bowl haircut, awful glasses, stiff posture, weird expression. Nothing to be done about any of it, not that I knew there was anything that /could/ be done. I once broke down in tears during a family slideshow because I couldn't stand seeing other people looking at me.

I can't find words for it and I've been trying since last night.

And when I stopped hating how I looked quite so much, which would probably be "eighth or ninth grade" in a combination of contact lenses, hair, and people who'd never known me any other way, I still never particularly liked most pictures of me. (I did like my senior photo from high school, and there's a handful of others I've kept from around that time, but.) The angle's wrong, or it catches me at a bad moment, or or or. Stiff posture, weird expression.

Which isn't to say that I didn't /want/ to like them, or to like how I looked in pictures. But it took a damned long time, and repeated encouragement from Erin among others, before that could even approach actuality.

I dunno. There's something important there. I sat on the couch and /shook/ this morning trying to write this. But I don't, quite, know what it is.

I appear to be, if not Burnt Out, then Burning Out.

I am judging this based on the fact that I very badly want to set up the TV, hook up the Wii which plays Gamecube games, and replay a couple of games that I beat ages ago (Zelda on a boat, the Metroid Prime games, maybe Eternal Darkness).

Note that I don't want to play any of the small backlog of unplayed games I've got hanging around. I explicitly want to Do A Thing which is a thing that I have done before. At a guess, what I get out of this is something along the lines of: comfort; consistency; sense of accomplishment without corresponding fear of failure; mental-sense of being in another, safer(?) time.

Bah. Work is being terrible: I've been doing the work of at least two people since the beginning of March, and for the two months before that it was 1.5 people. I lack the energy to apply for other jobs, if indeed there are any that are hiring at the moment, and if indeed I would be able to function well enough to take on a different position. I miss humans-that-are-not-Erin but I do not think I would be capable of interacting with them at present (I certainly do not have the ability to reach out, and do not appear to even be able to respond reasonably). I badly miss role-playing, which I've done zero of since ... November 2016? and I miss boardgaming, and at this point I'm not even able to indulge in gaming-adjacent activities like "playing online" or "reading rpg books". (Honourable exception for Through the Ages, whose asynchronous play keeps me going. I can generally brain well enough for five minutes at a time of taking my turn.)

... and there's a hell of a lot of other stuff just under the surface of this that needs digging through, but I certainly do not have the time and may or not have the energy.

So. Noted: today I admitted that I was burning out, yet again.

Will Moore RIP. The comments are insightful, particularly CassandraLeo's, particularly when paired with Five Lies Depression Told Me.

I don't know. At this point I feel confident in saying that I was depressed by summer 2012. That I was probably depressed by September 2011, and likely October 2010, and back and back and back with a little less certainty at each milestone. That being laid off eased up certain pressures but not others, and that after six months, being off work had done about as much good as it was going to. That I remained depressed up through last summer and on into the start of fall.

Still, I'm reluctant to identify as "depressed." I guess maybe I am, if frequent suicidal ideation and sporadic self-harm are anything to go by. I don't know. I feel pretty okay these days, but then oxytocin is a hell of a drug. Ask me in a month.

---

Too, I'm reluctant to try antidepressants for several reasons. In no particular order:

One, I am not the most reliable observer of my own mental state, and would prefer not to lock myself into something that maybe works with unpleasant side effects.

Two, finding a doctor in this town is a fool's errand.

Three, I would much prefer to sort out the external stressors in my life and see what's left after that.

Four, I've tried drugs once. I was on Prozac for a little over two years, from the end of high school through the first two years of university. It clipped the highs and lows of my emotional state, which I guess was a tradeoff I was happy to make at the time, and also sharply limited any pleasure I took from sex. Not the drive, mind you, just the physical pleasure.

This was under the direction of a terrible, terrible counselor chosen by my parents, at a time when their worry was "clearly there's something wrong with our son, he's not keeping up with his schoolwork." (A caricature, but not, I think, a wholly unfair one.) It's possible that that whole experience has made me averse to the idea of being depressed.

---

I don't know what the point of this post is, either, other than leaving a record where I can find it later. At about this time, Tucker began to consider that maybe he was clinically depressed and had been for well over a decade.

Eh.

This is an old stupid story and I'm tired of living it:

At the age of twelve I'd been hearing for years that I could be anything I wanted to be, that I was smart enough to do anything at all. So I told my parents that I wanted to be a writer, and write F&SF novels.

My mother famously answered, "How are you going to put food on the table?"

Lesson learned: I could be anything I wanted to be as long as my parents were okay with it.

A stronger kid might have said "screw you guys" and kept writing anyway. I wasn't that kid: I still desperately needed my parents' approval, because being an army brat meant that I didn't have anyone else, at all. I spent the next N years trying to simultaneously fit my future into the box of Acceptable To My Parents, while making my present Acceptable To Me.

In hindsight, it's no wonder that I was depressed.

---

That's not the story I'm telling now but it's useful background. So, take it as told.

During my terrible terrible junior year of high school, my English teacher was Ms Bettie Stegall. I can only assume she didn't think much of me. I certainly didn't give her much reason to. My teenage rebellion mostly took the form of not showing up and not doing the work, and Ms Stegall's English class was not one where I could slide by. I got my shit sufficiently together to pass, somehow.

For senior year English we had a few choices. The only ones I can remember are AP Literature and Writing Seminar. Had I chosen AP Lit, I could have taken the English AP exam, and placed out of freshman English at Tech. (And likely not ever have read Borges, and my life would have been the poorer for it.) On the other hand, there was Writing Sem, advertised as being meant for creative writers.

The point of the old story above: I never gave up wanting to be a writer. I just gave up on doing much about it, because no one cared.

I signed up for Writing Sem in the hope that it would make me into a writer. Ms Stegall taught Writing Sem; I took it anyway. I don't remember much of the class but then senior year was a depressive burnt-out blur for me. In Writing Sem I tutored a special-needs second-grader with Jen Larson, and read Catch-22 which was exactly the right book for me at that point, and taught Kafka's Metamorphosis to freshmen with the help of Brian Aldiss's parody "Better Morphosis". I'm sure there was writing, too: I recall terrible poetry, and a Finnegans-Wake-style stream-of-consciousness depiction of a high school class.

Throughout the year I'd hear whispers from other students about how they were working with Ms Stegall on ... things. A chapbook of poetry, a collection of monologues, whatever. Books. Actual books. (I only ever saw one, and that only because Nesa used a photograph I'd taken in photography class to go with one of her poems.) And I'd think "that would be kinda cool," and then I'd stop thinking about it, because I had no idea what I'd do other than "i want to write" and, well, I'd already nearly failed out of one of Stegall's classes for not caring.

And so I graduated from high school, and went off to college, and the rest, as they say, is history. Or silence. One of those.

---

My memories of Ms Stegall are of someone who contribued to making my life miserable junior year, and didn't much care about me during senior year.

Maybe six months ago I fell into a snarky Facebook group of alums from my high school. This weekend, someone reported that Ms. Stegall had died.

Immediate outpouring of grief and love and "she was my favourite teacher" and "she kicked my ass and really helped me get my writing in gear" and specific tangible things she'd done for people.

I had no such response. I got none of that from her.

Thing is, I'd really like to have. I wish I'd been someone that she saw enough potential in to encourage, to kick my ass and get me in gear.

But that would have required me to have gone through junior year differently, and for that to have happened, the changes keep going back until I'm not even recognisable to myself anymore.

And just showing up isn't enough for that. No mentor will come to me and say "yes, i will teach you, and help you, and guide you, and care about what you do." Most of the time I'm grown-up enough to know that.

Most of the time.

I make no promises as to whether I will reply to any comments here.

Blarg rant DST rant blarg. Sign the petition.

We've been keeping a change jar since we got here. It's a pretty big jar, and we've filled up maybe 5 cm (2") of it. Extrapolating out, it's going to take us over a decade to get it most of the way full. Since Canada abolished the penny awhile back there's going to be a clearly demarcated stratum at the bottom with copper intrusions, and then the rest of it will be pure silver coinage. (Loonies and toonies aren't "change," they're oddly-sized bills.)

March seems to be music month: Tylan (formerly of Girlyman) in Seattle next Sunday, a UK band called Veronica Falls the Friday after, and then back to Seattle for Antje Duvekot the next day. Busy busy.

---

After having it open in a browser tab for a week or more, I finally played Depression Quest yesterday. It's a choose-your-own-adventure type of thing from the point-of-view of someone who's depressed. As you get more depressed, some of the choices are struck out & not available to you. Highly effective, slightly terrifying. [Via Zarf, I'm pretty sure.]

(Also, Boggle the Owl. DW feed at boggletheowl_feed.)

Via thanate, Procrastination is Not Laziness, which explains a great deal about where my procrastination habit comes from. O brain, you are not as helpful as you think you are. From the comments on either that article or a related one, I'm experimenting with the Pomodoro technique, which consists mostly of doing things for 25 minutes and then not for 5 minutes. Initial results are promising but that could be the standard "any change in process will result in temporary improvements" thing. Will see.

And after a dull grey morning the sun is threatening to come out.