The Typing Cure

One of the things I miss about not being able to follow college basketball these days is that I don’t really know enough about the state of the game to understand Mark Titus’s columns at Grantland. They’re kind of sophomoric, but you know, a little of that is sometimes good, and I always enjoyed reading his stuff (I also enjoyed his book). But his columns are so heavily referential as to be basically incomprehensible unless you watch a lot of games.

I still follow him on Twitter, though, and was a little surprised when he tweeted out a link to a Reddit AMA where he talked about struggling with depression. This was the usual unsurprising sort of surprise– “Gosh, he seemed pretty cheerful, who knew he was depressed…” At some point, you’d think that I’d stop being surprised by that.

Anyway, I should say right up front that his post is a little problematic in one of the standard ways, namely that it’s an “I got over this by just trying harder” story. And these are not always helpful to people who are suffering; they even risk being counter-productive in making those who can’t just try harder feel worse. (And, to be fair to Titus, some things he tweeted later suggest that he is, in fact, aware of this problem…)

Posts like Titus’s, or Ethan Zuckerman’s last summer do serve a useful purpose for a lot of folks though. It’s really helpful to have an example of familiar problems greatly magnified, and that being aware of these problems is essential to solving them.

I mention Ethan’s post because that was a big one for me. I’ve been in a pretty rotten mood for the last few years, but reading Ethan’s post made me realize I was doing some of the same stuff he described. I’ve consistently been tired in a way all out of proportion to the amount of actual work I do– to the point of having some medical tests run after my physical last year– and I’ve had trouble working up any enthusiasm for stuff I generally really enjoy. It got considerably worse toward the end of last year.

I hasten to add that I was an international call away from the depths Titus talks about, but I recognize bits of his story as a greatly magnified version of my own problems. And I have the relative advantage that my bummed-out-ness is tied to a couple of very specific external issues– work and the new book– that will definitely get better. But I clearly recall the “You know, maybe I’ll just stay in bed all afternoon” thing from last December.

(Another big realization was that while I could barely make it through the day without a nap at home, when I got together with friends from college in November, and when I went to the Renaissance Weekend at the end of December, I had no trouble staying up late into the night socializing and drinking, and still getting up the next day. Back at work, though, zzzzzzzz… That contextuality really drove home that my general lassitude was largely a mental state.)

My own contribution to the not-as-helpful-as-it-might-be “just try harder” genre is, well, this blog. Specifically the Advent calendar stories thing. I started doing those without a lot of forethought (a sort of resigned “I guess I ought to do some publicity thing”), but having started, I was stubborn enough to force myself through, and that process was weirdly therapeutic. Not necessarily the stories themselves, though the challenge of writing those helped, but the routine of sitting down for an hour or so every morning, without fail, and writing something that’s mine. Which is why I’ve been blogging so much these last few months– I’ve fought pretty hard to keep this time blocked out for me, even when that complicates the process of juggling my other responsibilities, and that’s helped keep my dissatisfaction with those external issues at bay. And I’ve been a bit less tired, and more engaged recently as a result.

So, when I say that I blog because doing this helps keep me sane (as I sometimes do), I’m only half joking…