Shananana

So I am thinking big picture today. The plan I have come to is this:

Enroll at OSU in their winter quarter
Major in Comparative Studies (Cultural) or Art History or History (or some major/minor combo)
Graduate
Enroll in a Masters of Library Science program that has an archival element (and info tech)
Graduate
Probably still be unemployed

The most frustrating thing about career testing is I always end up with a list of moonbeams and fairy dust. Basically I would be an excellent novelist, illustrator, etc (how they know this without evluating product is of course suspect). Since I live in the real world, I need to find a satisfying career that incorporates a paycheck and that is what I hope the above will accomplish for me. It's probably far-fetched, but less far-fetched than a publisher stumbling into my home picking up my scratch notebooks and declaring me a bestseller.

Okay, here's a bit of truth. I'm hoping by writing this out some of these things will take form outside of myself and I can be done with them. As if it weren't painfully obvious, I have a sort of low grade depression. I say low grade because I am not suicidal, but also because most of the time it's like a slow low hum at the back of my head and in my chest. It's something that I've struggled with for awhile (by which I probably mean my whole life, including the wee-est years of childhood) in various permutations. This year I was man enough to get off my butt and do something about it, despite my half cynicism of the psychology industry. I got drugs. Drugs that worked for the most part. And drugs that I took myself off two months ago for no better reason than my refill ran out and it was a weekend. I had just been effectively cleared as 'sane enough' by the shaman-ish psychologist I had been seeing for a few months and figured, maybe I don't have to shell out a $30 copay every 60 pills or so. I was fine and good, and my drug man even let me go with, "I feel like I should tell you to get back on them, but I'm not going to." Lately however, I've been feeling the tendrils of it reaching up again. In fact I've been experiencing some older behaviors/feelings that have been absent since before this current round of meds. There is something unnerving about being 25 and finding the same awful quirks that plagued you when you were 19 coming back home to roost. I don't want back on my diet of SSRIs, but I am finding it disheartening to discover that this thing that I thought I might have licked is really more like a virus that I can supress but never eradicate. That it can and will periodically bubble up to the surface like genital warts or shingles.
I have a hard time talking about. describing this because in general I don't think most people's concept of depression or mental health matches its form in my life. When I use the term depression, I feel like I am automatically relegated to either fakely dark, misunderstood or pill-popping suburbanite status. For me it's not so much darkness or ennui as this other prickly sensation that is completely separate from what I would consider my core. It's this prickliness that fusses around in the day to day, pushing me in directions I don't want to be going or, even worse, not pushing me at all. In general it just makes everything a little bit harder, a little bit rougher around the edges. If I were a different person, I could probably plow through, get a little scraped and move on. However, my defense against most uncomfortable things seems to be to fall into dreaminess which anesthetizes me to the hardness but also leaves me stuck in the rut of it.
Yup, that's it. I don't know why I needed to tell that, but there it is.