Depressing? Really?

One of the members of my writing group made the comment last week that this blog is "kinda depressing."

Yeah, well, I guess it is a bit given the general topic. There's an arc none of us will escape. The inevitability of it can lead one to think that way. Or not.

I have been depressed. I can remember times when situational depression came close to disabling me. I know the signs. A lot of "procrasturbation," as one female comic put it, low energy, avoidance of engagement, a feeling of helplessness. Easy to fall into to that. I won't say it hasn't happened in the last 18 months or so. Back in the sixties that ennui had a more fashionable tinge. It was existential. Since the human potential era of the seventies and eighties it has been definitely not fashionable. After all one "creates" the experience of life that one has, and any of that "oh poor me" is just whining, dontcha know?

I get it. Have gotten it numerous times.

Right now I'm looking back at 18 months of unemployment.

(Okay, I have worked some part time, and been engaged in doing volunteer work; but the indignity of the bureaucratic questions required to make the weekly claim for unemployment does take an emotional toll. At least now most of it can take place between me and my computer screen. Twenty years ago I didn't even bother when I had first moved across country--from out of state with a large cash severance. The hoops seemed designed to make you feel like a shiftless bum for trying to collect. Now I'm counting pennies a bit even though I have healthy savings.)

I'm a little angry at being laid off a year ahead of my planned schedule. I'm very aware of my slow bodily decline, despite having pretty good health--some chronic arthritis I manage, a removed skin cancer cell or two, successfully treated prostate cancer. But I'm upright, mobile, still able to enjoy the things that please me like concerts and plays, fishing, travel.

Yeah, this is an inventory.

I remember a friend saying that she felt terrible some of the time because society sends the message that there is nothing so useless as an old woman. I think you could take the gender out of that statement. There's an element of "please disappear and don't be inconvenient for the rest of us" despite the fact that we are healthier longer and don't need to be dependent. And yes, that pisses me off. It should piss you off, too, because your clock is running as well.

Maybe what I am missing here is the issue that so many of my contemporaries have had to deal with--aging parents. I haven't seen the last decline up close, except that I kind of did when I was 17 and 28 when my parents died.

Well, still. I've got mileage left. Be damned if I'm going to go quietly.

So despite the darkness of all this, I don't think I'm depressed about it. Frustrated, a little angry, trying to figure out how to adjust, a little guilty that a younger wife still works, sometimes a bit worried about whether what I've saved will hold up, annoyed at the little ways my body betrays me now.

I am finding ways to be engaged in work that renews me and does something for others, even if I am not getting paid for it; and I'm back at teaching very part time, which has been enjoyable and does make a little money.

Depressing? Nah! Only if we let it be.