Tag: mental health

On the election, mental health, and a matter of great historical import

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, PoliticsLeave a comment

I need all of you to know something very important: never once in my life, nay, never once in the entire history of the human race, have the Democrats lost a Presidential election the day after I got a Platinum trophy in a PS5 game. It hasn’t happened once.

That is as optimistic as I intend to get. I was burned hard by 2016, as many of you were, and I’m refusing to hope, like, at all right now. I intend to go into tomorrow night being surprised by even the slightest scrap of good news. I can’t afford hope right now. I just can’t.

Minerva Grey asked me this in comments yesterday:

I am curious and a bit afraid to ask because I don’t want to run the risk of being talked into it, but how is watching election returns not detrimental to mental health? It strikes me as doomscolling and hopescrolling combined, and the likelihood of a definitive answer in the wee hours of Wednesday morning (at least on the U.S. east coast) seems highly unlikely.

First, let me be as clear as I can that, while I will be either on my couch or at my desk tomorrow, likely scrolling and reloading on my phone, my iPad, and a laptop simultaneously while watching one or more cable stations, that is because I am insane, in a way entirely different from my actual diagnosed mental illness. I mainline the news during elections, presidential and midterm. I have been like this since I was a teenager, and at 48 I’m not interested in swapping out those particular stripes. I will likely be up very late tomorrow night, and when I finally go to bed it will only be so I can go to sleep and open the news right the hell back up. For me, not throwing myself into as many news sources as I possibly can during that time is what’s going to drive me crazy. I can’t ignore an event of this magnitude. If you can, and if that will help you get through the next 48 hours, I enthusiastically recommend you turn absolutely everything off and do whatever you need to do. I took personal days tomorrow and Wednesday because I know myself and I don’t need to be around my students while I’m stressing this hard. But not watching everything as it comes in is not going to help me.

And while I really don’t want to make any predictions, I actually do think we’re going to have an answer tomorrow night, if not perhaps in the wee hours of the morning, or at the very least we’re going to have some results that point rather conclusively at one answer rather than another. I think when I do go to bed I will have a pretty strong idea of who the winner is going to be, and while there will absolutely be all sorts of litigation afterward, I don’t think it’s going to go much of anywhere.

Of course, I know nothing about politics, and I am wrong all the time, so you don’t need to pay too much attention to that last paragraph, and if we lose via court shenanigans the thing that happens next, where I kill God and leave his body on the steps of the Supreme Court, has absolutely nothing to do with me having made a prediction that some heavenly being, I’m not specifying which one, decided to make cataclysmically wrong, probably out of pure spite.

(I’m taking some refuge in the fact that Joe Biden is President right now, and I’m reminded of something Andrew Jackson once said about another Chief Justice named John: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”)

In which I am a monkey stick man

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, video games2 Comments

I have done a good job of avoiding both doomscrolling and hopescrolling, because both of them are dangerous to my mental health. I have my lesson plans ready for tomorrow; I am off Tuesday and Wednesday, because no one deserves me, and hopefully the world is still here on Thursday for me to return to work, but I make no Goddamned guarantees, and if I am still a lunatic, I will stay home for a third day in a row.

I have been working on Platinuming Black Myth Wukong all day today and once I am done with that I have a lot of housecleaning, a bunch of books and Dragon Age: Veilguard on deck. I have plenty to keep me from thinking until it’s time to inject cable news into my veins for 24 hours straight on Tuesday night.

God help us all.

#REVIEW: The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters; Anthony Francis & Liz Olmstead, eds.

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

And now the third review in a row of a book I got sent as a free ARC, thus discharging all of my current review obligations. I feel kind of bad about how long it took me to get to this; I didn’t get a release date when they sent me the book, and I put it on a sort of mental “find out when this is coming out” list, only to discover it had already been released when they sent it to me. So this is not timely; my apologies.

This is a hell of a concept for an anthology, really; the back cover describes it as “a hopeful, empowering science fiction anthology filled with own-voices stories from neurodivergent creators”– in other words, stories about neurodivergent people encountering aliens, written by people who are themselves neurodivergent but presumably have not encountered aliens. I find the word “neurodiversiverse” immensely fun to say, and while anthologies aren’t always my thing, there are certainly some gems to be found in here. Cat Rambo’s Scary Monsters, Super Creeps is about a young woman with an anxiety disorder who discovers it gives her superpowers, and Ada Hoffman’s Music, Not Words is about an autistic girl who is the first contact for an alien race.

Most of the authors in the collection are people I’m not familiar with, though; I sort of jumped around rather than reading the collection straight through (how do people usually read anthologies? Is that weird?) and Lauren D. Fulter’s The Cow Test is probably the standout of the rest of the anthology, for me at least. It involves cows. It’s a short story, I’m not spoiling the details. 🙂 There are art pieces and poetry as well. Some of the aspects of neurodivergence that get explored here are really interesting; Jody Lynn Nye’s A Hint of Color is about synesthesia, for example, and Keiko O’Leary’s Close Encounter In the Public Bathroom is the only poem I’ve ever read that combines being about OCD and aliens.

No, seriously, this anthology made me recommend a poem. That’s worth picking up, right?

Can’t do it tonight

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Having a weird and kind of upsetting mental health day, so I’m taking the day off from the blog. Go do something fun.

Line forms to the left

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

… today was the kind of day where I’m in my room, just after school lets out, when another teacher comes in who needs to vent, and it quickly becomes clear that she doesn’t just need to vent, she needs to be talked off a ledge to some extent, and then while she’s venting, a second teacher comes in to vent, and then a few minutes later a third teacher comes in to vent, and they’re all venting at each other, and okay I kinda had a rough day too, and I don’t mind being everybody’s sounding board, but would y’all mind if I just … went home, and left y’all my room as your private venting space?

No? That would be rude? Well, shit, I guess I’m staying late tonight then.

Dammit.

On the plus side, there was, like, a bomb threat or something called in against all of our middle schools? So maybe everybody will stay home tomorrow.

In which I must be sick

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, video games2 Comments

I haven’t ordered the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC yet.

I … what?

I put something like 130 hours into Elden Ring. My Let’s Play series is a hundred and ten episodes long. I completed every mission I could find, got the Platinum trophy, all of the endings, everything. Played the absolute ever-loving shit out of that game and enjoyed Goddamn near every second of it.

And they’re releasing a lengthy DLC on the 21st, which by all indications is amazing. And I haven’t bought it, I don’t think I’m going to buy it, and I’m not excited about it. Right now I should be planning on staying up late on Thursday night so that I can get started immediately, just like I did with the actual game. I stayed up late to record the demo, for God’s sake.

What the hell is wrong with me?

There’s been a consistent theme in my life over the last several years of this creeping anhedonia, where I just … stop doing things I used to really love doing, or stop enjoying things I used to enjoy. I effectively don’t watch anything any longer. No movies, no TV, nothing streaming. There’s a new season of The Boys, which I’ve enjoyed. Not gonna watch it. The Acolyte? Not gonna watch it. I’m done with Star Wars. I’m done with Marvel. I’m only still buying comic books because my weekly trip to the comic shop is my only reliable in-person interaction with human beings I’m not related to or work with; I can’t stop shopping there unless I move or die. I could literally just come home and put them in a box and never read them and I wouldn’t miss a thing.

You’re never going to catch me complaining about reading, but it’s literally the only thing I do for fun. That’s weird, right? I read books and I write here. Dassit. Those are my hobbies. The honest truth is I think I could sell my PS5 and my Xbox and I wouldn’t miss them. And I’ve been a gamer my entire life.

I don’t fucking get it, and I don’t like it.

(And, to forestall this: Yes, I recognize that I’m basically describing a textbook case of clinical depression here. And while I’m on Effexor, that’s an anti-anxiety med, not an antidepressant, and I don’t think the two overlap much. But I have no other symptoms of depression, including the not exactly minor detail that I’m rarely actually feeling depressed. This is a mental health issue, don’t misunderstand me, but I feel like the most obvious answer is not the right one.)

Today was not better

On By Luther M. SilerIn life5 Comments

I tell you what, when you’re someone who tends to write his way through his issues, and you’re realizing that you don’t want to write about the shit that’s currently occupying your mind … that’s a problem.

Might be time for a new Sekrit Blog. Who knows.

EDIT: You know what? Cat picture:

Mental health note

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

I alluded the other day to realizing that you’ve grown tired of a long-term hobby, and it’s floated through my head several times recently (and, I think, was also suggested by someone here, although I’m not about to go looking through comments) that if I described what I’ve been like lately to a third party and especially if I didn’t tell them I was talking about myself, they’d describe me as clinically depressed. My anhedonia is through the roof lately; I don’t enjoy much of anything that I used to enjoy, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

I’ve effectively stopped watching all things that can be watched. I have a probably month-high stack of comic books sitting next to me that I bought and actively don’t want to read. I’m ready to clear all of my superhero memorabilia out of the house, and that’s a lot of stuff. Even video games have been sources of more stress than stress relief yesterday; I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate III pretty consistently for a few weeks and I had a moment the other day where I realized I was getting tired of it. I’m … maybe a third of the way in? And my backlog is like six or seven games deep right now. If I hadn’t already shut down the YouTube channel (which is another thing I used to enjoy that I’ve stopped doing) I’d have to at this point, just because I can’t fucking finish anything.

I’m still reading, but nothing’s set the world on fire recently. I don’t know what the shit I’m going to do if I lose interest in reading. It’s unimaginable. And, well, y’all can bear witness to the amount of time I’ve spent writing recently. The weird thing is that I don’t feel like I’m unhappy; I just … feel like I don’t really enjoy anything lately. A bunch of perfectly cromulent geek hobbies have been tossed aside in favor of the fucking NYT crossword and Spelling Bee and I refuse to be that person.

I’ve been on brain meds long enough that I’m used to sort of monitoring my mental status from a distance. I’ll get in touch with my doctor if I start feeling like this is getting genuinely alarming, or if my wife comes to me after reading this and says she’s noticed something different. It may just be that I’m finally aging out of my juvenile bullshit; who knows. I just … really miss liking things, that’s all, and I don’t feel like that’s something I do any longer.

Blech.