All of my life, I've thought of myself as a writer. It's been both a descriptor and an aspiration, a part of my identity. I've always known my way around a story; I can feel the elements under my skin, a subtle clench of the jaw letting me know when something isn't working. Even when I'm not physically writing, I write in my mind. When I daydream, I describe it in my own head. But in spite of all this, I don't think of myself as a real writer. I'm not on the level of any published author. I'm not on the level of my my friends, who write and are published or in the process of being published. But as the years have progressed, from my first recorded story about a wizard who could make pumpkins walk, I have loved writing. And I have avoided it as much as I've embraced it.
My desire to write has never gone away. I have countless drafts comprised of one or two paragraphs of an idea; I have pages and pages of draft material, scribbled on various online receptacles. And I have created and abandoned more story ideas than I could even begin to count. But none of it has been finished. Over the last decade, I often couldn't get myself past the first few hundred words. At other times, I couldn't bear to be in my own head, thinking. I just wanted my racing thoughts to stop and numbed myself through t.v.
If you have any experience with clinical depression, you'll immediately understand this feeling. Anxiety and fear are a big part of it; they've been bubbling away inside of me for so long that the little of knot in my stomach is simply a part of me. When I'm doing well, I can ignore the anxiety and fear long enough to write. But when things are bad, I just want to shut the world off and sleep. In that vein, my productivity is directly related to my mental health.
I was diagnosed with clinical depression in 2000. Overall, my depression is just who I am, a reflection of my genetic history, exacerbated by circumstances or changing brain chemistry. But my recent downturn started sometime around 2009. As I write this, it is the summer of 2019. Ten years. And even though I shouldn't have to justify my mental state to anyone, I still want to. Because I've learned that when I explain to others, I learn more about myself.
Production-wise, it's been pretty shitty since about 2010; you can almost trace my productivity along a graph of my life events. For me, writing is an indicator of my mental state. And it doesn't sound as pathetic as saying "you can judge the severity of my depression by how gross my apartment is". You can trace my mental state on this graph, the y axis telling of my dropping productivity, the x axis showing the passage of years. In the resulting curves, you'll see my story. You would find the emotionally low periods, with the plateaus being the closest I've gotten to being content. And at the lowest points, you'll see the dark spaces where I lacked the energy and desire to even clean my apartment, writing became a far off goal, my own pipe dream. Things like laundry, eating, bathing, cleaning... the basic things that should be done, became the hardest things to do. I would make it through the days by telling myself "just get through the day, you can crash when you get home."
In 2009, I knew my marriage was failing, and my depression worsened. I would spend my weekends in the apartment, watching t.v. or sleeping for 18 hours straight. Our intimacy had disappeared, though that is an issue for another day. In the fall of 2010, we separated, and in June of 2011, our divorce was finalized. Almost 5 years to the day we wed. During the same period, my father started getting sick. We didn't know the cause at that time, and couldn't fathom the outcome.
By October of 2011, just after his 60th birthday, he was too weak to keep working and retired. Soon after, he was diagnosed with ALS. After struggling with my impulse to just quit my job and move home to help, I gave notice at my job in May of 2013 and then moved. In February of 2014, my grandmother died. Not even three months later, my father died. Almost two years after all of that, I started having some fairly standard women's health issues. So I saw a doctor, had two procedures. Time started moving faster, then, and soon a couple of years had passed. Last year I started taking care of myself, lost some weight, and I even started writing again. The highs and lows still come, dragging me along in their wake and leaving me to obsess over my failures.
My anxiety and sadness, the numb days with flares of anger, my self-loathing and self-chastisement, are all still here. They lurk in my mind, popping up when life gets hard. But slowly, I'm learning that it isn't my fault; there isn't anything wrong with me. I am me, I am AG. The individual pieces of myself don't make or break me; they don't make me a winner or a failure. I'm just me, with thoughts and foibles that will not disappear. I need to understand the way I work, and learn to work with that.
That is why I've named this blog "Chasing My Own Tail". Like a dog chasing it's tail, my brain is always going in circles, thoughts ceaselessly whirling around as I analyze my life and relive mistakes. But now, just a few years shy of 40, I've started using that skill to understand myself. This is my space to reflect, to understand and share my discoveries about myself. To learn how to be me and find out what that means.
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