Taking Inventory: Jan 2014

Yesterday, I listened to the interview that Maron did with Todd Hansen, a longtime writer and editor of The Onion. In the second half of the interview, Hansen details his failed suicide attempt and how he began to rebuild his life after that. Something that resonated to me was that in the two years following his suicide attempt in 2009, he took inventory of the relatively good days in the year. After all, if I'm going to get self-help advice from somebody, I might as well get it from somebody who has been on the other side.

YouTuber TF Grillah uploaded the interview (begins at 11:29, heavy shit begins at 1:00:00):

Although I revel in how fucked up my thoughts can get when I write, these thoughts are unbearable to experience. It's not fun waking up imagining yourself at a gun range and blowing your brains out in front of the staff. It's even worse when you find yourself Googling the closest gun range and getting angry when you learn that they require you to set up an appointment (I'm in the South! I have to make an appointment?!). Even though I am about three months into medication (I take a daily dose of 40 mg of Celexa) these thoughts creep in, but thankfully it isn't as frequent as it was without it. Celexa has broadened my emotional range, I think. It hasn't masked how bad things can get, but laughing comes more easily and I'm not doing some insane things like pulling over into a parking lot and yelling at my dashboard, starting arguments about nothing with my parents, or getting so anxious when talking to somebody one-on-one that I would feel exhausted to the point of tears at the end of a simple conversation. In fact, I missed a dosage on January 19th and I posted this on Facebook: "If anybody wants to know what it's like to be an old CRT TV that is switched to a dead channel and is slowly teetering off a windowsill, miss a dose of citalopram." Before I was on the drug, I told my emotional life to my doc and he said, "So you've been feeling this way for your whole adult life? Around five years?" I thought to myself, "Holy shit. Give me the fucking drugs, doc."

In the WTF episode, Hansen rated good days as days that weren't abjectly miserable. My default mood is gray, flat, and apathetic. My low is when I want to spend a full day in bed. I work 40 hours a week, so I suppose a good day in that context is if I don't think about how I'd rather be smoking, drinking, sleeping, or dead during the work day. Not because the work itself is bad, but sometimes the mind wanders. I am trying to break out of a pattern where as soon as I get to my parent's house from work I don't immediately take a three-hour nap. As of now, I would classify a day where I can manage it a great day.

The month of January, I had four great days and one good day. I also had some of the worst days (a bad interaction between Nyquil and Celexa when I was sick with a cold) I've had in the three months I've been on meds. The four great days I chalk up to my friends from a vacation in Boston where I spent some time with friends (Jan 1 - 4). The one good day happened on the 13th. For most of my life I played the piano. I was pretty proficient at it but after I transferred to Bard College I barely touched it. Even though the old piano is still with my parents and I see the thing every day, I haven't touched it in almost three years. For some irrational reason, I can't look at the thing. That Monday morning, I listened to The Mental Illness Happy Hour with Paul Gilmartin and guest Lynn Chen. When describing her father's death she said that she remembered playing and mastering Beethoven's Sonata Pathetique. That was one of the last pieces I learned in high school. In senior year, I believe I got a gold and a bronze medal in two different regional contests for that song. I paused the podcast, went on to YouTube and listened to an old Rubinstein recording. This is the first movement:

It was probably the first time I listened to the piece as music rather than a problem to be solved. An issue that I have had with piano was that I don't think I ever learned to play musically. I could do what was asked of me by my teacher (who was wonderful) and mimic some techniques from the recordings she gave me to listen to. But playing the piece was a very technical and physical thing rather than something musical.

So I listened through different interpretations:Gould, Barenboim, and Horowitz. I played through each interpretation several times in a row. Despite the amount of time I have played the piano, I am a shitty music critic. I don't know how to explain why I like the Rubinstein the best of the four and the Gould the least (though they are all good). I don't think I have any recordings of myself playing through the sonata (I know for sure that there won't be one of myself playing the second movement--that was the most fresh of the three movements before I left for college) but I wonder if I were to listen to it it would sound like music or a kid trying to perfect math homework. Maybe I was too young or immature to appreciate it as music or to even hear it as music. Who knows.

So that was a good day--I did collapse into bed for three hours as soon as I got home. I still spent my lunch break eating a sandwich and staring at my cubicle wall. Maybe sometime soon I'll give the piano thing another shot. That could potentially be therapeutic, I suppose.