Doubt

It's been a full week since I've written anything in novel or blog. That this unseemly lack of productivity was due more to physical than psychological inability does little for my morale, as the end result is the same: a glut of words in my brain, crowding my low-functioning synapses in their abruptly arrested stampede to escape.

They sit there, gibbering and cross-breeding in unnatural ways, their offspring happily sterile and sadly far less interesting than a liger. If I wasn't already feeling the effects of bitter cold January, dark and lingering and multiplicative with the sheer inelegance of a back rendered throbbingly sensitive by a wrongfully-directed sneeze—with an innocuous little SNEEZE, I caused myself this week-plus of posture-warping back pain ... a SNEEZE ... WTF?—then I should certainly be brought down by a clogged mental pipe of unraveling, unreleased thought.

As in most cases of depression, albethey minor and major, I found that stacking just a few less-than-ideal blocks upon one another resulted in a skyscraper of pointlessness. It wasn't just my back and midwinter that sucked, see, it was everything, and in the deep sea of craptasticness, I more-or-less willingly drowned, spending my heating-pad-relegated time in crushing despair, reiterating every little thing that is wrong in my life and berating myself for it, whether I was solely, mostly, minorly, or not at all responsible.

(Except for most of Saturday, where I was wrapped up in the warm thrall of The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, the latter two books in the series that begins with The Golden Compass ... THAT time was deliciously and quickly spent, and not even the odd angle at which I was forced to extrude myself from my chair could warp my spirit during those lovely, escapist hours. DAMN, but I liked those books quite a lot!)

Anyway, you get the idea, my back is a giant wuss and my brain is into self-mutilation, and the past week without writing was largely unpleasant, like mental constipation with cramps. Or something. The one productive—if I may glamorize it by calling it such—thing I did was get to the root of my "I hate my job" issue. I can't say it was so much of a cheery "A-HA!" experience as it was a gloomy "Ohhh" moment, but at least I finally got out of that particular thought-circle and onto the downward spiral away from it and on to the next one.

What happened was this: I was getting ready for another day on the job, and the dread welled up like whines out of the most recently ousted team on The Amazing Race and I paced around my usual depressive loop while barely retaining sour tears. But then it occurred to me to consider—to really, deeply ponder—the WHY of the loathing, rather than simply flop around in my sweltering unhappiness like a fish voluntarily leaping from water.

It seems like an obvious thing to do, I'm sure, but remember the frozen January mire in which I am trapped, please, and top that dreary, sludgy sundae off with the great, big, maraschino-cherry nastiness of stabbing, labor-esque back pain. Mmmm, tastes just like ipecac!

So I finally dug to the root of my problem, and oddly enough, it wasn't just corporateness and having to dress like a grown-up and bland, day-after-day routine and repetitiveness. No, past all that and the mourning of faded on-the-job friendships and the griping of all-executives-are-really-backstabbing-bastards, under the doom and gloom and a thousand other surface complaints, what I found a tiny little pea of a problem that was the root cause of my discomfort under the lovely padded mattresses of regular paychecks and my very own cubicle just down the hall from a double-doored bathroom in which people feel comfortable enough to talk on the phone whilst relieving themselves. And HUM! Yesterday I heard someone HUMMING while she pooped!

But I digress—in an obvious procrastinatorial attempt to escape this self-dictated confessional—so here it is, the truth: I don't like to work hard.

Not satisfied with being a mere lazy slob, I went from the main root to the first branches of it, and there I found that I don't like being challenged. I don't mean because of my many mental impairments either, but rather because of being assigned tasks that are outside or even just hanging off the edges of my warm little ring o' comfort. I don't like having to work hard because I don't like trying to rise to a challenge, and all of that is, of course, because I am afraid that I won't be able to, which means, of course, that I'm as full of the title of this entry as a political debate is full of calculation and blather.

Ouch. The realization of the depths of my lack of personal fortitude struck me like a 2x4 between the eyes, and left a mark in the shape of an "L."

It shouldn't be a surprise, and it's certainly not unique. I don't know anyone who doesn't have their doubts, often about even their own most well-documented strengths. Even an elite marathoner realizes s/he might not finish any given race, and when one isn't a top-level competitor—say, in going on down to the grocery store to purchase a little Gerber® jar of pureed ham for one's much-loved, very ill Old Lady Cat who has refused to eat anything else—there is no guarantee of success. I could have broken my leg after slipping on the flurry of "Winter Storm Warning" flakes outside the store (I didn't), someone could have stolen my wallet (no), or the store might have been flat-fucking OUT of that one variety of sloppy goo (oh yes, they were).

(Thankfully, Old Lady Cat seems to like the fine-ground chicken just as well. And I think what she's got is just a cold, although when you're roughly 92 in people years, there's really no such thing as "just a cold.")

So. Doubt. It would appear that this crafty beast is actually worse than depression. It feeds on anything it can, of course, discriminating not between physical disabilities and mental ones, and it loads every worry with more than its own weight, making it more ferocious and intimidating—as in panic and anxiety—or more inflated and crushing—as in weakness and depression. That I'm no exception to the general rules of human existence should be encouraging, I expect, but with doubt as my monkey on my already-aching back, I cannot be expected to believe that which I so glibly spout into cyberspace.

Really. As if I could just get over it and find my grown-up panties, which I DON'T EVEN LIKE, much less put those things on.

Still, I remain of the opinion that knowledge—however apparently pointless—is intrinsically powerful, I must conclude that as hopeless as my work mood and my general attitude seem, the fact that I've glimpsed their awkward ass ends is, I think, a good thing. Now that I know the true extent of the problem, I have increased my chances—however slight—of putting these bloated issues on a crash diet, so that I can send them packing with one well-placed kick. Or maybe 40 or so of them, like at the end of that GOD-awful Tae Bo® video that I still dredge out on increasingly rare occasion.

Maybe.