Monday, Apr. 26, 2004 - 10:31 p.m.
What I remember when my self esteem is low:
- The time in concert choir when I snapped at a girl next to me for politely correcting a note I was singing wrong � I told her everyone else was wrong, not me.
- Timothy, the mouse my cat brought into my room when I was ten -- I secretly nursed him back to health and was going to set him free but decided to keep him for one more day and so hid him in a box on the back porch and came home to find him dead.
- My undergraduate honors thesis defense, at which my committee told me I looked unprofessional and hadn�t done much research.
- The time I convinced my brother to train for a backpacking trip and made him put on a backpack full of rocks and run until he cried.
- The week my best friend was released from a mental institution for the third time and I didn�t answer her phone calls. I moved to Alaska the next week.
- The first day of eighth grade, when I stepped off the bus in front of Bell Junior High and walked past my friend Mandy without answering her greeting because I had decided she didn�t fit in with my plans to be cool that year.
- The three months following a road trip with C when I stopped talking to him because I�d been freaked out by being so close to him.
- That I haven�t called Mary but don�t feel like calling anybody.
L asks �Why are you sad? Why don�t you like yourself today?� But it�s not like that. There�s no reason, or there�s every reason. It�s raining�I was feeling shy yesterday but we played a show and so I had to talk to a bunch of people�a friend very innocently mentioned that I�d been off-key on a few of the backing vocal parts�I drank too much Saturday�I will be unemployed in a week and a half. But those things don�t cause the ickiness. The ickiness just descends. It feeds on whatever it can find, but it is caused by nothing outside of me. It�s not cured externally, either: hearing nice things about myself or accomplishing something good never makes it go away. It just stays for a while and then dries up.
If it�s depression, it�s a very mild and specific form: apart from some physical dejection it ever only manifests itself as bad self esteem. I just don�t like myself for a while, and then I do again.
So that showed up today and murgled around all through a productive day at work, a walk in the rain, a really good quesadilla, an Edward Gorey book, and the ingenious system I rigged up to direct the water from my leaky ceiling into the kitchen sink. See? Whatever brain chemicals are responsible here have no idea what�s going on in the real world.