In the spirit of another late night daily dose I am writing this two part daily dose. The first is a short rant about Blog Traffic and the second is going to be this thingy on depression. The reason I am writing the second one is because I know my brother will love it and I love hearing him tell me that the other nights daily dose was great, and two is because its actually pretty accurate about how I feel towards depression and I need to remember that kidna stuff. So first the rant.

I think this is a good website. I think I deserve more traffic. But I hate the idea of webrings and those blog rolling devices. You end up clicking on random links, visiting the sites for two seconds, reading a sentence, trying to remember where you saw that design scheme before, wondering why the fuck they put a frame there, figuring out what Content Management System they used, but you don't really capture the essence of the site. I believe in communal traffic. I plan to allow people who read this site to advertise on my site for free. Then instead of going to 100 random sites, you go to ten sites of people who took the time to create an ad, I saw the site, I mean I think it is going to be better, people will actually pay attention to the sites. If you are really special, I'll throw you a permalink on my sidebar. And then I love blogsnob so I signed up for that, but I'll probably drop that also. With all this, I still can't get traffic. I get 40 hits a day. Most of them are probably balony. Meaning no one reads this site. And bear in mind, if you aren't as affected as I am by now, that I think this is one of the better websites around, from programming, to interactivity right down to content. I want people to read what I am writing but I have no good way to get people who are interested in reading intelligent rambles. Well if you read this site and like it, throw me a link okay? Eventually, I will make giving me a link easier and maybe even funner, but for now, figure it out yourself. Coolio.

Okay depression. This is what depression is, to me of course, with some thoughts about it afterwards. Depression is mostly chemical, it is a weakness toward sadness. Much like overreacting, but it isnt at all in your control, things make you sadder easier, and it becomes harder to be happy. You aren't more sensitive to things, and that's why you are sad and everyone else is happy because they are sheltered or naive, you just have a weakness, like kryptonite, to sadness. It blurs your thinking like an addiction. You don't know your depressed, you are just down, or everything is just shitty or it just feels like there isn't anything to be happy about. And you think you are thinking clearly, but really, depression is causing you to miss things or not accept things. For instance, even when I could rationally think out a solution for a problem or understand something, I was still depressed. Suckiness is constantly over you and everything just bites. Commonly I found myself thinking that my sadness was good, that I would learn from being depressed and would find a truth that would make me happy. Like depression was a battle I had to face alone in order to become some sort of superior human that had meaning. But there isn't anything like that to depression. The sadness expierenced during depression isn't real. It isn't real in the sense that the things that are making you sad aren't social issues that you and your personality must learn to face, you are just overreacting to standard problems that everyone else faces as well. These problems are not more meaningful for you, they are just dealt with worse because of the chemical imbalance you are experiencing.

Conquering depression works in two ways and two ways only, I think. The first one is kinda the cold turkey approach. You just snap yourself out of it one day. Wake up, find something to do, hang out with friends, go to sleep. You just quit it. I never could do that. I'd be happy for a day, but then it would come back. For me, it was like that for 6 months. I just assumed that one day I would wake up from the nightmare that I felt everytime I woke up in the morning. But I never woke up like that, I could never be sure of anything long enough to give my life the stability it needed to rebound back to a normal chemical state. Worse, after awhile, the doubt I felt became a major issue. I would debate my life, my beliefs with myself for weeks, never sure about anything, I tore myself into a million pieces. I think that self-doubt is a product of depression, that's the worst part in my opinion. It makes you depressed over the same issue for weeks because no matter how reasonable, how logical, how brilliant your theory is, you are still sad, so the theory, your beliefs, must be wrong, that is the nature of the doubt.

The other way out of depression, which is what I recommend, is therapy and medication. I remember thinking that medication would change who I was, would make me stupider, eh, not stupid, but number. I thought I was experiencing life at it's fullest and had just found it unsatysfying. I liked the way I thought and believed medication would change all that. In reality, I wasn't experiencing life, I was just depressed. And the medication didn't change the way I was thought, it just took that overwhelming saddness and frustration away. Once those were gone, guess what? I was still sad, but this time, I could deal with that sadness. I spent a month in DC where all I did was think about myself and my beliefs, my future and what I had went threw being depressed. During that month I started feeling better, three months after medication, I finally could see what I wanted, what I believed, who I was, and what I felt. My therapist kept me reasonable when I was depressed and offered advice when he could. Most of all he encouraged me, which is really important because you need the UMF, to keep yourself going. I mean, who doesn't like talking about themselves for an hour to someone who can offer insight?

During that month in DC, my roomate Marc asked me what happiness was, and when I thought about it, I answered as follows:
"I get in these moods, after I do something, after I complete things, I just want to run up the stairs of my basement and kick open the door, lean back on the last stair, throw my hands in the air, and just shout. It's like jumping in a pool, you feel it all over."
Now I don't claim to feel that way always, but it happens and it is great. I will get to how I feel now in a minute, let me just finish that thing about happiness. When I was in DC the greatest thing I realized was that there were things in life that made me happy - film and writing. During depression those were the only things I liked doing and when I was no longer depressed, they provided me with all the meaning I needed. Meaning, who needs meaning, I fucking enjoyed doing them. Finding things that make you happy is the most important thing that depression makes you do. You learn to identify happiness. I mean it is so hard to cheer up and you have to delve so deeply into yourself to find what you want to do, what drives you, and when you aren't depressed, these things become the world. (Probably a lot like religion for those cult thingies).

Today, I feel great. I am not overjoyed as described all the time, I am not apathetic, I am just content and satisfied with my life. I do the things I love and when I think about things, I can trust myself to decide on an answer. I am no longer plagued by self doubt and I am confident that I will be able to get threw the things that scare me in life because I can decide. I can descipline myself to stick by my decisions while they keep me happy and to rebuild everything if I am sad. (maybe that didnt make sense, it is about self-reliance). Just satisfied that there aren't enough hours in a day for me to do the things I love doing.