Dopey Dopamine

I’ve been patiently waiting for my mood to shift a bit, and a horrid sort of aimlessness has settled over me. Options appear to my eyes with the same dull hues, nothing bright and obvious and appealing. I read to keep my mind occupied rather than circling like a vulture.

I was really hoping that the thyroid pills I’ve been prescribed would kick ennui’s butt. I'm always hoping there will be an a-ha moment that puts everything right

My therapist says I should cut myself some slack. Motivation is a gnawing problem for people with ADD. I’m low energy and that’s just a fact of my nature. I should rejoice that I’m functional. I have my kids and husband and they’re important to me. I think of my mom: her kids and family were important to her, too, but she still went around saying, “I just don’t know what to do with my life.” She was saying that in her 70s. Drove me mad. I used to think, Hell, by this time you’ve done what you were going to do with your life – suck it up. But it’s an awful feeling, that sense of directionless motion. You don’t feel like you’re the master of your own ship, or whatever that stupid expression is. I end up reacting to events, dithering over decisions. I feel foggy and uncertain. I’ve known from a young age that structure is essential if I’m to get anything done at all, and that I am incapable of creating that structure myself. I’ve needed schools and jobs to divide up my day, deadlines to force me to focus. The moment I try to set up any sort of routine for myself, I’m doomed. Set goals? Who’s going to hold me to it, after all? Myself? Hah. And routines are not foolproof. There are days when, for example, after years and years of putting out medicine for Firecracker to take, every morning at the same time, I forget it entirely. And you know what? The next day I’ll be more likely to forget it again. It’s as if the habit were unraveling. I finally set up automatic reminders to pop up on my phone. That’s not foolproof, either, because those sorts of things tend to become just so much white noise. The only thing I can be certain I won’t forget is to brush my teeth. I have immediate sensory feedback if that isn’t done.

Did you know that there’s a connection between dopamine and motivation? Low dopamine, low motivation. I take medications in an attempt to counter what I can only think is a full-out dopamine drought. Sometimes it works sort of okay, at least for a while. But then I just have to leave the boring behind and do something I like. Tedium is my enemy. And unfortunately this often happens in the middle of a work day. It’s almost guaranteed to happen when it’s time to deal with household chores. This is not just the afternoon slump. A few wisps of mist float through, and then the full-on fog of dreamy inattention. There are no rewards great enough to tempt me, so I rely on fear. I need a job, and I need to keep Dear Husband’s ire at bay. Some people think that the contentment and peacefulness of a clean house or a job well done would be reward enough, but no way. I have no work ethic. Never cared about working my way to the top of the dung heap. Left to myself I’d never do anything. I guess it’s a good thing I wasn’t born into wealth.

It sure makes me feel out of sync with cultural expectations. All these books on Get It Done, how to be an entrepreneur, how to get ahead, little tricks and bits and bobs on productivity. Seth Godin. Just visiting his website makes me tired. Do I care if I’m the linchpin? Hell no. (By the way, why are there all these blogs and books about leadership? What about books on being an astute and useful follower, assistant, or whatever?) Ambition, goals, productivity – I can understand these intellectually, but my physical self has no understanding at all. They are a foreign substance I keep trying to ingest and integrate and my system keeps pushing them out as foreign bodies.

You know, I was just on Seth Godin’s blog, and he mentioned the characteristics of losers. And I thought, No one wants to be a loser, but someone always is.

Which brings me to the last episode of Glee, with the fabulous song Loser Like Me, which expresses a sense of optimism I don’t feel.

You're Such a Sisyphus

Some days everything comes to a screeching halt and I wonder, “What am I doing? This is so not what I need.” I have no idea what I need. Well, “no idea” is perhaps too strong. I know that I need some sort of change. I need some sort of change yet I don’t have the energy to make one. I don’t know what change to make, exactly. There is a disconnect between my heart and my work that I put up with for various reasons, good reasons. I’m more real here than in the real world, where I play dress-up.

Dear Husband sometimes hints that I should find a way to make a living writing. Only thing is, I don’t enjoy the sorts of careers that writers have. I don’t want to be a journalist or a novel writer or write marketing copy or greeting cards. I don’t want to start showing up at open mikes or writers groups. I suppose if I had lived in a previous century, I would have been an epistolary writer, one of those correspondents who wrote amusing and interesting letters to entertain friends. Ephemeral, or by some trick of fate bound and preserved for dusty researches. Blogging seems to be an open letter to whomever happens by. You know, Emily Dickenson would have made an excellent blogger. She could have stayed holed up in her Amherst home and written oddly punctuated posts.

I can’t help but think that somehow I missed the point, that I failed in dedication to the craft, that I lacked nerve, though I have thought that my nerve would not have failed had I known in what direction to point myself. We all need a foundation of meaning to support our actions. I’ve always been amazed at and envious of people who had goals and plans and were able to embrace them as if they mattered. I say “as if” because my perception is always undergirded with a profound sense of futility. I am aware of it even in moments of happiness. I live “as if” – as if there were some reason we are born and die, some purpose to raising a family, some purpose to all the many pleasures we pursue. Some people turn to God for meaning. Our purpose is to glorify God. That just baffles me. Why would there be a God whose be-all and end-all was to be glorified? That sounds so profoundly anemic I can’t wrap my head around it. Why on earth would that be a satisfying endeavor?

I am not alone, of course. On the other hand, I know many people who have never experienced this. They’ve known deep despair and grief, sure, but not this . . . blankness.

I feel a great kinship with the writer of Ecclesiastes, up until he starts prattling on about serving God, which sounds as half-hearted and joyless as his lines of existential despair. There you are, then; we either keep muddling along or we kill ourselves. I’ve known people who chose the latter. But I like this world, I like all the beauty of the earth and other people, and it would take a huge blow to make me consider leaving early.

I have the existentialist belief that we create meaning in the face of chaos. I’m not very good at it. It’s just so exhausting. Camus was so spot on. Everyday – actually, moment by moment – I’m rolling a rock up a hill. Then it rolls back down and I start over. The existentialists thought that was sort of heroic, maybe because they were all crazy Frenchmen. They get drunk on ideas, even the depressing ones.

February 25

I feel like if I don’t write something soon, everyone will forget I’m here. Including me. Life seems full of holes at the moment, a bit ragged, and rather dull. Slumberous times, but not refreshing. I do things I don’t enjoy. I do things I usually enjoy but don’t enjoy now. I think enjoyment might require more energy than I have at the moment. It’s very difficult to let discomfort simply be, when it feels like a garrote wrapped around my neck. Perhaps I should stop trying to reassure myself. Why do I try to reassure myself? I’m very unconvincing. I live my life trying to pretend that I am not deeply afraid of: being alone, losing the people I love, being friendless, entering depression and never exiting, passing my mental problems along to my children, having no money, having no faith, living with Firecracker’s disease, looking for meaning and finding nothing, trying to create meaning and being stymied. Being me, just me, as in this is all there is – me anxious, floundering. There is no better me, no me with improved synapses and joie de vivre, no me who is more productive and less defective.

When I was younger, I used to think about being a mistake, that I was shoved into this world with some sort of ontological defect that prevented me from holding the world loosely rather than facing it stricken, as if it were coming after me with claws bared. More people than I realized feel this way, which isn’t much comfort, really. We are always busy leaping out of the way of the industrious, the ambitious, and the determined who think us weak and tiresome.

Some days my thoughts are like the sound of footsteps receding down an empty hallway.

This Book Could Use a Better Writer

My Vitamin D levels are very low. My thyroid is a bit wonky. Perhaps that is why I feel so little inclination to do anything at all. I have reached a boring patch in the book, the lackluster part you have to slog through – no skipping ahead in this one – before the story picks up again.

In the Slough

I’m still paddling around in the backwaters here, among the Spanish moss and gators. So far I’ve kept all my appendages, if not a balanced mind. I am two people at least. The one who goes to work and does homework with the kids and has this rather comfortable domestic life. Then there’s the one talking now, the doppelganger. She is navigating a swamp, alternately alert to lurking danger and lulled by the lapping of sludgy water against the boat. She’s liable to get eaten, because she is growing very bored.

Doldrums

Sigh. I am in the doldrums, and not a breath of fresh air to fill my sails. I’m trying to just let depression be what it is, since it is an inescapable part of the rhythm of my life. It won’t be here forever and it can huff and puff but thanks to modern medicine it can’t blow the house down. I hope.

But you know, it’s like having a cold. Yeah you can keep going and you aren’t dangerously ill, but your nose is rubbed raw and your throat hurts, nothing tastes good and you have to breathe through your mouth. It’s annoying, in other words, and gets in the way. Who can create a coherent plan when they’re sneezing and dabbing at their nose all the time? And complaining about it to anyone is about as entertaining as droning on about your cold symptoms.

Still. The symptoms drag at your consciousness all day long. They change the context for your goals and desires. Everything seems an enormous bother.

What is my deepest fear, the one that is always stirring the silt at the bottom of the pond? I think it is to be left alone, with no one, all social connections cut, the loss of every person who has helped define me. The fear of lack of desire. That’s horrible, to find yourself devoid of interest, with only the patterns of duty to keep you moving forward. One of the worst things about depression is the way that pleasure falls away, so that there is no particular reason to do any particular thing, and every decision seems an impossible riddle. I suppose this is why I cultivate my little obsessions, these hooks on which to hang my attention.

Sigh. At least the girls keep me anchored in reality.

Entropy

Today all my failures crowd my spirit, flapping their wings and cawing. And that’s about the most poetic thing you’ll get out of me today.

School will be starting soon. Every year this new beginning has given me false hope. But after 9 years, I know that any intention I have to be more involved or to be better organized will fall victim to entropy. Now I feel disheartened before the school year has even begun.

When I was a child, the start of the school year was an enormous relief. After the amorphous and dull summer my days would fall into an orderly routine, one I would be forced to follow. At the time I didn’t know I had ADD. After all I was very smart and could whiz through most subjects. But empty time was dreadful. I had no idea what to do with myself, how to make time behave the way it did at school. At home I was terrible at managing my time for homework, studying and projects. Waiting to the last minute seemed to work rather well as a motivator. It was almost exhilarating.

Now I have no one but myself to organize my time and I hate it. First, I don’t believe myself. I can set a goal or deadline, but it’s just me. I have no authority with myself. Second, very little compels me. My interests evaporate the moment I look at them directly.

And work is worse each day. I’m sharp, a quick study, so at any job I soon get a lot of leeway to work on my own. This is a disaster. Also, once I’ve mastered a task, I’m completely bored by it. I’ve tried so many systems and none work for very long. My attention wanders. I forget things. I feel lost. I create lists I don’t follow, send myself email reminders that get buried. I take medication, but that only helps with concentration; it hasn’t transformed me into someone with intrinsic motivation or the ability to create routines and stay with them. And concentration - well if my attention snags on something shiny, it will stubbornly remain there however irrelevant it is.

My mother was also unable to order and direct. Drove me mad as a child. I so wanted her to establish rules, structure, and routines and force me to abide. But no. She alternated between impossible projects and lethargy. Now I have children and I can’t manage it either. I feel like a terrible role model.

I know the girls suffer from a lack of structure at home. Most days they are following someone else’s routine. I didn’t have that as a child, so I hope it helps, and when I pick them up there isn’t much time between then and bed, although those routines are frequently derailed, too. Weekends defeat me. Completely. So much empty time.

I read this today: “If you have to get motivated to take action then you are not motivated by the outcome. Need 2 Reevaluate purpose.” I think it’s from some GTD coach, a system that annoys the crap out of me. Most of the time outcomes are so far out they look like a mirage. Of course I’m not motivated by the outcome. No one BELIEVES in the outcome.

Okay, I’m bored with this.

Why This Weekend Sucks

I never look forward to Memorial Day weekends. I always feel futile and ill at ease. It may be because my birthday always falls around that weekend. Dear Husband comes from a family that goes all out to celebrate birthdays. I remember one party when I was little, and no doubt presents when I was growing up. But, and it's kind of dreadful to admit because it sounds so emo, but I've never felt it was something to celebrate. I spent the better part of my life thinking that anyone glad to be here had to be nuts, and that my entrance was definitely not something I was happy about. It seemed so much like some sort of glitch, that a divine flunky read the charts wrong and I was really supposed to be back in the undifferentiated whatever that souls come from before they enter bodies.

Even now, when I can usually grab on to some perspective, and am medicated beyond belief, I feel more and more dark-minded as my birthday approaches, and I tense every time someone wishes me a happy birthday, as if I were taking something fraudulently. And I'm angry that I can't shake it, that I can't look on life as an amazing gift instead of my personal version of Kafka's Penal Colony. (Which, BTW, if you haven't read it you should really put in on your list. Criminals have their crimes written on their bodies with needles, and the director of the camp finally puts himself in the machine because the criminals all experience a revelation. And then they die. Yep, I love me some Kafka.)

I'm sitting at my desk at work. The office closed early, but I can't bring myself to leave. When I leave the apparatus of the weekend begins, all the cogs and wheels grind away, and I have to deal with sniping children, laundry, empty time, chaos, cooking, groceries, feeling lost, feeling futile. And I will be one year older, but no wiser.

Lemon without the Peel

This is just one of those crap days when my mood grows even darker than usual. No matter how many times I tell myself it’s a passing feeling, that part of it’s physical, and so on, I feel like the hounds of doom are nipping at my heels.

You know, it doesn’t much help to think, boy there are people in a lot worse situations, I should be grateful.

It’s weird how being grateful doesn’t translate into being happy.

And happiness may not be everything, but it sure helps one have enough energy to give a damn what happens and to actually get done what needs doing.

The lack of energy, the inability to organize my thoughts or to plan and set goals, it makes me feel like I’m failing my family. Myself, too, of course, but I really hoped to create a better, more stimulating environment for the girls.

Last night I kept thinking that I would end up dying like my mom, of leukemia, the disease of fatigue. She was always tired, and then she finally had a good reason to be tired.

Whatever I was meant to do, I definitely feel like it is too late. Or maybe there wasn’t anything in particular, or maybe it called for more self-discipline than I could or can summon. It may be pathetic, but my hope is for my children. I hope this mental plague skips them, that they will know what they want and find joy in the pursuit. I don’t think I walk around looking mopey and depressed. I do genuinely enjoy things, like reading a book, or listening to my girls, or holding hands with my husband, or hearing the birds. I laugh at jokes. These moments are the stepping stones that get me from one side to the other, from moment to moment and day to day.

Enjoyment doesn’t translate into happiness either.

Maybe I don’t mean happiness, but something more like “zest.” I have no zest.

Just writing that out makes me feel a teensy bit better. The rhythms of writing and reading are so soothing. No zestier, though.

And now for something completely serious

So enough of vapidness. Time for a bit of gravitas. It is Lent, after all. Not that I have ever observed Lent. But it seems a good time to accomplish a task I’ve been avoiding.

My therapist gave me an assignment weeks ago that I have not been able to process. Two assignments, actually. The first is to write about whether depression is a choice, and the second is to describe my ideal life.

Is it any wonder I’ve preferred to immerse myself in frivolity and look at pretty boys?

Of course I don’t believe depression is a choice. Who would choose such misery? There’s no payoff. When people think of it as a choice, what they are really thinking of is a bit of the blues, a soaking in self-pity, a stubborn refusal to put a positive spin on things. Those are so very different from depression. Over the years I’ve experienced all sorts of cognitive therapy techniques. Relaxation. Guided meditation. Rewriting your inner scripts. They have their place. Which comes first, the wrong thinking or the depression? Once the neurological switch is tripped, does it even matter?

I don’t know why some people just feel a bit glum, a bit low and others flail about in inner darkness. Genetics? I find that once I’m far enough along, rewriting scripts isn’t very effective. It feels like I’m traveling farther from either positive or negative thoughts into numbness. The numbness is superficial but tenacious. Underneath is a tremendous rage. Wouldn’t you be angry if you were caged and trapped? Numbness is the cage door. That is deep depression, when there is fury inside beating against enormous resistance, resistance so strong that it has drawn all my energy into itself. These are the times I feel the urge to hurt myself crawling over my skin, because that release is so calming and so immediate.

(I’ve never even mentioned my history of self-injury to my therapist. Oh, the things I leave out of my personal narrative.)

I’m thankful that I haven’t felt that way in a long time. I no longer feel the need to sneak the X-acto blades from the workroom supply, just in case. Having children is an amazing deterrent. They watch your every move. And Dear Husband. The few times I’ve slipped he has been furious. He’s so practical. If it isn’t the solution, why are you wasting your time? It’s self-seeking, self-pitying. Find a way out, any way out. For once fear and shame created a positive outcome, and so I have retrained my impulses, which is just as well. And I’m medicated. I can’t dip too deep anymore. I’m buoyed on a pharmaceutical sea.

Choices. When options aren’t available, you simply make do. When I experienced my first depression, my parents didn’t notice. Or they did and hoped it would go away. Or they did and were so afraid I would be like my mother they ignored it. Why didn’t I ask to see a psychiatrist? Did I ask? Did I hint? Did I think it was so outside the realm of possibilities that I didn’t bother? Did I choose not to talk to anyone about it, or was I rebuffed? Did I think it wouldn’t do any good, that they would simply look at me as a freak and send me on my way? Would I have even been able to describe what I felt? What would I have said? I want to die? I hate myself? I don’t understand your world? I can’t fix this? Someone help me?

As choices became available to handle depression, I took them. I’ve found that behavior can be modified, even if you still feel like shit. I have enough experience to know that the worst will pass or at least change. But depression itself, it comes when it will.

Onward then, to my second task. My ideal life. This is hard. I have a notable lack of ambition. I’ve gone through life letting circumstance make decisions for me. Even when I was young I couldn’t imagine myself into any particular life. When kids were starting to think about careers, even in high school, I simply knew that I wanted to study literature. That’s as far as I got. I didn’t want to teach, I knew that. I didn’t want to marry or have a family. Otherwise I had no idea. I wasn’t sure I was going to live past 20 anyway. I’ve gone on having no idea through college and grad school and a number of jobs.

Now here I am in my 40s and it feels a bit ridiculous to be without a plan. My mother used to infuriate me. Her constant refrain until she died was, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.” In my meaner moods I would tell her that if she didn’t know by now, she never would. And she never did. She was hindered by a mental illness far more significant than mine. She refused medication. She refused therapy. Her vicissitudes kept her confused and distracted. Here I am with lots of lovely medication and therapy, but I still have not made any advances as far as life goals.

I have vague impressions. I would like a creative life. I would like to be able to write again. I would like to be around other creative people. I would like to be around very intelligent people. I would like to be at home with my kids. That’s unexpected, and I may be off-base or it may be standing in for a simple wish for more compatible work, but it has been a longing all the same. I would like to homeschool my children, something else I think might be completely incompatible with my personality, and yet… I would like to travel England. I love England.

You see how very vague that is? I want to write poetry, but I don’t want to be a poet, with all that entails. I want to be at home, and yet I am completely incapable of structuring my own time. England…England we can save money for. Travel at least translates into a tangible goal.

I don’t exactly dream big, do I?

Sometimes I have plans. Lots of plans, but small ones. I’ll paint the house. I’ll take up knitting. I’ll finally learn to garden. I’ll do something with the photos. They go nowhere. They skitter away the moment I turn my back. They suddenly don’t seem so interesting. In fact they are dull.

Has a life of struggling with depression, or bipolar disorder, or whatever it is, rerouted my neurological pathways in such a way that I’m incapable of forming a plan, incapable of even dreaming a dream? Is that what happened to my mother? Will I be just as bad despite all my advantages – the education, the understanding husband, the medication, the therapy?

And now, what connection between this serious navel-gazing and the frivolous listing of the world’s hottest actors according to me? What do these fantasy figures mean, and why do they suddenly loom large in my imagination only to disappear just as quickly? What am I to make of such a preponderance of dominating men? Men who are lie detectors and truth tellers. And they aren’t very pleasant about it. In fact, to be in their line of sight is somewhat humiliating, but also thrilling and transformative. In Secretary, the female character is a cutter, something James Spader’s character picks up on right away and redirects into a series of erotic games. I connected to the woman right away, not because of the similar modus operandum or because I have any desire to participate in an s/m setup, but because I like the ingenious way in which he steers her away from despair by going through her neurosis rather than around it.

It all seems terribly anti-feminist. Is that the way it is, then? I respond to a male figure who dominates, judges and directs? Where’s Freud when you need him? Did thinking about depression and ambition trigger my current fascination with certain characters? Perhaps that silly list began with me feeling lost, defeated, and directionless.

What do I conclude from all this. Not much. I’ve always been good at seeing the connections. Conclusions, not so much.