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Half two in the morning and I can't sleep. This is doubly frustrating, because a) I wanted to get up early tomorrow and b) I've spent the whole day, the whole week, nauseous and lurching from exhaustion. Yesterday I woke up mid-afternoon, and Claire and Pat were on my bed and looking serious. It's time for professional help, they said. I wasn't inclined to believe them then, but when I got out of bed and we went out - actually, to lurk on Broad Street and giggle because they're filming the Oxford scenes of Northern Lights - I found myself wobbling a lot. And wobbling is easy to class as not normal.
So, I went this morning to see the college nurse, with some reluctance. I'm no longer sure where the baseline is - when tired and grey is just normal-person tired and grey and when it's properly worrying - but I went, and I got asked a lot of questions. The college nurse is a very nice woman, it must be said, whose only failing is having her open hours before eleven in the morning. And yes, she asked me a lot of questions about my habits and my work and my sex life (grooooan), and then she got to the more crucial questions, so to speak, about failure and worthlessness and talked about it not mattering if it's all in my head, etc., it's still not me making it up, and so on and so forth.
The thing is, I do worry that it's not real and if I just pull myself together and stop being an idiot it'll be fine. Because I don't feel rubbish all the time, I really don't; I feel fairly bouncy right now, for example, and I got geekily excited at the thought of them filming His Dark Materials, I had fun the other night at the party and I can still hold other people up as well as I always have. I feel rubbishy on my own, in the rain, when faced with hundreds of pages of reading, and so on. But then I try and remember what I wrote above, about having no baseline any more, and things like how you can survive rubbishness but not like this, not with stabbing pains in your temples and the encroaching feeling that the world is turning grey around you and everything that was joyous and fun just seems token and uninteresting and grey. And that doesn't make sense. I have, for example, entirely stopped writing, and that's not normal. I mean, I have writers' block for months at a time on occasion, but right now I'm not even opening blank documents and sighing at them, I'm not trying. There's even the momentary lurch in the academic writing, where I know, I just know, that I'm missing a trick - that there's some neat twist of expression to say what I want to say, some perfect phrase that will accurately transliterate thoughts into text - but I can't reach for it, I can't even pull out the energy to get it out.
And yet, here I am writing about it. The curse of meta-recursiveness strikes back and all that. I don't know what is wrong with my brain.
So physical symptoms are easier to deal with - stabbing pains in your head are always stabbing pains in your head - and I think the nurse reached the same conclusion. I am baffling her, she says; I ought to be depressed. I have the physical symptoms of significant depression. But, somehow, sheer bloody-mindedness or whatever, I don't have the matching mental state - I have quiet, mild, hard-headed-and-functional greyness rather than the full-blown "feelings of despair, hopelessness and failure."
(What do you say when asked if you feel depressed, sad and worthless? I don't know. I said, "Yes, yes, no", because that's true, but diagnostically what does that mean? You're surviving one essay a week but not two? Most of the time you get out of bed at twelve rather than three? You listen to lots of Sigur Rós but haven't yet progressed to the Velvet Underground? Or else you're just sick of being addressed in terms of synonymous adjectives in triplicate?)
Er, okay, time to shut up. The final option is that I have some sort of viral scourge that has happened to coincide with a mental low point, or anaemia with a similar sense of bad timing, and they took blood to test for these possibilities. I think I'd much prefer this option. But that said, mild depression is all very well. This has been a happy term. I know this. And to be honest, eighth week being over will make a lot of difference and this is already Tuesday of seventh.
I think I'm going to bed. Sleep is always good.
So, I went this morning to see the college nurse, with some reluctance. I'm no longer sure where the baseline is - when tired and grey is just normal-person tired and grey and when it's properly worrying - but I went, and I got asked a lot of questions. The college nurse is a very nice woman, it must be said, whose only failing is having her open hours before eleven in the morning. And yes, she asked me a lot of questions about my habits and my work and my sex life (grooooan), and then she got to the more crucial questions, so to speak, about failure and worthlessness and talked about it not mattering if it's all in my head, etc., it's still not me making it up, and so on and so forth.
The thing is, I do worry that it's not real and if I just pull myself together and stop being an idiot it'll be fine. Because I don't feel rubbish all the time, I really don't; I feel fairly bouncy right now, for example, and I got geekily excited at the thought of them filming His Dark Materials, I had fun the other night at the party and I can still hold other people up as well as I always have. I feel rubbishy on my own, in the rain, when faced with hundreds of pages of reading, and so on. But then I try and remember what I wrote above, about having no baseline any more, and things like how you can survive rubbishness but not like this, not with stabbing pains in your temples and the encroaching feeling that the world is turning grey around you and everything that was joyous and fun just seems token and uninteresting and grey. And that doesn't make sense. I have, for example, entirely stopped writing, and that's not normal. I mean, I have writers' block for months at a time on occasion, but right now I'm not even opening blank documents and sighing at them, I'm not trying. There's even the momentary lurch in the academic writing, where I know, I just know, that I'm missing a trick - that there's some neat twist of expression to say what I want to say, some perfect phrase that will accurately transliterate thoughts into text - but I can't reach for it, I can't even pull out the energy to get it out.
And yet, here I am writing about it. The curse of meta-recursiveness strikes back and all that. I don't know what is wrong with my brain.
So physical symptoms are easier to deal with - stabbing pains in your head are always stabbing pains in your head - and I think the nurse reached the same conclusion. I am baffling her, she says; I ought to be depressed. I have the physical symptoms of significant depression. But, somehow, sheer bloody-mindedness or whatever, I don't have the matching mental state - I have quiet, mild, hard-headed-and-functional greyness rather than the full-blown "feelings of despair, hopelessness and failure."
(What do you say when asked if you feel depressed, sad and worthless? I don't know. I said, "Yes, yes, no", because that's true, but diagnostically what does that mean? You're surviving one essay a week but not two? Most of the time you get out of bed at twelve rather than three? You listen to lots of Sigur Rós but haven't yet progressed to the Velvet Underground? Or else you're just sick of being addressed in terms of synonymous adjectives in triplicate?)
Er, okay, time to shut up. The final option is that I have some sort of viral scourge that has happened to coincide with a mental low point, or anaemia with a similar sense of bad timing, and they took blood to test for these possibilities. I think I'd much prefer this option. But that said, mild depression is all very well. This has been a happy term. I know this. And to be honest, eighth week being over will make a lot of difference and this is already Tuesday of seventh.
I think I'm going to bed. Sleep is always good.
