A Splintered Mind

I knew I was in trouble when I looked at the time. It was 12:30 already. Half past noon, and I was still in bed. I was just lying there feeling as if a giant weight was on top of me. I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to. Eat? Nah, too sad. Go to the bathroom? Too much effort. Even social media seemed tiresome. I put my iPhone down and thought in stunned, heavy silence, “I’m depressed.” Savage bouts of depression can still jump out at me and catch me off guard. I have clinical depression , yet I manage my depression on a daily basis. It doesn’t often get the better of me anymore. There was a time when depression ruled my world, but I have long since put that behind me. Which is exactly why I can be waylaid by depression from time to time. I get lax. I forget to be ever vigilant. It’s not that I hadn’t seen the warning signs. They were pretty obvious all week. Yet here I was, caught “unawares” because I hadn’t acted on t...

Once upon a time, and long before the evil, fanged Facebook consumed the conversations of the internet, readers could leave comments on my blog. Most readers left intelligent and insightful comments on what I wrote about that day. They were delightsome to behold. Thanks to vigilant knights, trolls didn’t often blunder into our edifying conversations, but whenever they did stumble upon our happy kingdom, the trolls were quickly vanquished. Then one day, the king (which is me) decreed that Disqus would be the new conversation system for all because the old one didn’t work. Except that Disqus didn’t work very well, either, and so, after a time, the king switched back to Google’s default system. That’s when he, me, I discovered something was wrong. There were NO Google comment boxes to be found. I couldn’t even reinstall the Disqus system. My blog was corrupted on Google’s server. After a year of banging my head against the portcullis, scrubbing the castle’s layout TWICE, I turned all comm...