That's Geraldine...

Hello.

I'm getting on with it this week. Slow starts to the day but hopefully I'll make a pace as it goes on. I'm looking at forums and just procrastinating without applying right now. Did a lot of job searching yesterday. I feel a bit deflated. I'm reading a book about depression. There was one bit that really struck me. The author talked about how he had an email relationship with a woman and they shared their experiences and feelings about depression. This author mentioned how he felt a great intimacy with this woman that he emailed and sometimes phoned, because of the way she understood his depression. There was almost a romantic element suggested but then he described meeting her. This woman was so severely depressed and it combined with other medical problems, she was incapable of any kind of relationship or connection when her lucidity was diminished.

Reading the book reminds me of when I was severely depressed. I would lay in bed all day, manage to find time and energy to get out of bed, then walk to a tescos or takeaway to eat a fuckload of chocolate, or fried food, and then go back to bed, or masturbate, or some combination of the above. I was so depressed in late 2006 that I had a plate of food under my bed that was there for 2 months. It grew mould. I felt so tired and without any willpower, I couldn't bear to take it out of under the bed and throw it away. It was a microwaveable lamb shank which was in a plastic pouch, I microwaved it, put it on the plate and it just stayed there for weeks.

Marie reminded me of the woman that Andrew Solomon (the author of the book) talked about in terms of how the bond of sympathy is almost mistaken for love. Except Marie was probably less depressed than I was. The thing that really got to me reading the book was when Solomon's friend was showing him her photo album of the past, and he realised something was wrong when she began to repeat herself, eventually she just kept saying 'That's Geraldine, that's Geraldine, that's Geraldine...'. It is no life to live with that kind of depression.

I am a little bit depressed at the moment. Lack of prospects with jobs is making me feel hopeless, all my friends are in careers. I'm 26 and I've gotten nowhere fast. Another thing that really got to me in the book was a testimony from a man who reported to Solomon how he is going through a hard time financially and with his family, but he's not depressed clinically. IN that sense the man was feeling pretty great. The point was that depression makes things impossible, but real life, while hard, is not impossible.

I don't see it that way, and maybe that's why I'm not really as depressed as I think I am. I could have had it a lot worse. But I don't really want to dwell on that. What I want to dwell on is how to make it better.