Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well

Living with anxiety and depression has been... an experience. I don't even want to give it a label, because it's been so many things at different points in my life. Painful. Agonizing. Eye opening. Cathartic. Frustrating. Immobilizing. Paralyzing. Mostly paralyzing.

But living with this shit in my head while caring for a toddler? Whole new ball game.

While I was pregnant I became very paranoid about post partum depression. I knew, given my history, I was at an increased risk. I had these vivid waking nightmares about being that crazy lady you read about in the paper who drowns her kids and ends up being committed instead of going to jail and gets treatment for post partum psychosis but then can't handle the pain of what she did so she jumps off a bridge but it doesn't kill her and she's permanently broken both physically and mentally for the rest of her life..... Okay, so for those of you who haven't been pregnant, disclaimer: hormones make you crazy.

I remember extracting many promises from my dear partner to watch me like a hawk. Which it turns out was a tad naive, because when you're that sleep deprived you ain't watching shit.
Regardless, we survived the newborn days. All three of us. No drownings. No post partum crazy. A few regular new parent crazy, but that's to be expected and forgiven.

A tiny, naked, shivering creature inside me began to hope. I had been off medication for almost two years. I had been out of therapy for over a year. It wasn't all smooth sailing, but our new family had weathered every crisis, and I had taken my combined tools from therapy and life and managed to keep the crazy at bay. After two years of keeping my shit together, I began to hope.

Until it struck again.

Hyperbole and a Half did a fantastic job explaining her experiences with depression. Far better than I can do. At one point she talks about being "too hopeless for hope". In my head it's a well that you're trapped within, that not only do you not begin to hope for a rope out, if someone offers you said rope you don't have the energy to take it, because to do so would be to hope and really what's the point because the rope would probably break or lead to nowhere better or be an imaginary rope. I'll just stay here in my well. It's not so bad. There's moss and stuff.

Here's the thing about depression... Here's the thing that frustrates the outsiders. We aren't. Depressed. ABOUT. Anything. It's not an event driven phenomenon. Triggered, perhaps, but even after the trigger is removed we're still trapped in the well. Or the trigger is something so inconsequential it's ludicrous. Or there is no trigger. You just trip, and fall in a well. Oops.

I tripped. I have no idea what I tripped on. I'd like to think after all my work (hard, intense, internal, painful work) in therapy and on my own that I'm fairly adept at stepping back and looking at what my brain is doing. Framing my brain as a parasitic entity out to get me, helps me to frame my experiences when I'm deep inside an anxiety attack, so I can halt it's progress and re-ground myself. It's not foolproof, it's not easy, but it works for me. The thing with depression, however, is that I try to step back and say "Hey dude. That thing your brain is doing? That empty you're feeling? Not real, dude. Your brain is totally lying to you. Snap out of it." But that "too hopeless for hope" sets in. It doesn't matter that my little hopeful creature acknowledges that this is just chemicals firing at the wrong things, or failing to fire at all, that doesn't fix it. It doesn't halt it. It doesn't change it. So why bother.

Here's the kicker: I have a son. He's wonderful. He's amazing. He's freaking adorable. He's my rope.

I spent a silly amount of time in my basement yesterday, with my eyes leaking, eating a bag of chips and watching TV. (I can't call it crying because I'm not sad, it's just what my body is doing to try and remind itself that emotions exist). This is typical  depressed-stuck-in-a-well-fuck-everything behaviour for me, because I have an unhealthy relationship with both food and television. But then I looked at the time and realized I had to pick up my Son from daycare.

Full disclosure here: In that brief moment, I resented the shit out of him. I disclose this because it's not the first time, it won't be the last time, and if you're a mom you've felt it too. We just don't talk about it. But I was comfortable in my funk, in my well with my moss and my chips (my well has chips in it, fuck off) and I resented having to leave that. But as a mom, you don't have much of a choice. I resent getting up at 3am when he wakes up with a nightmare, but I do it, and if I don't exactly do it with a smile on my face at least I do it with love in my heart.

I pulled myself off the couch, put pants on, washed my face and drove to pick him up. I took a few minutes, à la Allie Brosh, to practice my facial expressions, trying to nail down the No-I-haven't-been-crying-all-day-nothing's-wrong-I-swear look. I failed because she asked me if I was feeling alright. It's a terrible feeling, knowing that seeing your child grinning from ear to ear should fill you with immeasurable joy, but not being able to experience it. Like the Happy is pounding on sound proof glass, wanting to be let in but locked out.

My point is this: Seeing him didn't magically clear my head and make me "normal". In fact, the inability to truly appreciate how much I love him, because it was squashed under mountain of depression, only served to make me more depressed. However, looking at this goofily grinning face in my rear view mirror, while I attempted to drive and cry and sing him a song all at the same time, reminded me why it's still worth trying even when it feels hopeless.

It's not easy. Pretty much nothing about being a parent is. And there are days when I will bear a striking resemblance to that mom from About A Boy, crying while she makes her kid cereal. But it's worth hanging on until the hopelessness passes and the rope doesn't look quite so scary. It's worth climbing out of the well. It never feels worth it, and for me I probably wouldn't bother to hope. But for him, I'll nurse that tiny, scared little hopeful creature and ride it out.

I can ride this out.

[Thanks to the talented Mike Doughty for the inspired title.]

The Beginning... Or Not?

It's taken me three days to download and install Firefall.

Part of that is on my shoulders, because of, you know, LIFE, but a larger part of that I'm dumping square in the realm of Windows-8-can-suck-my-dick. If I had one. As an operating system, it operates relatively well. Actually, most of the time it does it's job of making your computer a usable collection of inanimate parts. Then every once and a while, it goes and does something wacky. Like suddenly deciding in the middle of a download that it absolutely needs, it needs, the latest service pack. It cannot go on without the latest service pack. Life is just not worth living without the latest service pack, and it will prove it to you by crashing in flamboyantly melodramatic fashion every time you attempt to give it the latest service pack.

These are problems that did not use to phase me. I was once woken up by my husband and brother-in-law at 1 in the morning because our network had come down in a case of the vapors and was refusing to speak to anyone. It did not phase me. I took these things in stride, like a trooper, a veteran PC user who knew that sometimes unplugging it worked, we don't know why, just go with it and don't question the ways of the Windows gods. But when I have a one year old on one hip, a bottle warming in the microwave, dinner burning on the stove, and my computer commits seppuku during a simple download? That shit phases me.

All of that to say, it took me three days to download and install Firefall. Shut up.

The loading music was my kind of zen. After the whole thing went sideways on me I even left the loading screen up just so I could chill to the music in the background while I did dishes. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The account setup was ridiculously easy (thank you for not making me log out and futz around on your website) so onwards I skipped towards character creation. Little did I know, what waited for me was some crazy gamer chick hip-cock to end all hip-cocks.

Seriously? Every since the infamous Lara Croft, I feel like most game developers have backed off on the over-sexualized female game character. I mean, not entirely. Let's be real here, they know who their primary market is, and it's not women's studies majors. But it's been a while since I've had a "Woah, what the fuck is up with her booty?!" moment while creating a female character. Yet here I am, staring at the female characters and thinking that there is no way outside of a porn studio a woman cocks her hips that much or sticks her chest out that violently. It looks like she's about to topple over face first at any moment. Seriously, guys? Seriously?!

Regardless! I stumble through creating a character, squinting at the ridiculously small description text for hair, eyes, skin, voice (one of which was incomprehensible to both me and my husband), and excitedly hit Volunteer and Fight!

At which point, the game crashes.

Play a Beta, they said. It'll be fun, they said. Sigh. I'll be back for you later, Firefall. You and your massively oversized booty too.

Unadvised Commitment

I am so tired right now.

So unbelievably tired.

Yet here I find myself, with burning eyes and my second coffee clutched in a death grip, reading through the webpage on Firefall, trying to mentally calculate when I can squeeze in an hour to try it.

Sleepiness due to video games is not an unfamiliar state for me. Shades of weekend long LAN parties, where we survived on candy, chips, soda, and 3 hours of sleep (with one eye open for the ever-present threat of being pranked by your fellow gamer "friends").

But that was a sobering decade ago (fuck, I'm getting old) and time, age, career and baby have all eroded my gumby like ability to bounce back. Video games have become like drinking -- tons of fun, but you pay for it days afterwards. Is the hangover really worth it?

It's not something I thought I'd ever have to do, actually work at scheduling my video game "fun time". But hell, between work, baby, laundry, food, baby and sleep I've had to schedule a whole other kind of "fun time", so why should gaming be any different!

So how in this brave new world of adulthood can I make time for video games? Should I even bother? I have no idea. But I intend to put my sanity and time management skills on the line, and find out.

First up, Firefall!

I Miss Video Games

I used to pwn noobs.

I used to stay up all night on Day of Defeat and snipe the shit out of annoying little 12 year olds who couldn't believe that a girl could have a 20-2 kill ratio. I used to suicide rush the barricades with a grenade pre-lit in my hand and it didn't matter that my ratio became pathetic, because it was a stupid crazy amount of fun.

I used to hop onto Final Fantasy Online and spend hours upon hours painstakingly assembling a group, running all the way out to the desert, only to pull 2 mobs and have the tank drop out because his mom was calling him for dinner. I crafted crystals like a mofo, and my mog-house was the ultimate adventurer's pad.

I used to have LAN parties, and consume nothing but soda, chips and candy for 48 hours straight, surviving on 3 hours sleep and the flashing of pixelated mayhem to keep me going until everyone finally crashed out from sheer exhaustion and over stimulation. I played Counter Strike like a boss and it always eventually degenerated into shooting each other in the head as soon as the map started.

I used to run a guild, first in FFOnline, and had a quiet little thrill when we hopped over to World of Warcraft and got recognized as that person who ran that totally awesome guild and holy crap you're famous. We used to run in-game game-shows with prizes. We were kinda a big deal.

I've played every single Assassin's Creed, and could blend better than a friggin' Cuisinart. I would make impossible leaps into stacks of hay, and emerged unscathed and miraculously anonymous once more. I was a little chicken chaser in Fable, and I was practically invisible as a thief in Skyrim. I robbed a guard of his sweet roll while standing on his toes.

Now I play This Little Piggy, and PattyCake... like a boss. I play zerberts on tummies and gotchernose and I'm-gonna-get-you!

It's not really the same thing. It's pretty awesome. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty damn awesome. But it's still not the same thing. I wonder if they make baby-sized Xbox controllers...

Accidental Awesomeness

My son is one year old today.

There is a plethora of mom blogs out there. An abundance of people (not just moms, dads too) writing about parenting and children and the ups and downs of spawning a new generation of shit disturbers. And part of me balks at joining their ranks.

I remember pre-baby saying that I wouldn't lose my passion for all things me. My interest in science, my willingness to devour esoteric papers on human sexuality, my fascination with the brain. I will continue to write about these things, I said to myself, because I won't be another mommy blogger, another poor soul who can only talk about her life in relation to her children. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Maybe it's a backlash from the increasingly numerous un-baby-bearing people in our generation. By choice more and more are choosing not to burden themselves with poopy diapers and the kind of sleep deprivation that could rival KGB style torture methods. And really, who can blame them. They don't want to read about us stupid suckers whose lives have effectively ended. So I felt a certain amount of shame and worry that I would turn into another boring mommy blogger in a sea of sleep deprived boring mommy bloggers all bitching about the same thing, which ultimately the un-baby feel we have no true right to bitch about because we chose this of our own free will. So why, oh why, are there still so many parental blogs and why oh why is it when I sit to write, what I want to write about is my son?

Because here's the thing:

There is no other experience on earth that is at the same time so universal and yet so hauntingly personal.

Children change you. People hear that and go "yeah, yeah, we know" but they aren't hearing the meaning behind it. Children change you. We all change, gradually, accumulating experience and slowly morphing into something new and hopefully better. But children are not gradual. Nothing they do is gradual. From one instant to the next they create billions of new neurons and neural connections. They become different people in front of your eyes. And you become a different person alongside them, quickly in order to stay in step with their lightning fast movement towards becoming whoever they are becoming. It's like watching a miniature version of the Big Bang constantly happening in your living room.

Pre-baby, I could say that every day I was a new person, but I said with a kind of Zen Buddhist understanding. Today is the first day blah blah. But post-baby I am a new person. Every day I learn more watching my son for 20 minutes than I have over the past 20 years. I learn kindness, and compassion, and patience, and joy, and laughter, and frustration, and heartbreak, and wonder, and love. Then a new hour rolls by and I learn all of that again, I learn another facet of them, and a dozen more, and am amazed that my heart has not imploded under the sheer strain of loving too hard.

We parents talk incessantly about our children because not only are we are forever awed by what they do.  We are forever humbled by the kind of people they help us become.

Shnell. Shnell.

My brain is moving too quickly for my own good.

When I was little, I used to write constantly. I flip back through some of it and laugh because my sentences were disjointed. Incomplete. My brain moved too quickly through what I wanted to say and my hands couldn't keep up with a pen.

As I grew older my brain slowed down, relaxed. Settled into itself and I could think clearly. I spent more time thinking about what I wanted to say. I grasped for the right words and often came up short.

Now my brain is moving quickly again. I think it's trying to keep up with my son, whose brain is firing on all cylinders. If you're very still and watch him very closely, I believe you can see new brain cells forming in front of your eyes. I have ideas bouncing around my head, writing that I haven't thought of in years nagging to get out.

But everytime I sit to write, I don't know what to say. I think of this blog and put off writing on it, not because I'm devoid of conversation, but because I'm not sure what face I want to show the world anymore. I'd just like to hide in myself for the time being, and watch my son grow.

Time For Bed

I've been thinking about what to write, when to write, how to write for a long time now. For months, I have had no idea what to say or how I want to say it, so I've taken a page out of the Book of Impulse and decided to just start writing.

I'm a mom. What the fuck.

It feels like being trapped in a temporal anomaly. Everything is new, everything is different, but it feels like he's always been here, as if there never existed a time pre-baby. Or rather, that the pre-baby existence was someone else's life.

I've never had a problem with mortality. It has never concerned me greatly, that my life was ticking away or that I would grow old and die. I was playing with little Squidge on my lap today with a toy mirror. The mirror is kid friendly, of course, so it bends creating this bizarro distorted reflection almost constantly because he almost constantly has one of his hands bending it up to his mouth. I was smiling and caught my reflection in a rare un-bendy moment. I had laugh lines. Wrinkles. "I look like I'm 30", I thought in astonishment. Before I realized I almost am 30.

I don't begrudge my face my laugh lines, or my eyes my wrinkles. In the same way I don't begrudge my body the stretch marks from pregnancy. They're my tiger stripes. I earned each one of those stretch marks. I fought the demons of biology for them, screaming, literally for hours, so I'll be damned if I'll feel bad about them. I've earned every wrinkles on my face from every joke, every sorrow, every experience that's formed them and formed me along the way. But I what I hadn't realized, until I caught my fun-house reflection in the bizarro mirror, was that I had already had so many experiences.

Considering the exponentially growing life expectancy, it's reasonable to say that I'm a good third of the way through my life. How did that happen? Where did the time go? I spent my miserable early teen years yearning for life to get on with itself so that I could start living. And suddenly I was here, married, with a child, in a house no bigger than a breadbox, expected to be a mother. Where on earth did all the time go?

Little Squidge rolled over on his own. His first act in his journey towards locomotion. There must be some science fiction explanation for the bending of time that causes it to move so slowly when you are young, but speed up as you get older. If Squidge could be aware of time (instead of only aware of his own fingers) the past 5 months would seem an eternity. It's all he's known, and it's taken him so long to get to a point where he can awkwardly flop his body over like a near-dead fish. But for me it's gone so fast. One minute he was this squawking, bloody mess being handed to me, the next he was rolling over and grinning up at me in triumph.

Where did all the time go?