For anyone that only has contact with me through this blog: I'm still not dead. That reassurance is extremely late, but I figure I should at least write something. Spoiler for the rest of the trip: I had a nice time recovering in Indiana, had a few more adventures, and made it to the east coast. I rode a train full of loud babies back to Urbana and am now living there, trying to figure out what's next.
I took notes on all the days that I didn't post, but I haven't been able to turn them into blog posts yet. I'm still planning on doing that, and soon, but I think I need to write about anxiety first. I suppose this is some of the personal detail that I originally thought I might include.
For whatever reason, I fell into a minor but extended depressive episode that started as far back as mid-Kansas and lasted most of the rest of this trip. It was nothing major, especially compared to earlier times in my life, and there were certainly no significant negative events that triggered it. Even unemployed, my life situation is much more comfortable than that of many people I know, thanks to savings and a lack of external pressure. But that's the problem with depression: it's not logical. Maybe it happened because I was marinating my brain in distress chemicals from the knee pain, maybe I developed some unhealthy thought patterns, maybe I have poor genetic wiring, or maybe it was a combination of all those things or more. Whatever the cause, these technical issues in my own head made it difficult to fully engage with the rest of the trip how I would have liked, and it became especially difficult to interact with other people. Instead, I focused on anxiety about weather, about covering ground, about ways I should be atoning for embarrassing actions, about emails I should be writing, about retirement savings and the growing hole in my previously-solid resume, about stalling my life while the rest of the world carries on, about being unable to perfectly control my emotions, about the lack of positive contributions I've made to the world, about lying to myself that I have value to contribute in the first place, and about anything else I could use to justify the lingering unhappiness resulting from all the thoughts above.
A lot of these ideas are still on my mind, and even while making progress on one topic, I'll get anxious about progress not being made on others. That anxiety triggers what I think of as meta-anxiety, a kind of self-hate for being anxious in the first place. Being distracted by unproductive self-hate does nothing to solve the problem, of course, which feels pretty pathetic compared to the good that could be done with the resources I have. That triggers more self-hate, which feels bad, so I avoid it by distracting myself with easy, immersive things like games, beer, or fantasies about things that could be true if I hadn't spent my time fantasizing about things that could be true. Those do nothing to solve the issue, which means I've wasted time sucking my thumb, which of course feels worse. Just snap out of it, right? But if I'm telling myself that, I must not have "snapped out" yet, which means I have one more failure to hate myself for. It goes on from there, spiraling downward until I go to sleep and my neurochemicals restore some kind of temporary balance. That's the difference between my current situation and real depression: I can still go to sleep and reset. Those self-hate thought patterns haven't been worn in thoroughly enough to become my default, even if I can tell that they're primed from past episodes.
With that out there, I feel much more hopeful about finishing the blog and moving on to more useful tasks. Acknowledging a depressive or anxious episode as a genuine "thing that happened" helps it to feel real, which validates my feelings and makes it easier to forgive myself for succumbing to it.
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