Unnumbered Ways of Dream

2005-02-07 at 10:55 p.m.

I was feeling rather depressed before, but am now feeling somewhat better. For some reason this feeling better is linked to filling out a references form for that job agency I'm going to on Thursday. Why this should make me feel better I don't know. I am somewhat embarassed to realise that I cannot give five work references to them (I've only had two real jobs, and the good people at Labour Party HQ have all gone off to other jobs/North Shields now so I can't get references). So I've wound up using one real reference, one MP that I did a little bit of work experience with in 97, my university director of studies and an old friend of my dad's. Still they all know me quite well.

Life is unutterably boring, as ever. Today I sat and read a Cadfael mystery, which I'd read before and therefore knew whodunnit already. But I cannot read Exquisite Corpse while I am eating, it just doesn't seem right.

I was meaning to finish writing up my physics practical but have come to the sad realisation that I cannot do so, as I did not understand what the hell I was doing at the time, and have even less of a clue now. I have some very pretty graphs, but no way of knowing what should go on the axes (damn oscillascope or whatever it is called). Maybe I will find something on the internet.

I am still worried about these fits of depression though. I truly don't know whether this is normal, as everyone feels every now and again, or a sign that I should go back on the medication, inform my doctor and go back on the merry whirl of seeing people madder than I to explain "my feelings". As I have only just got to the stage where I can say to myself "I am well" and plan my life as though that little episode had not happened, to a stage where I can feel a sense of shock when I have to write "bipolar" on a form or otherwise define myself as ill, I really do not want to give up that sort of freedom. Of course there is a perilous sort of freedom in being ill itself - sympathy can be a drug and there is quite a liberation in not being entirely responsible for what you say or do. Plus it feeds into my natural fatalism, to just let everything slip, do nothing, do no work, just recede into myself until I can no longer see a way out, until I cannot remember what normal is like. But I don't want to go down that road again and while I get flashes of wanting it back, wanting to regain a sense of community and fellow-feeling that you can get by defining yourself as ill with others who are too, I should not feel such things. And I will not, if those flashes become more than mere flashes, more than a vague longing for "dark things" (which can be more easily assuaged by reading horror stories and bad poetry) then I will definitely go back on the meds, and deal with the consequences. Until then, I shall just have to stand against it - but brave words are easy when you're just typing them into the ether. I shall see.

Immortality
George William Russell

We must pass like smoke or live within the spirit's fire;
For we can no more than smoke unto the flame return
If our thought has changed to dream, our will unto desire,
As smoke we vanish though the fire may burn.

Lights of infinite pity star the grey dusk of our days:
Surely here is soul: with it we have eternal breath,
In the fire of love we live, or pass by many ways,
By unnumbered ways of dream to death.

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