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Thinking about Mental Health and I
Today ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
frith_in_thorns and I were chatting online and going through our old folders of unfinished fanfic, and I discovered something interesting about SGA -- the way I remember my falling out of the fandom isn't quite what happened. Somehow I ended up remembering it as a relatively sudden slide into misery and vengefully unhappy feelings towards the fandom, mostly brought on by a lot of stuff that happened around the time the show was cancelled and in the months immediately following.
... but that's not actually what happened! Looking back through my unfinished fics, there are stories of the "brutally miserable and dark" variety that I was writing as far back as mid-2007, a point at which I remember still being pretty happy in the fandom. (I'm not talking about anything I posted; I'm referring to stories that are basically just nonstop rapefests and "dark mirror universe" versions of canon.) And I remember now that I was doing some of the social acting-out things that I was doing later on, like locking comments on fic or deleting old fic, as early as late 2006/early 2007, although I didn't at the time recognize that I was acting out.
Basically, looking back on it now, there was a slow, steady slide that took place from about 2007-2010, and it wasn't brought on of anything specific that had happened in fandom (although there were certainly things that exacerbated it). It was obviously due in part to uncontrollable brain chemistry, probably partly RL stuff (this was a time during which my life at work was getting increasingly stressful and miserable, until I quit in 2010) -- and partly, also, that I was ... encouraging it, I guess?
Because I remember what was happening towards the end, which was that I'd started feeding off negative emotions in a way that was sort of ... I don't really know how to describe this, miserable but felt good too? In other words, I'd write stories that were absolutely miserable, and kill off the characters I was fond of in various horrible ways, and fantasize about horrible things, and enjoy it in the same way that I used to enjoy wallowing in the happier emotions. I was thinking of it at the time as cathartic, but I think now that it was basically the opposite of cathartic -- it retrained my brain to go looking for dark, unhappy emotions and reward the pleasure centers of my brain for delivering those, rather than getting a pleasure reward for delivering something happy and positive.
In that case, I got out of it more or less by accident, by unloading a lot of the EVERYTHING that was associated with my unhappiness. In real life, I quit my job and, since most of my friends were at my job, basically changed social circles. In fandom, I did much the same thing by quitting SGA fandom, which also gave my fandom-brain something new to chew on: a new shiny with a bright new set of happy emotions that weren't tainted by association. Also, one of my close relatives had major health problems that year and I ended up devoting a lot of time to taking care of them, which was, at the very least, distracting and different and made me feel good about myself.
And I was happy again for a while.
Then last year the same thing started happening again with White Collar. Again, I blamed it on stuff that was happening in fandom, and again, I think that was probably a part of it but not the major part. Looking back on it now, I kinda wonder if it wasn't triggered in part by the previous winter, because it was the first winter I wasn't working at least part-time, and the cold and dark was REALLY GETTING TO ME by spring. There were some (mildly) unpleasant social things going on, but I think I would've weathered them better if I'd been dealing with everything a little better. Basically, being a tenuous emotional place anyway caused me to blow up over things that really weren't a big deal.
I talked about this pretty extensively in a post last winter, which I can't find now because (dammit) I have no idea what I tagged it as, or exactly when I wrote it, though I think it was around November/early December. But like I said at that time, I didn't realize I was getting depressed last year because it wasn't manifesting itself in a way that I recognized as depression. I wasn't really unhappy so much as distracted and unambitious and irritable, spending all day surfing the Internet without really interacting with anyone, and being quarrelsome with people in a way that isn't really normal for me.
And I think again, like was happening in SGA, it's easy for me to allow my brain to get addicted to negative emotions instead of positive, healthy ones. It's hard to describe it, exactly, but where I'd normally spend time fantasizing about happy, cheerful things, I'll fantasize about dark, unhappy things instead, and it -- doesn't really feel good, and yet it does.
Anyway, at the time I wrote that other post I can't find, I had just realized that I was doing in WC more or less the same thing I'd done in SGA, and I was putting a bunch of measures into place to deal with it, especially cutting out basically ALL non-flist fannish interactions (because apparently I couldn't deal with it at the time without getting hurt, and hurting other people). And I was focusing more on getting stuff done, and basically trying to halt the slide before it went as far as it did in 2010.
And I'll be damned if it doesn't seem to have worked. Even coming out of a hellishly long winter, I am WAY more cheerful, motivated and generally positive-feeling than I was at this time last year. I think the way that I feel and act in fandom is a pretty good barometer for how I feel in general, because I spend so much of my social time there, and so much of my emotional life is there -- and I've been feeling more confident lately, and more comfortable venturing out to participate in fannish games and exchanges.
I'm worried that this post could come across as "You can bootstrap your way out of depression!" and that is really, really NOT what I'm trying to get across. For one thing, it was really mild depression in both cases, comparatively, even if it felt miserable to me at the time. I think the really important thing for me, though, personally, is that I'm starting to figure out that I can retrain my brain, a little bit. It's awfully slow (I mean, it's been about six months since I started recognizing there was a problem last year), but on the other hand, I haven't really been working hard so much as trying to identify the things that were really dragging me down and cutting them, if only temporarily, out of my life. Spending the whole day without accomplishing anything made me unhappy, so I started trying to break the cycle of endless surfing. Fandom made me unhappy, so I cut out most of it and am now slowly reintegrating it into my life.
It all sounds a lot simpler and, quite frankly, a lot PETTIER when I describe it than it felt when I was living through it. It's confusing and messy and, of course, it's not that I was unhappy all the time, or that I was unhappy in fandom all the time. If I had been, I think it would've been a lot more obvious to me what was happening.
And like I said, it's not that I think you can happy-thought your way out of depression. I know there are a lot of people on my flist who struggle with various forms of depression and mental illness, and I'm terribly afraid this will come across as shaming or accusing in some way for not being, I don't know, "strong" enough, or "working hard" enough. I truly do not believe that! And I think it only worked for me in this instance because I wasn't very deep already, and it was mostly that I was letting myself fall into bad brain patterns that I was still capable of breaking out of.
But I do think that in my particular case, learning how my brain works and learning to recognize the early warning signs and redirect my brain into better thought patterns actually is a very useful thing for me. It's something I've been slowly learning to do over the past 15 years, ever since I had a major depressive episode in college that took me several years and a complete upending of my entire life to climb out of.
And I am DEFINITELY not saying this would or could work for other people the same way it does for me. But as far as the care and feeding of my own brain, it's very useful to me to be, slowly but surely, learning some of the early warning signs that I'm starting into a downward slide, and figuring out ways of heading them off.
For my own future reference, mostly, here are some of the things I started doing at the end of last year, when I recognized that I was repeating a lot of the same (unhealthy) patterns of behavior that I'd gone through while I was in SGA fandom:
- I cut out nearly all my interaction with White Collar fandom. I blocked all the communities. I stopped reading fic that was written by anyone except a handful of people. I was taking it too damn seriously -- I was getting into fights, I was spending days obsessing miserably on some small random thing I'd read in a fic. It was ridiculous, and it was harmful to other people as well as me.
I never stopped entirely, and over the last few months I've been slowly seeding it back into my life. I'm reading fic again; I'm watching communities again. I'm just being careful, still, and not doing more than I feel like I can manage, emotionally.
(It sounds absolutely ridiculous to talk about fandom as if it's alcohol or something. But for me, the emotions are so incredibly powerful and intense that they can, apparently, really mess me up. It can be my good drug, the endorphin boost that'll lift me up, but it can also wreck me.)
- Last year it got to where I was spending hours and hours at a time doing nothing but surfing the Internet, because I had no energy for anything else and it was the path of least resistance. Once again, I haven't really quit, but when I can feel myself sliding into that thing where I'm just brainlessly following one link after another, I make myself put the computer to sleep and go do something else. I don't really care what ... wash dishes, read a book, write something. Just ... stop. Another thing I've been doing to try to stem the tide of reckless lurking is to make myself comment on stuff -- which I know is basically the opposite of what I said I was doing above, but this actually IS useful because when I'd open up a dozen posts to read in tabs, I wouldn't let myself go forward to the next one until I'd left a comment. Or I would just close them.
I'm basically going for "less, but better quality" here. Rather than reading a dozen tabs and not really being affected by it, I'd read a couple of tabs and get involved in conversations.
- And I'm making plans and to-do lists, and ticking stuff steadily off them. But I'm also trying not to overload myself or castigate myself for not getting things done.
This Sunday, I apparently hit the point where I ran out of what my (geeky) husband calls Ambition Points -- whatever it is that makes you get up and do stuff? I ran out of that. I pretty much didn't do anything on Sunday but slump in front of the computer reading stuff. I felt like a jellyfish slumped over my keyboard. But you know, it's okay to have some days like that. I recharged my Ambition Points and now I'm getting things done again.
And I consider things like hanging out with friends or writing fanfic "getting stuff done" too. I spent a few hours today in chat with Frith, for example, spontaneously and off-the-cuff. That's Useful Stuff too. Because it's fun! Half my problems the previous winter were due to not socializing enough; I turned into a hermit, and look where it got me. If I never did anything ELSE but socialize, that would be a problem, but expecting myself to be Accomplishing Things every minute of every day is just going to drive me back into a hole. I LIKE hanging out with my friends, online or in person. That's a lot more important, sometimes, than making a check mark on a to-do list.
Possibly this entire post is making me sound terribly pathetic. (There is a part of me that doesn't want to admit exactly how much time I spend not doing anything "useful", or how much of my life is taken up with fandom, or how much trouble I have, sometimes, getting myself to do anything at all.) But I don't feel pathetic. I'm actually very happy with myself and how my life is working out right now. And now I am going to post this stupid gigantic monster post and then go off to town and hang art in a gallery. :D
frith_in_thorns and I were chatting online and going through our old folders of unfinished fanfic, and I discovered something interesting about SGA -- the way I remember my falling out of the fandom isn't quite what happened. Somehow I ended up remembering it as a relatively sudden slide into misery and vengefully unhappy feelings towards the fandom, mostly brought on by a lot of stuff that happened around the time the show was cancelled and in the months immediately following.... but that's not actually what happened! Looking back through my unfinished fics, there are stories of the "brutally miserable and dark" variety that I was writing as far back as mid-2007, a point at which I remember still being pretty happy in the fandom. (I'm not talking about anything I posted; I'm referring to stories that are basically just nonstop rapefests and "dark mirror universe" versions of canon.) And I remember now that I was doing some of the social acting-out things that I was doing later on, like locking comments on fic or deleting old fic, as early as late 2006/early 2007, although I didn't at the time recognize that I was acting out.
Basically, looking back on it now, there was a slow, steady slide that took place from about 2007-2010, and it wasn't brought on of anything specific that had happened in fandom (although there were certainly things that exacerbated it). It was obviously due in part to uncontrollable brain chemistry, probably partly RL stuff (this was a time during which my life at work was getting increasingly stressful and miserable, until I quit in 2010) -- and partly, also, that I was ... encouraging it, I guess?
Because I remember what was happening towards the end, which was that I'd started feeding off negative emotions in a way that was sort of ... I don't really know how to describe this, miserable but felt good too? In other words, I'd write stories that were absolutely miserable, and kill off the characters I was fond of in various horrible ways, and fantasize about horrible things, and enjoy it in the same way that I used to enjoy wallowing in the happier emotions. I was thinking of it at the time as cathartic, but I think now that it was basically the opposite of cathartic -- it retrained my brain to go looking for dark, unhappy emotions and reward the pleasure centers of my brain for delivering those, rather than getting a pleasure reward for delivering something happy and positive.
In that case, I got out of it more or less by accident, by unloading a lot of the EVERYTHING that was associated with my unhappiness. In real life, I quit my job and, since most of my friends were at my job, basically changed social circles. In fandom, I did much the same thing by quitting SGA fandom, which also gave my fandom-brain something new to chew on: a new shiny with a bright new set of happy emotions that weren't tainted by association. Also, one of my close relatives had major health problems that year and I ended up devoting a lot of time to taking care of them, which was, at the very least, distracting and different and made me feel good about myself.
And I was happy again for a while.
Then last year the same thing started happening again with White Collar. Again, I blamed it on stuff that was happening in fandom, and again, I think that was probably a part of it but not the major part. Looking back on it now, I kinda wonder if it wasn't triggered in part by the previous winter, because it was the first winter I wasn't working at least part-time, and the cold and dark was REALLY GETTING TO ME by spring. There were some (mildly) unpleasant social things going on, but I think I would've weathered them better if I'd been dealing with everything a little better. Basically, being a tenuous emotional place anyway caused me to blow up over things that really weren't a big deal.
I talked about this pretty extensively in a post last winter, which I can't find now because (dammit) I have no idea what I tagged it as, or exactly when I wrote it, though I think it was around November/early December. But like I said at that time, I didn't realize I was getting depressed last year because it wasn't manifesting itself in a way that I recognized as depression. I wasn't really unhappy so much as distracted and unambitious and irritable, spending all day surfing the Internet without really interacting with anyone, and being quarrelsome with people in a way that isn't really normal for me.
And I think again, like was happening in SGA, it's easy for me to allow my brain to get addicted to negative emotions instead of positive, healthy ones. It's hard to describe it, exactly, but where I'd normally spend time fantasizing about happy, cheerful things, I'll fantasize about dark, unhappy things instead, and it -- doesn't really feel good, and yet it does.
Anyway, at the time I wrote that other post I can't find, I had just realized that I was doing in WC more or less the same thing I'd done in SGA, and I was putting a bunch of measures into place to deal with it, especially cutting out basically ALL non-flist fannish interactions (because apparently I couldn't deal with it at the time without getting hurt, and hurting other people). And I was focusing more on getting stuff done, and basically trying to halt the slide before it went as far as it did in 2010.
And I'll be damned if it doesn't seem to have worked. Even coming out of a hellishly long winter, I am WAY more cheerful, motivated and generally positive-feeling than I was at this time last year. I think the way that I feel and act in fandom is a pretty good barometer for how I feel in general, because I spend so much of my social time there, and so much of my emotional life is there -- and I've been feeling more confident lately, and more comfortable venturing out to participate in fannish games and exchanges.
I'm worried that this post could come across as "You can bootstrap your way out of depression!" and that is really, really NOT what I'm trying to get across. For one thing, it was really mild depression in both cases, comparatively, even if it felt miserable to me at the time. I think the really important thing for me, though, personally, is that I'm starting to figure out that I can retrain my brain, a little bit. It's awfully slow (I mean, it's been about six months since I started recognizing there was a problem last year), but on the other hand, I haven't really been working hard so much as trying to identify the things that were really dragging me down and cutting them, if only temporarily, out of my life. Spending the whole day without accomplishing anything made me unhappy, so I started trying to break the cycle of endless surfing. Fandom made me unhappy, so I cut out most of it and am now slowly reintegrating it into my life.
It all sounds a lot simpler and, quite frankly, a lot PETTIER when I describe it than it felt when I was living through it. It's confusing and messy and, of course, it's not that I was unhappy all the time, or that I was unhappy in fandom all the time. If I had been, I think it would've been a lot more obvious to me what was happening.
And like I said, it's not that I think you can happy-thought your way out of depression. I know there are a lot of people on my flist who struggle with various forms of depression and mental illness, and I'm terribly afraid this will come across as shaming or accusing in some way for not being, I don't know, "strong" enough, or "working hard" enough. I truly do not believe that! And I think it only worked for me in this instance because I wasn't very deep already, and it was mostly that I was letting myself fall into bad brain patterns that I was still capable of breaking out of.
But I do think that in my particular case, learning how my brain works and learning to recognize the early warning signs and redirect my brain into better thought patterns actually is a very useful thing for me. It's something I've been slowly learning to do over the past 15 years, ever since I had a major depressive episode in college that took me several years and a complete upending of my entire life to climb out of.
And I am DEFINITELY not saying this would or could work for other people the same way it does for me. But as far as the care and feeding of my own brain, it's very useful to me to be, slowly but surely, learning some of the early warning signs that I'm starting into a downward slide, and figuring out ways of heading them off.
For my own future reference, mostly, here are some of the things I started doing at the end of last year, when I recognized that I was repeating a lot of the same (unhealthy) patterns of behavior that I'd gone through while I was in SGA fandom:
- I cut out nearly all my interaction with White Collar fandom. I blocked all the communities. I stopped reading fic that was written by anyone except a handful of people. I was taking it too damn seriously -- I was getting into fights, I was spending days obsessing miserably on some small random thing I'd read in a fic. It was ridiculous, and it was harmful to other people as well as me.
I never stopped entirely, and over the last few months I've been slowly seeding it back into my life. I'm reading fic again; I'm watching communities again. I'm just being careful, still, and not doing more than I feel like I can manage, emotionally.
(It sounds absolutely ridiculous to talk about fandom as if it's alcohol or something. But for me, the emotions are so incredibly powerful and intense that they can, apparently, really mess me up. It can be my good drug, the endorphin boost that'll lift me up, but it can also wreck me.)
- Last year it got to where I was spending hours and hours at a time doing nothing but surfing the Internet, because I had no energy for anything else and it was the path of least resistance. Once again, I haven't really quit, but when I can feel myself sliding into that thing where I'm just brainlessly following one link after another, I make myself put the computer to sleep and go do something else. I don't really care what ... wash dishes, read a book, write something. Just ... stop. Another thing I've been doing to try to stem the tide of reckless lurking is to make myself comment on stuff -- which I know is basically the opposite of what I said I was doing above, but this actually IS useful because when I'd open up a dozen posts to read in tabs, I wouldn't let myself go forward to the next one until I'd left a comment. Or I would just close them.
I'm basically going for "less, but better quality" here. Rather than reading a dozen tabs and not really being affected by it, I'd read a couple of tabs and get involved in conversations.
- And I'm making plans and to-do lists, and ticking stuff steadily off them. But I'm also trying not to overload myself or castigate myself for not getting things done.
This Sunday, I apparently hit the point where I ran out of what my (geeky) husband calls Ambition Points -- whatever it is that makes you get up and do stuff? I ran out of that. I pretty much didn't do anything on Sunday but slump in front of the computer reading stuff. I felt like a jellyfish slumped over my keyboard. But you know, it's okay to have some days like that. I recharged my Ambition Points and now I'm getting things done again.
And I consider things like hanging out with friends or writing fanfic "getting stuff done" too. I spent a few hours today in chat with Frith, for example, spontaneously and off-the-cuff. That's Useful Stuff too. Because it's fun! Half my problems the previous winter were due to not socializing enough; I turned into a hermit, and look where it got me. If I never did anything ELSE but socialize, that would be a problem, but expecting myself to be Accomplishing Things every minute of every day is just going to drive me back into a hole. I LIKE hanging out with my friends, online or in person. That's a lot more important, sometimes, than making a check mark on a to-do list.
Possibly this entire post is making me sound terribly pathetic. (There is a part of me that doesn't want to admit exactly how much time I spend not doing anything "useful", or how much of my life is taken up with fandom, or how much trouble I have, sometimes, getting myself to do anything at all.) But I don't feel pathetic. I'm actually very happy with myself and how my life is working out right now. And now I am going to post this stupid gigantic monster post and then go off to town and hang art in a gallery. :D