Bored, tired, depressed

I passed the university test, and don’t know if this is just the aftermath of weeks of intense studying, or just the natural order of things for me but, as I could expect, my interest toward this blogging issue is inexorably dropped to the point now I feel like forcing myself to write, instead of writing because I want to. Generally, I feel tired, bored and unmotivated most of the time, with occasional bouts of depression.

So my guitar practicing routine is no more a practicing routine, and I just play random notes on the instrument for an hour or so until I get tired of that and stop, while my interest for fishing (one I thought I’d never lose) oscillates between obsession and indifference pretty quickly.

So I may have guessed right when I said my ability to get bored is growing with time, and I really don’t know what to do with that. Probably I’ll just start by asking my therapist what she thinks about this.

If things don’t get better, it’s unlikely for another post to follow. I’m not going to force myself writing here, and nobody is forcing me to do that, so there’s no reason for writing if I don’t feel like I want to.

Therapy: is this thing working? (part 2)

I’m mostly satisfied with today’s therapy session. As I thought, the psychologist seems to be taking a more holistic approach than mine, as she tends to speak more about self-consciousness and well-being than specific problems. It’s not a bad perspective, given the way multiple issues interact to create situations specific to each individual, classifying people by means of specific disorders is questionable at least.

As promised, I prepared some questions for her, and here’s what I can remember about the answers:

Q: What are we doing now? Speaking? Analysis? Therapy?
A: Analysis AND therapy. She still think of not knowing enough about me, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working on my issues.

Q: What are we working on? How long might it take? Is there something we can’t tackle with this therapy?
A: We are working on improving my general well being by tackling undesired beliefs and improving my self-awareness when it comes to feelings and how I (do not) express them. She doesn’t like to do very long therapies, but can’t say about how much it’ll take, not more than 3 years for sure she said (Ouch!). She’s not against medication, but we agreed over the fact that medication is for the symptoms, it doesn’t solve problems, nor teach you how to live without the symptoms. Then she said my physical and mental problems are all symptoms of psychological suffering, but we could make some memory and attention tests in a future sessions if I felt like that would somewhat satisfy my worries, and I readily accepted. I’m confident I’ll perform awfully on those tests.

Q: It looks like my drive to get better psychologically, as for most other things I do, is more a product of my worries about other’s opinions of me and feelings of inferiority instead of a genuine desire to have a better and fuller life. I suppose we’ll work about these feelings too, but if they are my main drive while doing things, what could happen if I lose this drive?
A: Since I’m used to exploit such feelings to fight apathy and depression, it’s normal to be scared of change. In any case, she’s not going to turn me into a cold, unconcerned and “don’t give a fuck about anyone” dude. We’ll work on reducing my current exaggerated worries, without eradicating it all.

After the Q&A, we talked a bit about how I (do not) interact with my family members, even when my dad is a complete asshole to my mother. But we agreed how my mother is mature enough to react to the verbal “abuse”, so it’s not the role of a son to interfere with what may be their established communication “standards”. What I may do is to eventually express my disappointment for their childish behavior, and not just go to my room as I always did since I was I child.

Finally we talked about my Bad night, and how my depression may be linked to memories of better times (nostalgia) and how my pessimistic view of the future makes them very unpleasant, reinforcing my negative thinking. I still think boredom plays a significant factor here, but she has nothing to say every time I mention it, probably because there’s no way to explain it in purely psychological arguments. We’ll see, if I fail the memory and attention tests like I expect to, boredom will surely add weight to a diagnosis of some kind of attention deficit disorder.

As a side note, I’ll soon receive those 6000$ from my car insurance, so I’m definitely going to make some more examinations to rule out any possibility of a non-mental illness.

Therapy prep: is this thing working?

I’m having another psychotherapy session soon, thought I don’t even know if I should call it like that, maybe it’s just counseling. Let’s just call it “therapy” then. Should I ask Ms. psychologist about that?

I have lots to ask in fact, because this time I plan to dictate my own agenda to the psychologist, and I need to be prepared.

First of all, I’m tired of living with my problems: doing things I don’t like to do (almost everything) takes just too much time and energy, and the few things I like to do get boring in no time. That not being enough of a hassle, when I like something it obsesses me so much that doing anything else becomes even more difficult and straining.
And this talk therapy has taken me nowhere in getting better, in fact knowing better my problems just makes me feel more and more the need to get rid of them, so I can’t get out of my mind the urge of doing something actually useful – maybe only temporarily – until we can find a way to address my problems through “talking”.

It’s not that I don’t trust the psychologist, I just don’t understand how this therapy should work, and I need to know how things work to put trust in them. But most of all, I need to know if this is actually therapy or just talk, if she’s still trying to know me and my problems, or if we’re already working on my problems. I think that after 8 hours or more of talk strictly focused on me, she should know me pretty well, I really don’t have much new to say anymore.

So if we are to be working on my problems, I’ll say her that I’d prefer a problem-centric approach, so if she says me that some problems can be addressed while others can’t, I’ll look at alternative strategies to deal with the ones she can’t address. And with a problem-centric attitude it’ll be easier to give at least a rough estimate of the time it’ll take to effectively get better. Because if I can’t get better for the time I graduate, the risk of me getting into alcohol or drugs to make a daily job tolerable is high, and suicide is not totally improbable too.

Whatever she says, I’m going to change GP (my current one sucks) and talk to him about both my mental and physical problems, discussing a possible hormonal imbalance as the origin of everything. I’m still convinced of that – even if my blood thyroid hormone levels are normal – because recently it came back to my mind how I was hit in my balls when I was around 8, and I’ve never been checked out, even though I occasionally feel a bit of pain in one of them. Additionally, I still lack a lot of facial and body hair a man at my age should have, as they’re still growing (very) slowly. In general, my body developed a lot more slowly in comparison to the average boy, my mustaches started to grow when I was 22, for example. So blaming hormones for that is not that weird isn’t? Given my thyroid hormones are fine, and given my balls precedents, I think Hypogonadism might be a serious possibility.

And unlike what I did in the past, giving up after a few negative examinations (mostly because my parents looked at me like I was some sort of attention-seeking hypochondriac), if the hormone theory fails to deliver, I’ll look into something else, because now money aren’t much of a problem! I won’t feel guilty toward my parents for spending money in examinations, now that I’ll probably receive 6000$ as compensation from the car insurance. Who may have thought car accidents could be so profitable?

So right now I’m hopeful, and I wish at least some of my expectations will be met, because right now hope is one of the few things keeping me alive.

Flashback: May 9 to 12, 2008

May 9: The tendency to think about Lucy has faded, but when it happens, I can clearly feel the depression coming, so I’m not going to contact her. But I don’t want to be rude, so I’ll keep behaving normally, should she contact me.

May 10: I’ve begun playing World of Warcraft in a private server, but it’s not the same thing as the original… Still, given my current level of depression, this castrated and low-populated version should be enough for now.

Lucy contacted me in the afternoon, and it wasn’t hard to behave normally, to the point I was able to make jokes and have some honest laughs. But soon after the conversation ended, I seemed to notice a small worsening in my mood so I readily drank some beer at dinner, in one of the rare days my mom drink that instead of wine (practically when we eat pizza). So alcohol could be one of my last-resort aids in coping with my problems until I’ll feel the real need to see a psychiatrist.

Finally, tonight my mind wandered again about those chats I’ve read some days ago (good lord tell me why I’ve done that!), and this still makes me feel depressed. I’ll forget everything soon, I hope, as it has already happened in the past.

May 12: In the morning I was stressed, mainly because I was too obsessed with WoW. In the afternoon I had a lesson to follow so I had to took the train, but Lucy didn’t took that one this time, don’t know if this was a bad or a good thing. Still, during the lesson I got bored and I thought again about her… This is still depressing for me, but it looks like these thoughts are easier to control now.

“I still cannot explain clearly why I was depressed at the time, everytime I think of having a clue, my theories are torn to pieces by seemingly random mood swings. My best guess is based on what seemed to be the trigger: reading my old chats with Lucy. This episode apparently brought up mixed feelings of nostalgia and inferiority, because at the time of those chats our relationship was still fresh and stimulating, and she was single too, so I may have failed in catching any sign of interest from her, if there were any. Now I’m pretty sure how I’ve never been interested in romantic relationships and probably I never will, so I will hardly get depressed again for a girl.”

One hour-long attention span

Nothing relevant happened today, did some more studying, and lost almost a hundred hair, yeah! Like I have so many of them I could sell them to wig makers… It’s so depressing and frustrating, nothing seem to get better in my life, perhaps excluding my university performance, and even if I don’t care for the most part about my life being a complete failure, I have already enough health concerns to think of, I don’t really need other new shit to worry about.

So I started taking some food supplements and applying some kind of lotion in the hope of stopping this sudden hair loss. I might just believe those who say my problems are all psychosomatic, but even if they are what can I do? Doing what I like instead of doing what people expect me to do never helped with my sleep, psoriasis or digestion, so why should it help with hair loss? If it is really situational depression, then the only way I can see to exit this situation is to kill myself, because the situation is the way life works in this fucking society.

But this isn’t what I meant to write tonight, I’m going to analyze in some detail how I live social situations with my friends from a specific point of view: tonight we went out to eat and drink something, and for the first hour or so I was more or less comfortable, the topics of conversation were related to video games or computer science so it was not impossible for me to say something, even if it they were mostly remarks. But then my ability to concentrate started to fade, and I really was having a hard time following the conversations, especially since I wasn’t much interested about the usual WoW-related discussions between my two friends. Unfortunately, my friends sometimes expected me to participate in the conversation and actually understand what they said, so I had to make some serious efforts to follow through their chat.

I don’t know if this drop in my ability to concentrate was somewhat related to the pub getting more crowded, but I don’t think so, I wasn’t much anxious, probably because there were no girls in the near surroundings. What I can say for sure is that one hour is a limit I encounter often while following university lessons, doing psychotherapy or playing guitar, after that hour it looks like I suddenly get bored and need to do something else. Weird, indeed, but the pattern suggests how this ease of boredom is a primary factor that undermines most of my daily activities, and solving that will probably lead me a long way in improving my life. Now if only I could know what’s the cause… I’m not even confident an average psychiatrist will have a clue, and by the way, I fear them. I’m sure they’ll instantly try to medicate me, but I’m not going to take medication until I’ll be fucking sure I really need it, I’m not going to ruin my life even more by becoming addicted to some drug.

My life is a loop

Beside having a generally low self-esteem and self-confidence, I consider myself a good programmer. I’ve spent at least 3 years programming pretty much everyday, constantly challenging myself at writing simpler, more manageable and extensible code. And I’ve succeeded, until I got bored. Now I code only for university projects (because I’m forced to).

Giving a proof of my coding skills is no simple task, especially if I want to stay anonymous. But I’ll think about how to do that when I will not be forcing myself to study 8 hours per day for an insanely difficult numerical analysis exam. (Yeah, I’m bored with coding and I study computer science, so there’s a 99% chance I’ll be a programmer for the rest of my life. Indeed a good reason to be depressed, but it’s not the only one: it’ll be too easy!)

So, what’s the point of such exceptional claims about my coding skills? Well, because I’ve condensed as much I could remember about my life in a simple loop:

1. I’d like to spend my days playing video games (World of Warcraft, I miss you so much…) and watching TV series, cartoons or anime, and barely doing anything else. But I feel guilty about doing that when my parents are making sacrifices to allow me to study while I’m doing anything in my power to avoid any sort of job. It’s no surprise I’ve realized how spending my life as a Hikikomori will be hardly, if ever accepted by society or by my family. Given I can’t see how I could get rid of that feeling of guilt, it would not be a bad idea to look for some way to improve my perspective about the future.
2. This could be a constructive activity (which must not be boring) that may actually develop into some kind of job, and solve the money problem (yeah, I thought about crime, but it’s not that easy if you don’t have a natural inclination for it).Given I’m very curios and always looking for new stuff to try, it is almost automatic I’ll stumble upon such activities.
3. Get obsessed with the activity I thought might be my life goal, work on it as much as I can, focus my thoughts on it and forget about anything else, and then…
4. Get bored when what was new and exciting becomes part of the daily routine, when too much work is required to accomplish some improvement and when my goal of making money with that activity is so obviously far away to make it not even noticeable with a Hubble telescope.
5. Get depressed for failing in trying to make my life better, or forget about that and goto (2).

So I tend to get obsessed easily, and this is my primary way to cope with depression. My obsession may be either a trait of Asperger’s syndrome or Obsessive–compulsive personality disorder, combined with some kind of Inferiority complex and a need to compensate for that . Unfortunately, I don’t learn much from my obsessions because of my tendency to also get bored easily and lose attention, while my memory fails as much as a ruined, amnesic 50 years old floppy disc with Alzheimer’s. Still I prefer to engage in more or less useless obsessions than face boredom, depression or guilt.