I woke up this morning, after a fine night’s sleep, feeling cranky, listless, and altogether unmotivated to do much of anything. Since the year began, I’ve been pretty consistently posting content here 2-3 times a week, but I only posted one poem last week, didn’t post anything yesterday, and couldn’t bring myself to care when I woke up today. I was solidly on the “meh” side of things.
Here’s a thing about brain meds: they don’t completely eliminate your wonky brain chemistry, they just even it out and make it easier to deal with. Crazy people are always crazy, we’re just not as crazy on our meds. So when I woke up feeling tired and fitful and apathetic, I quickly realized I was experiencing depression, which led to the larger realization that summer is starting, and summer is when my depression is generally at its worst. Most people I know who suffer from seasonal depression get it in the darker, colder months in winter. Not yours truly. I thrive in autumn, winter, and spring, but I lag in summer like a chemically-depressed…laggy thing. (Do sloths suffer from depression? Do sloths write fiction and poetry? Do sloths occasionally get mad at themselves for being so slothy? Is that sloth-loathing?)
So while I can’t completely stop the depression, I can at least recognize it and work with it and be kind to myself while it’s going on. Which means I’m taking a vacation from blogging this summer. I’ll still write as much as I can, but I’m not expecting that to be a lot, and I’m not going to push myself to post what I write publicly. If I really like something or am super inspired by something, I’ll blog it, but I’m not sticking to my standard schedule and I might go weeks without posting a good goddamn thing.
(Fun Josh Fact: one summer in college, long before I was medicated or thought I needed to be medicated, my summer depression was bad enough that focusing on words and following linear trains of thought were very, very difficult. The only book I was able to read all the way through from the start and make any sense of was William S. Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch.)
This is nothing for anyone to worry about. I’ll be fine. I just need to allow myself to back off from regularly writing and posting. And I’ll be back in full force when autumn comes around and my brain chemistry swings back up to fun levels.
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