So, I find myself awake at night, all night. Nighttime is a lonely time, lonelier than usual even in a lonely life like mine. Something about the silence and the dark, it becomes so much clearer how alone you really are. I’m sick of it. Stringing an existence together from sitcom reruns and pointless errands I give myself to keep busy. Having a job won’t change much of course, but it would at least be an improvement. I really don’t feel like I belong in the here and now. I feel whatever this is slowly slipping away from my grasp. I’m scared, and there’s no one to turn to.

If you don’t believe me, try the following: Every day when you wake up, place a few crumbs, or the crust from a slice of bread, on your window sill outside. You might not see the results for a week or two, but you can be certain someone or something is noticing. Pretty soon you’ll have some eager birds waiting patiently for you to wake up at the same time each morning. If you oversleep, and I can vouch for this, they’ll see to it that you get out of bed with a song, or even tapping on the window with a beak. It’s cheaper and more reliable than an alarm clock.

I’ve had the same Starling visit me at the same time, every day, for over a year now. And somehow, tomorrow morning, he’ll show up an hour later to compensate for the time change. I have no clue how he knows this but he’s done so twice already, last Fall and Spring both.

See, when you’re depressed, you have something called a “flat affect.” This means you have no highs or lows in your life. So while depression suggests someone is actually continually very sad, it’s really the lack of any real strong feelings or motivations at all. There’s a disconnect somewhere between your mind and your body. I realize, because of this “flatness” that I have no real passions anymore, nothing really drives me, aside from fear, and that’s only marginal. Because I have no passions, it’s almost impossible to get a job that isn’t very low paying and mindless. Employers love passion, they throw that word around like they really knew what it meant. They don’t, they simply understand that studies and facts and figures have proven that if they ask their employees to have “passion” they tend to get better results from them.

In any event, this flat affect is a great dampening force on my life. Like wearing cement boots, you can get around like everyone else, but you’re a lot slower, and it’s a lot harder, requires a great deal more concentration and effort. And I realize just now, as I am tasked with writing just a few meager samples of work, which I have not been able to do, that these inabilities are going to hold me down at this level forever. I’ve already fallen behind all my friends and contemporaries. I am angry, I am bitter, I am a loser. And it’s just getting worse with every passing day. And I am frightened.

Is doing nothing the new black? New York Magazine says yes, devoting paper and ink that cost actual money to tell you, the reader, how two painfully average girls have turned the world on its side, by doing little more than retaining their corporeal form.

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/44495/

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