I was just plain “off” this week. 
I started out antsy, and unable to focus or stay still. My knee bobbled up and down, my fingers drummed to no particular beat, and my mind went around and around. I was about as stable as a three-legged table. It wouldn’t have taken much to make me cry, and I knew it.
Later that day, I crashed. Exhausted, inarticulate and unsociable, I flaked out on the couch, where I zoned out on iTouch games. I am now officially an Angry Birds addict, BTW.
Maybe it was a meds mix-up. I’m good at that. Maybe it was something I ate, or the facial I had, or the weather or Heaven only knows what, but it wiped out most of the week. This matters to me mostly because I was behind on two sort-of, kind-of, arbitrarily chosen deadlines to write two weekly blogs, this one and my humor blog, Mother Hen’s Nest.[1] No one takes missing a self-imposed deadline worse than an obsessive-compulsive person with a well-ingrained guilt complex (that would be me).
Yesterday I girded my loins, [2]fired up my lap-top, and grit my teeth. It was time to face my faithful readers and produce a post. There was something simply not right about that post though. I could have sworn the darn thing sucked—so I did what any responsible blogger who was already running behind would do, and I put the darn thing off until today.
Today, at last, a revelation! Thank you God!
I could type my little fingers off on only one subject, and that was the one on my mind.
Let’s face it. As people with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), there are times when we are incapacitated by our illness. All we can do is ride out the tsunami and wait for a better day.
If we are honest with ourselves though, there are also days when, because we are so used to monitoring our emotions constantly, when we wake up thinking, “I don’t feel like it,” and that settles the matter. We decide how our hours will be spent based on our emotions, because we don’t want to rock the psychological boat and capsize.
Over-analyzing is a depressive specialty, and if there is a way to view a situation negatively, odds are that we will find it. Motivation is difficult to come by in this world for anyone, but for folks with MDD life often feels like a battlefield laced with landmines. It is so much easier to crouch down in our foxholes and pray for a ceasefire than to force ourselves into the action where we have been repeatedly wounded.
Or we can look at it this way: our inner toddler yells, “I don’ wanna!” and our adult selves say, “Oh, okay!” Let’s face it and admit this isn’t a mature way of handling life. Sure, there are days that are impossible, but there are also days when if we simply put one foot in front of the other, we could actually get stuff done, and probably feel better for it. We need to stop always living our days according to our emotional barometer and push past the blah-ness towards a goal, however small.
That, my dear readers, is how this post was written.
A Darker Shade of Blue 
Interesting blog. Of course women have loins. Or lions. One or the other, if not both.
Anway – I’m no Sylvia Plath, but I find I write best/most when majorly depressed. My creativity drops off the map when I’m not depressed.
By: decidetodecideetc on May 13, 2011
at 9:00 pm
Actually, I did look it up, and of course, you are correct: women do have loins, but I thought it was a funny question anyway. Somehow “girding one’s loins” sounds awfully masculine to me.
As for creativity, for me it depends on what I am trying to do. Poetry comes easily when I am depressed. Blogs or essays not so much. I think that the necessity of expressing myself in a more structured format which requires assembling research and/or expressing an argument is tough when my mind is more chemically unbalanced.
By: jedwardswright on May 14, 2011
at 5:39 pm