The Shape I am In

 I am trying to decide when to go to the sheriff's. It looks like 1 pm, which means I need to catch the 12:15 #5 downtown. I never thought I would be living my life according to a bus schedule. It is not usually onerous, but it can be a bit nerve wracking when my mind keeps turning around. I will not be going to work. My conscience and my bank account strain against that choice. 

I still need to call the doctor. Having medical insurance for the first time in my life, I do not know what to do with a doctor in my life. I think the problem will go away, but it has been a week.

I read, thinking time will resolve things for me. Might as well get some things off the to-do list. I look at the Scottish Review's Our broken democracy. Which leaves me feeling a bit better about the US of A.

I read Treading Water by Nazish Brohi, and the following leaves me wondering what good I am doing, what good can we do writing like I am, and considering humility is a human necessity:

So if moralizing is now misplaced in literature, what space is there to write about imperiled people, except to set them up as subjects for recreational grieving? And why should imperiled people be expected to display their pain for empty empathy that won’t translate into lifesaving action?

As I write, Nigeria has been hit by floods, the country’s worst in a decade, displacing nearly 1.3 million people. The devastation in Pakistan is far worse, in numbers and scale. What horrors should Nigerian writers present to break through the saturation and numbness set in motion by Pakistan’s floods, and how should they up the global attention ante? They could pit their stories against Monjoba by writing about the seventy-six souls who drowned when an overloaded boat of people fleeing the floods capsized in Anambra State. They could fictionalize more maudlin tales: a woman, eight months pregnant, who finally found the strength and saved enough money to run away from her abusive husband, only to drown. Or an octogenarian man who survived while all eleven of his family members, including grandchildren, died in front of his eyes.

But they won’t have to compete with Monjoba for compassion. I won’t enter that exchange of producing and consuming secondhand grief, and I won’t prompt any onus-shrugging philanthropy. I will not resolve this aporia.

Munjho bha’s story will remain unwritten.

Aporia explained.

I have been listening to too much of Bob Dylan. Never thought I would say that - he is only contributing to my uneasiness of being here right now.

Okay, enough of Bob. Putting him on hold. Making calls.

I left a message with the doctor's nurse. Probably sounded like an idiot; felt like one. Updated my phone with the counselor.

Feeling very much like I ought not be doing what I am doing. Guilt at being inactive, at not working.

I read Farrell and Gleeson: a magnetic duo from The Scottish Review. I want to see a movie. I am thinking Taur, maybe Black Adam, but now must see The Banshees of Inisherin.

About 30 minutes before the bus arrives.

Going to work on a different post for this place.

I made it to the sheriff's. Limped in, but I made it.

During the 90-minute wait for the next bus, I read a couple of stories out of Torgny Lindgren's Merab's Beauty and Other Stories (Harper & Row, 19830. Joel C sent this to me, thinking I would like it. I do. The stories are simply told, like Van Gogh painted simply. I suspect they may a quality of a saga without the saga's epic nature. Something strange happened to me, a bit of an epiphany, when I read this:

"...Itis not really that I am unfaithful, but rather that I am in despair, desperation gnaws at my flesh and sconsumes my bones; my nakedness would frighten you . You would try to comfort me, Althea."

"Gloria"

Comfort does not help with desperation, or despair. Comfort becomes mollycoddling, the feeling of one's pain and fear being diminished. What despair and desperation want is escape from their clutches. Drugs, alcohol, women, overwork, all offer escape. There is one other thing we want when despairing and desperate: to confront what lies behind those emotions, to take by the throat and throttle what hurts us. Comfort becomes a barrier to that confrontation. Comfort becomes gasoline thrown on a fire. Would that we had an ally to make us stand up and fight - that will ease the pain. Else, we find somewhere to hide from what torments us.

I finished the piece for the blog. 

I found some interesting sites - one about Edgar Allan Poe and one for Walt Whitman. These might come in handy for "Chasing Ashes." I found also Numéro Cinq, a site dead now five years but still seems to have interesting writing, and Enquiry: A Publication of the AHI Undergraduate Fellows. I am not sure what to make of this, but I find myself more intrigued than not after reading this:

With the support of The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), Enquiry: A Publication of the AHI Undergraduate Fellows publishes student opinion pieces on political, cultural, and economic issues. We print points of view and arguments that do not appear in many campus publications, and we welcome well-reasoned, well-written articles by students across the political spectrum, from paleoconservative to progressive.

Emotions run high when college students engage politics, but the written word can be an antidote. It forces students to stop, think, and argue persuasively. Here you will find no shouting matches, no sloganeering. The goal is to elevate discussion, not to end it. Here, no debates are over and settled, and no ideas are safe from criticism.

 I also read a bit of No Evidence for Psychiatry’s Depression Claims, Report Three 2022 Research Reviews. Some of which hit very close to home:

The most recent of the three reviews about the neurobiology of depression was published in October 2022 by Peter Sterling, Professor of Neuroscience at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and it is titled: “A Neuroscientist Evaluates the Standard Biological Model of Depression.” Sterling examined the evidence for the theory that depression is “a brain disorder caused by some defect in a specific neural pathway,” and he concluded that “recent evidence from multiple sources [citing 44 journal publications] fails to support this hypothesis.” Published in the webzine Mad in America, Sterling summarizes his findings:

(1) Neuroimaging does not identify brain abnormalities in depressed individuals; neuroimaging does not even distinguish between large populations of depressed vs healthy.

(2) Genome-wide association studies identify hundreds of variants of small effect, but these do not identify a depressed individual, nor even a depressed population.

(3) The ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of depression has failed for want of evidence, thus depriving ‘antidepressant’ drugs of a neuroscientific rationale.

(4) Depression, while weakly predicted by any ‘biomarker,’ is strongly predicted by childhood trauma and chronic social stress.

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If one actually spends time with depressed people, it is obvious that the common ingredient they share is some type of overwhelming pain, and if one spends even an hour listening to most depressed individuals, it is not all that difficult to discover the source of that pain.

Some of the most common overwhelming pains include: severe chronic physical pain (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis or bone cancer); severe financial pain (e.g., bankruptcy, unemployment, and poverty); legal pains (e.g., parole, probation, and other involvements in the criminal justice system); severe interpersonal pains (e.g., isolation, a miserable marriage, or a lengthy ugly divorce); unhealed trauma (from childhood and elsewhere); and overwhelming existential pains (e.g., meaninglessness, directionlessnes, and lost integrity).

I recognize the pains listed above in my own life. Writing helped me with my depression - it gave me the means to grapple with the voices in my head, the paranoia, what all combined to make me hate life and living - but I am not ready to quit my Zoloft. It has added a quality of evenness that I did not have before, even with the writing. I may not be bipolar, but I did have times when what I felt had the taint of mania. We cannot discount these studies (and I would suggest reading the whole of the article, it makes wide-ranging points of interest to everyone, not only the depressed.) Depression is real. It needs treated - I offer myself as an example of that proposition - and the treatment need not (should not?) be limited to medicine.

My hip still hurts a bit. I stretched the wrong way, and it shot up to 10. I must get to work tomorrow, regardless of whatever pain I have.

I did get a call from the doctor, but not a lot of good it did me. I called back after noon and they were closed. I think they are closed for the remainder of the week. My luck.

And for my aching hip, for my life in general, for the days when I did not attend to my depression, I leave you with The Band.

Good night.
 sch