A Splintered Mind

My Clinical Depression colors my perceptions a bit, so a few years ago I began a radical treatment to improve my outlook on life: I decided to think more positively. Yeah, I know. Really radical… So by writing this blog I hope to renew again that effort. I also hope to laugh a bit at myself and maybe relax a little. That's why I chose to list "Bad Luck" in the topics I'd cover here (Another topic was "Foot Odor", but that was vetoed by my wife). My luck is so extreme that it's funny. I'll prove that here over the next few months. You see, I tend to believe that either God or the Universe is out to get me. That's why so many unusual things happen to me. I used to think that it was just my imagination — that I was just feeling sorry for myself. But my friends and family have corroborated it. They were skeptical at first, but soon the evidence swayed them. Everyone has bad luck, but the frequency at which things go wrong for me is reall...

Here is an interesting thing about people: They seem to relate more with physical handicaps than neurological ones. I broke my pinky toe in the last week of 2004. I had a showdown between me and the corner of the wall. Obviously, the wall won. It’s not that I had a bone to pick with the wall. It was just in the way and I wasn’t paying too much attention to that fact. So as a result I hobbled about for a few weeks babying my toe. After a week the startling colors faded away, after two I didn’t have to baby it so much, and now everything is back to normal except that I have an aversion to corners. Breaking a pinky toe is really an insignificant matter. Mildly inconvenient, perhaps painful at first, but quite quickly it will mend and we forget about it. I bring this up because I noticed something about people in that last week of 2004 that I wanted to explore a bit. When I went to a New Year’s Eve party and informed my friends I couldn’t participate in the Dance Dance Rev...

My wife told me today that the air around me was so heavy she found it hard to breathe when she was near me. I knew I was feeling down, but I hadn’t realized how deeply down I had gone. That’s the problem with depression - it’s such an integral part of you that you cannot notice how much it has taken over. Take today for instance. I was so depressed that I walked through the day in a daze. And yet I wasn’t initially aware that I was depressed. In fact, I was becoming frustrated with myself because I was so out of sync. Ever feel that way? Like you’re walking around in a rain cloud and wondering in anger why everything you touch is so wet and soggy? Time was I would lose weeks or months to this feeling. I was so sad I’d forgotten what happiness felt like and accepted “slightly less morose” as a form of improvement. Later on today I recognized I was in the dumps but lacked the energy to pull myself out of it. Those of you with depression know what I’m talking about. You a...

I'll start off this new year with a new direction for my web journal. I've been keeping a journal on my site since 1995, but this marks the first time I've embraced "blogging" as others know it. I'll focus on a few topics of interest and how they affect my life: Depression, ADD, Chronic Motor Tic Disorder, Insomnia, Sleep Apnea, and for fun Good Luck and Bad Luck. Maybe somebody out there needs to know they are not alone when dealing with some of these issues. Maybe somebody just wants to feel better about themself by reading about the mess that is my world. Maybe they find what I have to say entertaining. We'll see. In the meantime, I'll start off with a brief entry on a favorite subject of mine: Bad Luck. Don’t you hate it when electronics expire just outside of warranty? My Canon ZR70 decided it liked my home movie so much today that it refused to let me remove the cassette. I think it was confused because it continually told me to remove...