Something that I’ve been doing recently is trying to meditate every day. I’ve been wanting to try it ever since I’d seen Sam Harris mention it as a kind of “secular spirituality” (my words). From what I’ve learned and experienced so far, it is a good compliment to everything else I’ve been practicing to address chronic and mental illness (somatic experiencing/trauma/whatever you want to call it).

I use an app called Insight Timer that has guided meditations. The ones I try to find are not so much what I’d (perhaps harshly) consider “woo woo” (e.g. ‘feeling the energy of the earth’) but instead are more about connecting with the present moment. (My favorites: Joseph Goldstein, Tara Branch, The Easier Softer Way Meditation, and Jason Murphy Pedulla.)

That’s how I’d define mindfulness: connecting with the present moment in one’s body. Because I’m almost constantly thinking -which is fine because that’s how the brain work- I’m always outside of the present moment in our body. I’m thinking about the past or the future, or I’m judging something about the present. All of this is taking my attention away from the present moment -not “this period of 10 minutes for meditation”, the exact present moment in which my body is having sensations and emotions come and go, ebb and flow. Thought is fine; it’s part of what makes life so interesting and I’d scarcely get anything done without it. But our brains can do more than just thinking and as with most things, there’s a balance to be had.

“Socially awkward” makes my mind jump to saying something at an inappropriate time, or speaking or laughing too loudly, or being unaware of personal space boundaries. While I constantly worry about being seen (or exposed) as that person, the majority of me being “socially awkward” mostly comes from the exact opposite.

For a very long time, I would say nothing in social situations even when being directly addressed. My brain just didn’t come up with what the response should be, even if the situation called for a simple “Thanks”. After a lot of practice (with cashiers, mostly), I taught myself to respond with a list of phrases for situations, like those little kids books that plays a sound when you press a button when the story tells you to.

One of the more damning symptoms that have emerged since this whole chronic illness thing kicked off is how horribly my memory has been effected. For a while it was so bad that it felt like I could hardly function; you’d ask me a question and I’d just sit there in silence, not because of an “on the tip of my tongue” feeling but because I my brain wasn’t giving me the words for the thought I wanted to express. It feels like trying to use the web when the internet is down. The wheel just keeps spinning but the page never loads.

It always reminds me of the movie Memento where the lead character can no longer form long-term memories and thus has to “remember” things by taking polaroid photographs. I’m not quite that bad, but ever since the chronic illness really started getting serious, I’ve quite literally felt like I can’t remember past a certain point in the past. It felt like my brain suddenly gated them off and wouldn’t pull up anything; childhood memories, events, dates, and most importantly, myself.

I’m not a good pet owner. I’m not one of those horrible people who keep their dog chained up outside in horrid conditions or try to force their cat to eat vegan, but recently, after spending some time with people who know much more about dogs and cats, I’ve been made aware of how mistaken my view of what a “pet” really is.

It’s human tendency to see things as being like us. We mistake a shadow in our bedroom for a person, we see a face on Mars, and we understand dogs and cats to just be small, stupid, furry people. At the same time, we also tend to see them (and all animals, really) as appliances, as things that we obtained for a purpose. In reality what we have is a life: a complex nervous system with pattern-based learning and reward systems, fully capable of being effected by trauma.

I have a constant temptation with this blog to post things that I see online that I can relate to. There’s no shortage of them, especially on Tumblr; graphics and images of things that make me go “this expresses how I feel perfectly!”

They can be both negative and positive. There are images of encouragement of how things could be (many of which I find to be shallow and cliche), but there are also the depressing ones that describe how things are now. For some reason the negative ones feel better, I guess because it’s more cathartic, and I won’t deny to having a folder of them saved to my PC. But even though I have nights were I seek the comfort of seeing such images, I don’t think they’re actually helpful, and that’s what I want this blog to be.

Every time I try to describe my lack of motivation to other people, it’s amazing how I always see the same look of a lack of understanding. They just have a hard time comprehending not having the drive to do critical things. And I can’t say I understand it fully either. All I know is that something just isn’t there. It’s not a case of not wanting to go to work on a Monday, it’s having no desire or drive to brush your teeth, or eat, or even take your daily meds, even though you understand that there will be consequences. It’s a bit like hunger, in that you don’t decide to be hungry, you check what your body is telling you. You don’t decide to have a base level of motivation, you just have it. Or you don’t.

It’s crazy because if you asked me “What’s the one thing that defines your life up to this point?”, my answer -since I was about 16- would be “depression”. And yet I still, roughly 10 years later, have some feeling of doubt about actually saying that I have “depression”.

I think that part of it is that the words are used far more loosely than, say, physical illnesses. It’s not uncommon for people to say “I’m feeling depressed this week” or “I’ve been feeling anxious lately”. That’s fine because it’s just how language is, but I would definitely say there’s a difference between that and living with depression or anxiety.

The hope when starting this tumblr is that, in some way, it would help me. One way is that I find that the process of writing down a problem causes me to think about it in ways I perhaps wouldn’t have.

Like I’ve realized recently that a lot of my struggle comes from me trying to please the “Stranger”; this hypothetical onlooker who will judge me or my actions.

I’ve always thought that this was a good thing, because it makes one very careful of what one believes. When you start to accept something, the Stranger chimes in, purposefully trying to find a way that what I’m accepting is completely wrong. The end effect is that I feel as though I’m able to view most things from more than one point of view. Perhaps not all of them, but at least multiple. This does, however, severely limit what I believe concretely; nearly everything is up for debate with the Stranger.

A common theme on Tumblr (where this block originally started) is to “glorify” mental illness; to make it something that is “weird” and thus is desirable, a way to be considered unique in society, perhaps. They self-diagnose and create blogs dedicated (in partial or full) to their depression and mental illnesses, treating it like a fandom for some TV show instead of a true illness.

A while ago I watched a special by comedian Mike Birbiglia where he talks about his blog “My Secret Public Journal” which his therapist told him to start to “put it on paper” for things in his life that bothered him. That’s basically what this blog is, though probably going to be way less funny.

Instead of stories about sleepwalking and whatnot, I’ll be talking more about depression, anxiety, and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). That might not sound like the most attractive thing to read, but that’s why this is a Journey to the Center of Self. It’s more or less a voyage of self discovery, with my thoughts on what defines me (which, at the moment, is those three things more than anything else).

You can make of it what you will. I’m not writing to define how things are for everyone nor am I trying to tell people how to get better. I’ll be sharing various treatments like Somatic Experiencing and EMDR and other (attempted) remedies for CFS, but a month later I may make a post saying I was wrong. It’s a journey and I’ve always had a poor sense of direction.

It’s only recently I’ve realized just how menacing the combination of Depression and Chronic Fatigue is for me.

Chronic Fatigue, I think, is always difficult. But I think that maybe people with a greater drive might be able to fight through it more. Much of the attempted remedies I’ve done require a ton of motivation with the biggest one being massive diet changes. Trying to go through the process of researching, then planning, then grocery shopping, then preparing food on a regular basis (likely every day) while having no energy and/or losing tons of time to sleep is just plain miserable. And simultaneously, you’re constantly looking for other possible remedies, going to doctors, taking new supplements, trying to exercise regularly, and pushing yourself physically to get all it done. Anybody’s endurance would be tested, I think.

But imagine throwing in depression, which has a primary symptom being “loss of interest/motivation”. It’s no wonder I’ve failed time and again when trying to follow the remedies. It goes from me having stints where I am not motivated enough to take my antidepressants (very dangerous) to now trying to take more medicine daily, sometimes several times a day. From sometimes skipping meals just because I don’t feel motivated enough to eat to trying to cook daily with new foreign ingredients.

I think the combination is nasty regardless of which came first, but for me, I had depression first, and while I felt limited in many ways, I at least felt like I had some mobility. It’s like I was a roommate with a complete slob, but I at least had a car. Then Chronic Fatigue came along and the car broke down, and now I’m stuck with the slob all the time, and I have absolutely no idea how to fix the car.

I like to describe depression as being forced to hang out with someone you hate, only that someone is yourself. The type of person that, when you see them, you tense up a sigh and whenever they talk, you inwardly cringe.