The Online Photographer

["Open Mike" is the open-topic Editorial page of TOP. It appears when Yr. Hmbl. Ed. finds the energy.]

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I just caught up with all the Featured Comments on the last several posts, starting with "Big Camera, Small Camera" (a list of recent posts is in the left-hand sidebar) and the ones newer than that.

I apologize for being tardy with this work, a recurring problem. I get flareups of my mental illness (depression) from time to time, and I get stuck in a state of pessimism, despondency and low energy in which even small tasks feel difficult. (I wrote a short story once in which the hero's nickname is Dragon, "because Mama always told me, boy, you're always draggin', and so I always was.") Just being honest, not looking for excuses. I've learned all sorts of tricks to deal with this over the years, and an intensive five-year course of antidepressants in the early 2000s helped immensely (thank you, David Holloway, M.D., Ph.D.)—I never get as depressed now as I used to get all the time—but the battle never ends, and sometimes it gets the better of me. In my life, the return of an ordinary level of personal energy is an occasion for gratitude and relief.

It's really much better now than it used to be. One reason I like blogging for a living is that it absorbs these periods of inaction pretty well. Severe depression, from which I no longer suffer, can be astonishingly debilitating—all but paralyzing. I had a girlfriend in the '80s whose life was utterly transformed by the then-new wonder drug Prozac. Although she considered her life to be mostly a failure and her accomplishments minimal, actually she had done an impressive job of organizing a life that allowed her to carry on despite her disability. If you're a busy and successful working person in middle age, try to imagine for a moment what your own current life would be like if, at unpredictable but inevitable intervals, you became a complete invalid for agonizingly long stretches of time—a week and a half to three weeks ordinarily, but up to as much as five weeks. That describes her situation, not every depressive's. And it happened two, three, or even more times every year. Not only could you not work during these periods, but you could barely take care of yourself. Each time, the maintenance of your everyday life would slowly start to fall apart. Think that would interrupt and complicate things in your life? That's what she had to cope with. During her periods of depression, she would have whole days at a time when she couldn't even muster the energy to get dressed, shower, brush her teeth, or cook. Every project that had been underway suddenly halted; appointments were missed; the dishes piled up; phone calls went unanswered. All she could do was lie around listlessly. She described a television show ending and not having the energy to get up and turn off the TV. I get that. I've felt that. Normies do not understand it, and people with higher-than-average levels of energy, which includes many professional photographers almost as part of the job description, find it incomprehensible. Yet she was independent and had managed to survive and cope. She had two part-time photography and graphic arts jobs that allowed her to refuse assignments when she had to (claiming to be too busy, which was ironic), and she took freelance work with long deadlines which she could schedule around her stints of inactivity. She got free rent in return for collecting the rent from other tenants in her building, also a job that could stand intermittent pauses followed by flurries of activity. Altogether it was pretty amazing that she did as well as she did. It had taken a lot of cleverness.

When I knew her, she had been on Prozac for a year, and hadn't experienced a single depressive episode in all that time. And she was beginning to trust it. She was beginning to feel hope, and to believe that she could make plans (depression is a great slayer of plans). Something very weird about me—I don't pretend to know why—is that many women I've been involved with have found their forever relationships just after dating me. And that was true of her. After we broke up, she reconnected with a high-school classmate who had carried a torch for her in their younger years, married him, and moved into a big Victorian house as had always been her dream. That's as far as I know.

I do pretty well these days. It's just that every now and then I have to slog through a swamp of molasses.

Anyway, if you get a chance, please check out those belated Featured Comments. I think my curation might have been a little one-sided on the teaching post comments, which I try not to let happen, but there have been a lot of great comments both in the Featured Comments and the regular comments section as well.

I don't feel we've exhausted this whole recent discussion, by the bye. The topic of street photography, for one thing, is fraught with antagonism and disputation. But why? There has to be a post in that. Maybe it's something similar to Sayre's Law, named after Wallace Stanley Sayre, the guy who said, "the politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low." I should write a rant/humor piece on that. As soon as I get the dishes done.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Mike Plews: "Thirty years ago I witnessed a murder and got a taste of what real depression feels like. I was miserable, suffering insomnia, and, when I could sleep, I had nightmares that were vivid and bloody. It left me feeling like my body was encased in concrete. It took all I had to drag myself out of bed and stagger through a day at work, at which I wasn't worth a s**t. After about a month, it passed, but it left me with a deep respect for the destructive power of depression, even transitory depression. Good luck. Keeping a good thought for you."

Scott: "I agree very much that it is hard for us high-energy people to understand what depression is like. I had the misfortune to hurt my back a while ago, and the pain medication I was on had an unfortunate side effect: it caused depression. I had no idea what it was until I mentioned to my doctor that I wasn't sure if life was worth living, that I couldn't get out of bed in the morning, that I couldn't be bothered to eat. She told me to immediately stop taking the pain med and within three days I was back to myself. If it hadn't been for that chemical detour into depression, I would have no capacity to understand how debilitating it is, because it is so very far from my normal place of mind. I am heartbroken for anyone who has to go through that."

Mike replies: That's a silver lining to experiencing difficulties: it amplifies compassion. I've never suffered much from depression's twinned polar opposite, anxiety, but I had a series of panic attacks in 2014 that helped me understand what anxiety sufferers go through. I'm not saying it was good to go through that, or that I would have wanted to, but it did increase my understanding and my ability to empathize.