I've Been Struggling With Depression, Again
The last couple of months have been difficult. The world is going to hell, sure, but I’m talking about me here. I’ve been struggling with a particularly bad bout of depression since the middle of February, and it got worse as the weeks went on. I finally hit the floor in early March, and stayed there for another week or so. Eventually I was able to pick myself up, and I figured to get over the last hurdle, I needed to put my thoughts to paper. Too bad I still haven’t done that. Because this is digital.
That was a joke.
I’ve struggled with depression most of my life, feeling it more acutely within the last year and a half. This last month has been rough even by those standards. I’m not sure why it got so bad. I have the usual guesses. Sucky day job, my first rejection letter for a short story I submitted, got ripped off by an online store again, being broke, my senior dog’s declining health.
That’s the personal stuff, you can’t forget the wider world. The video game industry, a medium I once loved, continues its rapid decline as it continues to lay off thousands and close studios as it gets in bed with AI. Speaking of, AI continues to win its war against critical thinking. I read an interview with author Andy Weir this morning in which he enthusiastically praised AI and said it creates better art than humans. He literally said "I'm going to be out of a job eventually" and he was happy about it!
What else? Oh yeah! My country has forsaken democracy, allowing unidentified masked men to kill innocent and unnamed protesters, while praising the killers as heroes. They've kidnapped foreign leaders, bombed some nations, blockaded others, and threatened those that speak out. A far-right billionaire bullied his way into buying one of the largest media companies in the country, after having done the same thing last year, while his allies openly applaud the upcoming decimation of the news network he’s getting in the deal.
There aren't many reasons to be happy these days, are there? The world—my world and the world at large—are both going to shit and I felt (and still do) powerless to do anything about it. That’s why I signed up with Squarespace to create a custom website for my darkest thoughts!
That was another attempted joke.
All I could do was log off. I talked about wanting to do that before, though I could never fully commit. I’m a blogger, and until last year I was also a YouTuber. I couldn’t walk away from the internet. How would I write this blog? How would I research for my fiction writing? How would I stay informed on what’s going on in the world? How could I share my terrible jokes?
I realized those were excuses. The internet, not just social media but the internet at large, were making my life hell. It was injecting me with a high dose of anxiety and I was overdosing. I had to cut myself off cold turkey. Actually, they go by Türkiye, now!
Aha. Ha. Uh… that was a dumb joke trying to distract from the heaviness of what I was talking about, not an insult to the country. Shit, I’m not doing very good at this, am I?
I went through March without using the internet. Well, I checked Kirkus Reviews and Eastern Kicks for book and movie news and reviews, a couple of times, but that was it. Otherwise, I didn’t touch my computer and only used my phone for phone calls. Which is to say I didn’t use it, either.
Nor did I write. I went into this internet hiatus expecting to spend most of my free time writing short stories and working on my book. Maybe write a few blogs for when I returned. But I couldn’t do it. Writer’s block isn’t something I’ve dealt with before, not since the last days of my YouTube channel. I sit down and I start writing whatever comes to mind. If its crap, so what? Delete it later and rewrite it. When I had a hard time writing scripts for my YouTube videos, that’s when I knew it was time to quit, because nothing was working. Now I had that same feeling creeping up to me in all of my writing. Something wasn’t right (write!) and I had to figure out what. I realized there was a simple fix. I got ChatGPT to start writing for me!
None of these jokes are landing, are they? I hope they don't keep falling forever.
I retreated from all of it. No internet, no writing. It was all the day job, and relaxing at home. Movies and books have taken up most of my free time, and there were some good’uns. I read Gate of Ivrel sequel Well of Shiuan and Foreigner sequel Invader, both by CJ Cherryh and both fantastic. I finally read The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead and loved them as well. I read A Burning by Megha Majumdar and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki by Haruki Murakami and thought they were terrible.
I guess this is a recommendation blog, now. May as well talk about some movies. I watched In The Mood For Love by Wong Kar-wai and I wasn’t sure what to think at first, but it stuck with me, and wormed its way into my heart. Gotta watch that one again. I also watched No Bears from Jafar Panahi, and that was absolutely brilliant. As was Victims of Sin by Emilio Fernandez, and what can I say about John Woo’s classic The Killer? It’s certainly better than the only other Woo movie I’ve seen, Windtalkers.
It felt good to be able to do all this without feeling the need to write about them. What doomed my YouTube channel was feeling obligated to share my thoughts on every single indie game, whether I wanted to or was even interested in the games or not. I was happy to realize that, while watching these books and reading these films (you still paying attention?) I wanted to write about my experience with them. I even took notes so I could write about them when I got back. I think I’ll have reviews of Invader and No Bears out soon(ish), but don’t quote me on that.
This wasn’t a vacation, though. I still felt miserable most days. Wake up, go to work, come home, put music on or a movie and zone out, maybe read, then go to sleep. On days I had off, it was the same routine, only I wasn’t getting paid to feel miserable.
There were mornings I’d wake up and feel like writing. A blog or a story, or finally get back to my book. I’d have a million ideas running through my head, and I felt good about finally wanting to do something. I’d go and get my coffee and think about more ideas, then rush to my computer, sit down, turn it on… and by the time I opened a blank document, that desire to write had evaporated. All the dark thoughts would rush back in and within seconds my mind would be otherwise empty, all those ideas gone. I’d close the document and go lay down until I finally decided to pick myself up long enough to read or watch a movie.
I cannot begin to describe how frustrating those days were. I hate to resort to cliché, but it was like a match being puffed out. Bright and intense one moment, ready to start a roaring fire, only to be extinguished in an instant by the slightest breeze before ever reaching its potential. That was terrible writing but I’m going to leave it in as comic relief.
I’d love to tell you exactly what I did to climb out of this hole. But I don’t know. I don’t know how I got out of it anymore than I know how I got in it. I also wish I could give a rousing speech about how we need to pick ourselves up and not let ourselves get down, but I’ve never had big speeches in me. Depression isn’t something you can talk yourself out of, certainly not something a stranger on the internet can sort out for you.
What helped, funny enough, was getting back into writing. When I was finally able to get over that hurdle and put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, but that sounds horrible), I found all my problems melted away. At least for a little while.
I started a new short story, and I worked on my book for the first time since November. I think I was so obsessed with planning and outlining the lore that it was inhibiting my ability to write. I was restrained by all the notes I had written. I also began thinking about sequels before I put down a single word, which is about the worst sin you can commit. I’ve put those plans away, and have spent the last few days sorting through the dozens of documents and hastily scribbled notes I came up with over the year I was working on it. What can stay, what can go, what needs changing, and more importantly what I need to focus on in order to get this thing off the ground.
Then there’s this blog. I updated my post about every game developer using generative AI yesterday. It had been a couple of months since I last updated it, and in that time that games industry quadrupled-down on AI. There were a lot of new developers added to the list, and new information added to ones that were already on it. Xbox appointing an AI-loving pronatalist as its new CEO might have raised an eyebrow if it weren’t for Nvidia’s Yassification-filter and Krafton cooperating with a weapon’s manufacturer to create a Terminator.
Unrelated note, out of the blue, I'm done with video games.
I’m going to ease myself back into the blog. I’m thinking I’ll do one blog every week to ten days, for now. I don’t want to commit to a more rigid or extravagant schedule right now. That should also give me time to work on this short story and get back up to speed on the book. I’m going to miss reading and watching movies all day, but if that means I don’t feel miserable all the time, I’ll take that deal. It’s been nice writing again. I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I started that short story a few days ago. I suppose sometimes we need to be away from something we love and learn how much we truly miss it in order to appreciate it. That was terribly worded, but you know what I mean. Maybe.
The internet is still something I’m keeping away from as much as possible. I’ve slowly started checking out a few other websites here and there, mostly places like CityonFire, Peertube, and YouTube. Staying away from news and political sites, even ones I agree with. I haven’t abandoned social media entirely, this blog will surely wither and die without continuing to promote it on Mastodon and Lemmy. That’s the extent of my usage of those platforms, spamming self-promotion. Then again, isn’t that what everyone uses social media for now?
