On Cutting Down the Levity [from 2015]

ARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHH. I still haven’t finished reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, but I’m sooooo close. This is the last draft blog post I have in my “unpublished posts” folder on WordPress, so here it goes. I’ve been spending all my free time making Triumph of the Now TV (#TotNTV), working full time for an antiques business, working ad hoc for an independent cinema in Brixton and spending many hours a week on Albrecht Dürer: Renaissance Dude. I’ve also been walking my dog, plus trying to have a social life, and I went to the Machynlleth Comedy Festival the weekend before last. Too much on, and now my big supply of old, unpublished, blog posts is over. SHIT. My life has caught up with itself. Will try to blast through the end of Rebecca West over the next two days. I’m scared, terrified, of dropping this post-every-three-days-not-including-videos routine. Shit!!!

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[FROM DECEMBER 21 2015]

I suppose the error I made was losing touch with myself.

When one decides to ignore internal problems, one has two options: either hold the problems of others as sacrosanct and worthy of your attention, or to go the other way, and care about nothing, feel like nothing is real.

For me, I think this happened a few years ago, when I gave up talking therapy for my long-standing depression and instead started taking pharmaceutical medication in order to press back my emotions.

Antidepressants repressed my mind. Though, yes, the time I spent using them I was – on a general level – happier, in many ways I was less myself. I felt less fear, I felt less impeded doing anything I wanted to do, I was indiscriminately focused on the short term – I managed my finances terribly and I partied too much. I did these things because the bit of my mind that worried – the bit where the anxiety comes from – was being systematically shut down. The problem is, though, that the bit of my mind that worries about things is the bit of my mind that analyses things and sees multiple different outcomes. The problem with my depression was that the outcomes I chose to focus on were the negative ones, but the problem with the anti-depressants – for me – was that they shut down almost all of my analytical thoughts.

They made me less clever.

With that, too, came an unwillingness to engage with the outside world. If my problems were not worth taking seriously – which they stopped feeling like they were (on anti-depressants), neither were anyone else’s. It was a mindset that allowed me to shrug off feeling compassion [no longer the case, SMH 2017].

Don’t get me wrong, anti-depressants helped me to do some of the most difficult and fulfilling things that happened in my life: I’m not certain that I’d’ve had the confidence to complete, let alone apply for my MA if I’d-

[incomplete, ends here]

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NORMAL SERVICE IS GONNA HAVE TO RESUME, GOTTA FINISH READING THIS BOOOK!!!