Category Archive

Shit. Despite all the online soul-searching I’ve been doing this year… despite the fact half the comments on this post are from bloggers I’ve been reading in order to figure out what I want to do with my life (eg here and here) and all that jazz… why has it taken so long for me to find this…???

In order to jump-start passionate living again you might have to…

• Stop being an (unnecessarily) “responsible” person
• Quit projects that are no longer relevant
• Be happy with a less than permanently clean home

 In order to come alive, you might have to…

• Pursue an occupation that doesn’t put your insanely expensive degree to use
• Move back in with your parents
• Work a low-status, low-paying job in order to make time for your new endeavor
• Come to terms with your messy home
• Completely and utterly ignore your parent’s and friend’s expectations of you

If you really want to live passionately, you’ll need to consider leaving nearly everything you’re not passionate about.  To live passionately you may have to quit your job, sell your home, rent a small apartment, and live simply for a while.

To get off the treadmill you’ll have to realize that your high IQ does not obligate you to work 80-hour weeks in high-status professional career.  Your high IQ also doesn’t obligate you to get a Ph.D., or to put on any other golden handcuffs.

Fark. I might just not have to go back to fricking “Therapy” anymore.

And maybe I need to sit down for a while sometime soon and start thinking about WHY I need apply for the Rhodes Scholarship before I start filling out the application form that is sitting on my desk right now. (Although, the whole “push the pause button” thing was what I “learned” in “Therapy” last week so maybe I should keep going.)

In a way, I want to go to Oxford to study something that I’m passionate about, that probably definitely won’t lead me into a high-status, high-paying career… but on the other hand, do I really want to go through yet another cattle-show of an interview process and another two years of brain-straining graduate studies? What if the path I’m on right now is my life’s calling?

Gawd it would be nice to be less neurotic, wouldn’t it?

Aw!! I was rather hesitant about writing to Bossy, because she usually gives “no-holds-bared” responses that is “the sort of advice friends and relatives are too polite to give”. I was a bit worried I’d end up on “Fruitcake Friday” so in a way, I was, in a way, glad when her response to my email didn’t show up on those days.

Even her profile photo make her look kinda scary!

But then, when she did respond, she was really nice to me!!!

So were (most) of the commenters.  I had the urge to reply back to every single one, because they took the time to write to me, but there are over 100!! So I might write straight to Bossy with an update and thank everyone in that.

It’s amazing how nice I felt reading about not being the only one who’s gone through periods like this. Intellectually, I know I’m not that special, duh, but sometimes when you’re in the depths of a Doona Day, the intellectual part is so battered by the traumatized emo part that it retreats to higher ground, and it feels like it’s just you on the plain.

(Where did that wanky analogy come from? Shite, I need to get out more.)

I’ve emailed the link to the post to my psychologist so that I can talk about Bossy’s suggestions in more detail at my session tomorrow.

M read the post too, and we chatted about it over the weekend.  I wrote to her a while ago, the day after M and I were both in tears, and the situation has definitely calmed down since then, so that was probably a good thing — we were able to talk about it in a really rational way.

I’m really glad that I wrote to her, and started writing things in this blog.  It’s great to get things off my chest and as well as get feedback from an objective viewpoint.  Thank you Bossy, and Bossy Bloggers, I really appreciate your time.

It’s been a while since I posted.  Work has been busy, life has been busy, and I just generally have been trying to avoid thinking and talking about being depressed (my BFF calls it “cessing”, as in just sitting there in the cess pool of one’s mental crap not achieving anything), which is what I started this blog for.

Therapy’s been happening on and off, although for financial reasons it hasn’t been as regular as it should be. I’ve scribbled some points in my bedside notebook about a few therapy experiences and I’ll get around to posting them eventually.

However, I had an impetus to post today… because Bossy answered my question this morning.

I wrote to news.com.au’s “agony aunt” (essentially) months ago, and she finally got around to answering my quandary about feeling guilty for making my boyfriend deal with all the shit that’s involved with my depression. It’s long winded, so I won’t re-hash it; anyone who cares can read it themselves.

Bossy’s answer was, however, really amazing. She’s usually a bit snarky but she offered some great advice about “Changing my Narrative”.  I’m going to print her post and all the comments from her readers to digest at home tonight, but just wanted to mention that to check in here and do some dusting.

Ok, so, my brain is mush these days. I keep forgetting stuff I need to do so I write things I have to do in a bunch of different places on a billion scraps of paper, but never have the right bit of paper to remind me to do stuff when that thing could be done, and so I forget to do it and freak about it later, resulting in my having yet another thing to be upset about.

Le sigh.

So, I decided to get organised.  I was inspired by a bunch of blogs all talking about this ‘GTD‘ task management thing:

[Getting Things Done] rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks. What distinguishes GTD from other time- or action-management systems is the idea of grouping tasks by the context (defined as a place or set of available resources) in which they are to be performed.

There are lots of ways of GTD-ing, apparently, and I spent many a geeky blog-surfing hour looking at them.  The ideas that impressed me most included using a Moleskine (because I heart Moleskines) and regular old index cards (aka an Hipster PDA) but I ended up making up a system that melds a few of them together. 

I got a cute new pocket Moleskine, hacked [literally] out tabs in the pages, highlighted the tabs and edges and clipped a bunch of index cards to the front with a fat phat Mori Clip and then stuck in some planner pages from D*I*Y Planner.

“Uh. Wait. Why don’t you just use your diary?”, my friend A asked when she saw me with it, knowling full well that I already have one, which just happens to be a Molskine softcover weekly planner notebook.

Because it’s got extra features.  That I put in myself because I knew how I wanted to organise myself.  So nyah.

“I think you do more organising that actual doing,” M said to me when he saw it.

Yeah, he’s probably right.

Found this on BoingBoing:

Sidewalk Psychiatry encourages self-evaluation in transit by posing critical questions on the pavements of New York City. Now your daily ponderings and emotional problems can be prodded and treated on the go - and, best of all, it’s free of charge!

And who said graffiti wasn’t constructive? I’d save heaps in shrink bills if we had that kinda thing here.

Image: Candy Chang

The Black Dog Insitute is doing a study on how writing affects people’s mood:

Over the centuries, many people have been naturally drawn to writing about their life and their experiences, through journals, creative writing, and other forms of written expression.   Day to day life can be stressful as people strive for balance between family, friends and work.  We are interested in whether certain kinds of expressive writing can be helpful for people in managing their moods, stress levels and general health. The ‘Writing and Mood’ study is investigating whether particular ways of writing about our lives and our experiences can offer benefits for our moods, emotional and physical health.  We are also interested in whether people with certain personality styles find writing in certain ways to be more helpful than others.

I thought it was quite fortuitous that I found about this research the week I decided to start blogging in an attempt to work though my depression treatment. I’ve signed up for the study, and I’m looking forward to going through the exercises. It’ll probably help to do more structured writing tasks than me just blathering away about random stuff.

There was a pretty intense questionnaire that I had to do, which left me with some thought-fodder to work with later.  But it involved lots of thinking-about-myself and I think that’s enough for now.