Offline for several hours, I panic and fear all my friends will think I’m
dead. Finally, I am connected. I have 24 new messages in my inbox. All of
them are spam. Way to stroke the old ego, eh? Strange to think that even
just a year or two ago I was completely out of touch with everyone and
didn’t care. I had my family and other than that, my friends were books
and indie movies and Elvis Costello CDs. Going to the farmers market and
buying fresh tomatoes qualified as an “event.” Window shopping at the mall
was a major outing. A box of donuts on a Sunday morning heralded a
celebration. I was sooo fucking boring. Not that there’s anything wrong
with that. There are plenty of good things to be said about “voluntary
simplicity” and I love my family to pieces. But I was not happy.
Smart,creative people with moderate depressive tendencies are not well
advised to hole up and forsake the outside universe. I forgot I could be
worthwhile at all. I hadn’t written anything in years and I was supposedly
such a great writer (according to the people I went to high school with
anyway, some of whom didn’t even like me that much and still said it…) I
hadn’t sung anywhere but in my car in over a decade. The closest I’d come
to “going out with friends” in years had been a rather disappointing
venture to a tacky comedy club with one of my Colorado mommy friends and a
chainsmoking, cackling, retired friend of her mother. The show consisted
of a Hispanic comedian making ethnic jokes and a female comedian making
“men sure are stupid” jokes. But I digress. My point is that I’m happy to
have gotten to the point where an empty inbox is something unusual. I’m so
glad to havemy old friends back and a few new ones and the guts to give
myself a shot at being alive again on some level. I love my girls more
than anything in the world, but I can see them benefitting from a mommy
with opinions and friends and outside interests. I take them out more
often than I used to. I’m more creative with them than I used to be. I
feel so much more capable than I did not long ago at all. And so, to my
friends old and new I say a long overdue “thank you” and also I offer an
apology for the times I’ve bugged the living crap out of some of you
because I was using my newly formed and/or newly recemented friendships as
a form of social prozac. And I vow to try and network a bit more until
someday I am at the point where I actually dread looking in my inbox
because there’s too much correspondence awaiting me. Depression is
invasive and stultifying and sometimes the best way to overcome it isn’t
pills and therapy but flat out getting the hell out of the house and doing
something slightly different for a while. And I swear to you all I will
grow less annoying with time 🙂
Corbid the still slightly dull