Okay so I'm still not dead

I'm just...not really alive yet either.

So the short part of the story is...I really, really suck at staying on anti-depressants. Probably TMI, but that's probably 99.99999 percent of why I've let my duties to ya'll slide so far. When you are depressed you are officially Not Giving Shits. And you know you ought to be Giving Shits, so when you remember something you used to Give Shits about, that you've been ignoring because hey, Giving Shits is hard...you avoid it. Because you feel guilty. And the guilt isn't fun, so you avoid it longer, and eventually hit this death spiral of avoidance and depression that ends in something completely unproductive. Like Minecraft, or reading somebody else's books instead of writing your own.

Also: I've had a cold for about a week and a half now.

That's kind of the difference between being mentally ill and being physically ill. Depression is perceived as this nebulous feeling of unhappiness. You feel sad, and you don't want to do things because you feel sad, and that's stupid and lazy, because feelings don't rule the world. A cold, however, is an automatic three day trip to the nearest  bed or couch, especially if you have a fever of 102 (which I had this last week. It went away.)

But depression, as I've said many many times before, isn't even like having a cold. It's like having diabetes, or scurvy. You are literally missing chemicals your brain needs to function right. Mild depression means not feeling happy. Severe depression means not feeling anything. Except maybe guilt and a growing sense of dread because you know something is severely, severely fucked up inside of you, but you don't know what it is and you don't know why.

There's also pain involved. See that guilt and dread, and a bunch of other funhouse symptoms. My personal theory about that is that pain and unpleasant sensations exist to motivate us to seek help. That's why women feel like their insides are ripping open every time they give birth to a kid--the survival rate when a woman seeks help in childbirth is better than when she doesn't. The problem is that once you're talking about mental health issues? We stop offering help. Or if we do offer help, you first have to jump through flaming hoops while some government mook stands over in a corner grading your jumps. Do too well? You don't qualify. Do too poorly? Oops, sorry, we really needed that one more piece of paper to get you into the program so we could offer you help. If you're too mentally ill to make it, sucks to be you.

THAT. SAID.

I am still writing and painting and doing all that wonderful stuff. I've been making an effort lately, and it's gone from feeling like lifting an entire dump truck full of bricks to maybe just the bricks. I will make announcements shortly and get back to reviewing and doing all that lovely stuff.

I love you guys, and I promise I will try to do a better job at being fun and entertaining.