Fierce Dogs in the Cellar

Nietzsche described depression as having “fierce dogs in the cellar.”  I feel like I have a whole pack of fierce dogs in my cellar: depression, anxiety, OCD, and they’re all baying for my blood at the moment.  Even the OCD, which I thought I’d got rid of, has come back.

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I went to bed late last night (about 1.30am) because I was writing a job application and (I admit) blogging, but I woke up at 6.30am with a headache that wouldn’t shift.  I watched TV for a bit until the headache went, but trying to go back to sleep after that didn’t work; I just lay in bed feeling depressed and having OCD thoughts: I made a kashrut (Jewish dietary law) mistake recently and am waiting to hear back whether I need to do anything practical about it.  I guess it’s a big improvement on how I was two years ago, as then I would be in a total panic, thinking I had treifed up the entire house (made all the crockery etc. non-kosher), whereas now I think there’s probably nothing practical to do, except feeling stupid for making a mistake.  I wish I could accept mistakes as part of life rather than beating myself up endlessly for them.  I try not to get angry with other people for their mistakes, but, as I’ve noted before, I treat myself much worse than I treat other people and worry that if I forgive myself for anything I’ll just become complacent and end up as a terrible person.

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I tell myself that I don’t care how many people read my blog and to some extent that’s true.  I’m not generally agonising over follower numbers or likes the way I used to.  Still, once I get followers (and I’ve acquired a few recently), I worry about losing them.  It doesn’t help that I don’t really understand why anyone would read my blog.  I worry about being “too much” for people.  Too Jewish, too geeky, too mentally ill.  I look back at some posts (e.g. yesterday’s) and shudder at how much I give rein to what I feel without thinking what other people will think of me.  I don’t have much confidence in my writing ability, especially here, where I give freer rein to my thoughts than in more ‘formal’ writing situations.  I suppose I don’t have confidence in my self as someone other people would want to know, through my blog or in real life.  I guess it’s the classic Jewish thing of not wanting (as Groucho Marx said) to belong to any club that will accept me as a member, a mindset that dogs pretty much all my social interactions.  As with most of my issues, it stems from low self-esteem and a childhood of being bullied and ostracised, but I don’t know how to move on from it.  I’m hoping if I can get some CBT soon it might help, but I’m worried it won’t.

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Part of my trouble in finding a correct diagnosis is my the difficulty I have in describing what I feel and in understanding how other people experience the world, what is ‘normal.’  This can be particularly true with my religious life, given that religious Jews are rarely portrayed in fiction and are usually presented negatively when they are.  For example, it occurred to me a while back that I have always felt uncomfortable with my tefillin on.  I just thought that this was one of those things, perhaps even a bad reflection on me that I felt uncomfortable performing a mitzvah (commandment).  But now I wonder if it is autistic sensory sensitivity.  Or it could be something that everyone who puts on tefillin feels, but no one talks about it because it’s too mundane and taken for granted.  I think my father finds his tefillin uncomfortable, but he binds his far too tightly.  I’ve never had the courage to ask anyone else.  Likewise, when my OCD was bad, it was a relief to discover I’m not the only frum (religious) Jew who struggles with seeing images of Jesus and Buddha while davening (praying) thanks to OCD.

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My instinct is to say that I’m a loner, but I’m not sure that it’s true.  I dislike crowds, but I think I need a few good friends.  But I’ve spent much of my life feeling very lonely.  According to Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology, loneliness, from a health/mortality perspective, is “comparable to the risk of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day… It exceeds the risk of alcohol consumption, it exceeds the risk of physical inactivity, obesity, and it exceeds the risk of air pollution.”  Whoops.  One article I saw suggested that people who don’t fit into their community should move to another one, but that isn’t always possible.  Certainly in my case, my choice of community, although wide by the standards of where I used to live, does not provide any community that would be a perfect fit for me.  My shul (synagogue) has positives and negatives and I have to learn to live with that.  I can’t find a “shul for weirdos” as that author of that article was able to do.

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I sent off a job application.  I just feel anxiety and despair about the whole job hunt process.  I want to have a job and be financially independent, something I haven’t managed in thirty-five years (I’ve never worked full-time and even when working I’ve still had my income supplemented by my parents because I have never earned enough to be fully self-sufficient), but my experience of my current and previous jobs are too negative: too many mistakes, some of them stemming from social anxiety, but many through sheer carelessness.  I hope that’s due to depression (at any rate in the past I was not a careless person), but I worry that I’ve become a careless person and ultimately whether the carelessness is due to depression or not doesn’t really make a difference to the fact that I don’t feel capable of doing a job well.  In the job before that I made fewer careless mistakes (or maybe they just weren’t found as I wasn’t being supervised so carefully), but was frequently absent due to depression and anxiety, which is not encouraging either.

Looking to complete a second application this weekend, I found myself having to choose between a job I was not really qualified for; a job I probably was qualified for, but for which the employer wanted a recent graduate straight out of library school; a job that had all the negative aspects of the revised job description I turned down at my previous job because I didn’t think I could cope with it, but only on a three month contract (the job seems far too complicated and involved to be done in just three months); another job I’m technically over-qualified for, but which I suspect would still push me to my limits, given how I feel right now; and one I’m applying for out of desperation because it doesn’t seem as obviously a bad a fit as the others.  Actually, on second thoughts, it also looks worryingly similar to the job they were turning my old job into and which I (and my then boss) didn’t think I could do.  I worry – again – that the librarianship profession has changed.  I could have been a great academic librarian… fifty years ago, before the internet, when librarianship was about managing a collection of hard copy books and knowing how to search card catalogues and reference works to answer reader queries.  But now academic librarianship is about teaching information literacy, managing online resources and marketing library services to staff and students.  But I’ve started the application now and will finish it.

I did procrastinate a lot over the application.  I hate the fact that I essentially have two jobs at the moment: my part-time (four days a week) paid job and my unpaid job on non-work days (bar Shabbat (the Sabbath)), applying for a new job.  I don’t have time to tackle various chores that need doing, let alone relax, yet because of my mental health situation, I need time to relax a lot.  So I end up procrastinating and neither applying for jobs or truly relaxing.

Someone at work, interviewing applicants for a position, remarked that there’s a clear difference between candidates who want a job and candidates who want the job.  I fear I’m in the former category.  I don’t actually know what job I could do well and at the moment have very little confidence that I could do anything.  At the moment I don’t really have any ambition.  At times it feels that the only thing I want is… perhaps not to die exactly, but not to be here.  To be on another plane of existence.  Not to deal with the heartache and the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to, and which I seem to be singularly bad at dealing with.  I vaguely want to have a career, friends, community, marriage, children, but I have no real plan of how to get any of these things and I doubt I would know what to do with them if I did get them.  I don’t see myself as really competent to work (although officially I’m fit to work and don’t qualify for benefits) and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to marry me, unless it was someone who was ‘settling’ because she was desperate for children.

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Walking to the shops, I visualise myself watching my own funeral in ghostly sort of way.  This is a morbid fantasy I have when I’m very depressed, or even mildly depressed.  I worry whether there will be anyone there, or whether I will be so alone that I won’t get a minyan (prayer quorum).  I worry what the eulogies will say, because I can’t think of very much that is positive that one could say about me.

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I fear this blog is getting tiresome.  The same topics – my ambiguous relationship with autism, my anxieties about work, my loneliness and fear of being single forever, my belief that I am a reprehensible person, my struggles to fit into the community I have chosen for myself – seem to dominate week after week.  It bores me, let alone my readers, but I am not sure what I can do about this.  It all stems from my poor mental health and consequent lack of direction.  Actually, even my mental health may not be the primary issue; it increasingly seems to me that my low self-esteem and lack of self-knowledge is at the root of the depression, rather than the other way around.  I don’t know who I am, and I don’t like what I do know.  I can’t take my friends or family seriously, because they all like me a lot more than I do.