Gone Quiet

I haven’t written in a while, and I haven’t been particularly chatty on social media either. I’m doing better than I was, but I’m expending all of my energy on the things that are vital to me right now. Self-care, school, and Professor Chaos. I did really well in school the last quarter, and I’m on track to do well this quarter too. That alone, covers most of why I don’t have the energy to write as often as I used to.

When I first started this blog I was so excited about BDSM, about finally figuring out a big part of me that I wrote about it all the time, and I read about it all the time, and since I wasn’t in a relationship I had a lot of time that I could spend just writing about what I hoped it would be when I was in one. Now I am in a D/s relationship, and other than describing my kinky sex-life, the topics I have to write on are heavy and important. That takes emotional energy and consideration, which I don’t feel like I have because…

I’m trying to take care of myself.

And I am doing magnitudes better than I was last year, but I still don’t feel like myself entirely. I started dealing with depression and anxiety in my early teens, I didn’t get any help for it till my late teens, and I didn’t identify my anxiety as such until my twenties.

I always thought anxiety meant you were nervous about stuff, like a Woody Allen caricature. Me, I just got irritated easily by certain things. For example I’d find myself irrationally angry about slow walkers in the grocery store, and it would take all of my energy not to scream at them, for moving so slow, taking up the whole lane and wasting my time, forcing me to spend more time in a store full of people I didn’t want to be around.  All that stress was, is, exhausting.

As a team depression and anxiety seem unbeatable. Anxiety forces you to expend all your energy dealing with every little thing that stresses you out, and then when you are exhausted and you need to do laundry and dishes and your homework, depression pulls you in like warm, apathetic, quicksand and says “fuck it, none of this matters anyway. Life is pointless, and you suck. You should be dead.” And so on, depression will go on in this vein until you manage to drown it out by say, binge watching entire seasons of Buffy while concurrently playing through skyrim for the 30th time.

“You don’t suck you’ve got a 100 levels of enchanting and you can shoot lightning out of your ass” Skyrim says.

“Life is terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.” Says Giles.

And you can’t hear the depression, over all the noise so it seems like things are okay.

Then, after a couple of weeks, or a month you pull yourself out of the quicksand and clean yourself off, and look around to see that the dishes are moldy, you’re out of clean everything, and you just failed environmental science. And even though you feel better-ish than when things were really bad, now you have to deal with the mess it’s left behind and that is almost worse.

Hey, I don’t feel terrible toda…

So that’s what I’ve been doing, and I’m getting through it as well as can be expected. However I’ve found that the last drug I was on, in addition to sending me into a psychological tailspin, seems to have changed the way my brain works. I’m more brittle now, and my emotions are much closer to the surface. Which, after twelve or so years of serious emotional repression is freaking me out when I get choked up for things like melodramatic scenes in subpar movies, or I start crying because I’m having an argument. I don’t know how to deal with uncomfortable emotions other than to push them away so that they don’t take over my life, and I can still get things done.

I feel broken. It affects my ability to relate to Professor Chaos. It affects my ability to enact submission, or express myself, because I don’t want to start crying for no good reason (which, since I’m a man, not ten, and didn’t just finish reading Where the Red Fern Grows, doesn’t exist in my mind.) I’m doing the best I can here, and I am supposed to believe that that is okay. But it doesn’t feel that way, and sitting down to write about it forces me to think about how scared I am that I’m never going to be any better than I am now. And I’m not satisfied, let alone happy, with how I am now.

So I’ve gone a little quiet.