I Used To Have Thoughts
It's funny, the last time I posted anything on this blog was about the time I started Prozac. Are those correlated? I hypothesize the answer is yes.
I used to have thoughts. Or, rather, I used to be held captive by my thoughts. They would cycle, marinate, permeate, and cycle again. On the one hand, they became very fleshed out. I knew what I thought of practically everything because I had turned over any given thought and examined it from every angle imaginable a countless number of times. I would plan the future - not in the abstract or in a sort of outline, but intricately down to the last detail. I would plan conversations, what they were likely to say, how I'd respond, how I'd feel, and, if necessary, how I'd mask what I feel in my response. I would plan my route to work, despite it never changing. I would plan exactly what I'd do when I got off, and a break from that expected routine would swing my mood wildly. I was able to master those moods after a while, but only just. They still lay right under the surface, boiling, until such time as my grip loosened.
On the other hand, I was anxious all the time. And massively depressed.
I was diagnosed with clinical depression in my collegiate years. Hard to believe that's ten years ago now. When I look back I can say I honestly did believe the diagnosis to be true at the time, I just also thought it someone irrelevant. It was an explanation at best, an official certification of my own brokenness, but it wasn't a sickness worth pursuing treatment for. It was confirmation. No more, no less.
In retrospect that's an incredibly stupid thing for me to have thought, but hey, depression brains are weird. I've not really mourned the loss of time or the life I could've had if I had gone through with therapy and medication before, and to be honest I don't really feel the need to do so. But I do sometimes wonder what would have been different. Would I be here? Would I have met my wife?
Would I know how to think?
Because one weird thing I've learned since finding inner silence (I won't say inner peace as it's not quite that lofty) is that I never actually learned how to think properly. I only ever knew how to dwell, how to spiral. Now thoughts are present but fleeting, wafting through as butterflies thrown to and fro by the wind. I don't know how to grab them, how to meditate on them. Hell, I don't even know how to determine which are worth reaching for, much less holding on to. This isn't a complaint, to be clear, more an observation - an attempt to grab a thought and analyze it with a healthier mind. It's an odd place to be, but an interesting one.
So maybe that's what I'll try to make this blog into going forward, at least for a bit. A place where I try to grab onto my thoughts. But then I've said so many blogs are going to be so many things over the years and never stuck to any of it. But hey, I'm medicated now. Maybe this time will be different.