I wrote the other day about feeling depressed, about my sadness.
I didn’t write, though, about some of the symptoms of this depression, apart from my tears and my mournful aspect.
The first, the most prevalent, is when someone asks me how I’m doing, I don’t have an easy answer. “Fine,” “Good,” “Awesome,” “Really great!” – answers I’ve historically accessed quite easily – feel inauthentic and inaccessible in the current moment. But there’s not some other answer. “Shitty, thanks!” “Sad.” “Struggling.”
That feels, at least not often, like a response no one wants to get, I don’t want to give, as it opens up a conversation that most people asking how I’m doing didn’t really want to invite. So, that’s my most prominent symptom – a sort of confusion in the face of a very basic performance of social nicety.
Following a close second behind, though, is my essentially absent libido. I’ve written at times about my sense of deadness, about the ways that I use porn and women to enliven me, to wake me up. In the current moment, though, I’m barely even doing that. I just don’t have the energy or the appetite. I don’t crave physical intimacy. And the work associated with emotional intimacy feels like, well, like work.
So, in a sort of spirally, self-destructive way, I isolate a bit. A good friend invited me to dinner the other night at the last minute. Circumstances were such that I could perfectly well have gone. T was out of town. I didn’t have plans. I like my good friend. His family is lovely. An evening there would have been, no doubt, a good addition to my week. A good ending to my week.
And yet, without really thinking about it, I found myself first not responding to the invitation, and then, finally, sending my regrets.