The Princess Bride
“The worst aspect of my depression is what I’ve come to think of as “black dog time,” when my enthusiasm for anything takes an Acapulco cliff-dive. It’s a hard state of mind to describe— in fact, it’s a hard state of mind to even detect, and even once you have detected it it’s hard to give a damn because you’re, well, depressed. It’s a mental cloud in which one remains perfectly capable of taking action, but primarily obsessive action, self-centered action. Not caring, conscientious, or constructive action. A depressive is supremely skilled at entertaining themselves now because now is all depression ever lets you have. It sharply retracts your chronological horizon. Now is everything, even if, to parahprase Patton Oswalt, now is consumed by sitting in bed and watching The Princess Bride 17 times in a row.
Since now has you in its fucking kung fu death grip, you don’t care that three or four or twelve days have gone by. You notice, but you don’t care. You can do the mental math as easily as you can when healthy, but the conclusion doesn’t spark anything inside you. When the black dog has you, your only possible reaction is “meh.” The future gets a “meh,” too. Now won’t let you give a damn about the future, so you don’t exercise, you don’t eat right, you don’t clean, you don’t fetch the mail, you don’t do useful work, you don’t plan. Nothing is sublime, nothing summons joy. The world loses emotional texture, and the height of your ambition is to fill all that now with something marginally diverting.
At their very worst, before proper treatment and medication, these plunges would last weeks. Weeks, cyclically consumed by this bullshit. When I’m stably medicated, these plunges are mitigated to a matter of hours, or a couple of days at worst. “
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