On the Phenomology of Depression

I'd say most of the time I'd depressed, it's mostly just being low energy. I sleep too much, I have trouble getting out of bed. I wake up in the middle of the night and then fall back asleep. I'm tired all day and take lots of little naps. I have no motivation to do much of anything. Work. Hobbies. Video games. Hanging out with people. Even eating, though once food is in front of me I'll do it. 

I don't necessarily feel emotionally bad. Like sure I don't feel happy or even good but it's not like I feel sad, really. I just am. Low mood/emotions can coincide with this mild depression though. It's just not the defining feature.    

For the most part I can push through this. I can get up (with effort), put on a smile and move on. My work will be slower, it will be worse. I'll be exhausting myself keeping my mask on. But I make it through it. This is the depression that makes me feel the most like an imposter, in a way. I'm wearing a mask of myself as I wait for my face to regrow.

Sometimes, the depression gets more physical. Like a pit in my throat or stomach. Just generally feeling physically bad. Not common, but maybe every few days during an episode. Maybe less. It might not even last much of a day.

The bad moods, the sad moods don't necessarily coincide with these physical feelings but sometimes they do. I feel overwhelmed, like I'm treading water and can barely keep my head above. I feel stressed, but not an ordinary sort of stress. No, a stress about nothing, even when there is something to be stressed about. These moods used to have a lot more self-loathing and guilt. Not so much now. I've cleaned up my life and have developed a healthier sense of self-esteem which has made it hard to get hooked this way. That being said, when the moods come, they will eventually find something to sink their claws into and pull me down. And then I either have to wait for the feelings to subside or hope something, someone knocks me out of them.

I used to have a lot of trouble crying. At the very least it wasn't a common occurrence. Based on this blog, that's clearly changed. Crying helps. Doing things helps. It tends to wash (with time) the bad feelings away for a while. 

They are rare, but occasionally I have suicidal thoughts. I've never gotten anywhere beyond passive ideation (and well, maybe fantasizing dying, but never actually making plans) but they're still really scary. Wanting to self-harm is more common (and I think some of my common coping mechanisms, like intensive, reckless cardio when I feel down actually come from that) but I've managed to resist the urge for almost a decade now. In general I think both of these have gone down a lot compared to my early adulthood.

Most people don't know I'm depressed. In fact very few do and even the ones I've told don't realize the extent. I don't blame them at all. I laugh and I smile. I do get happy when I'm with people, generally speaking, so it's not like I'm lying to them in the moment. But that's what they see and so when I say that I'm sad, they don't know what to believe. They don't know I was crying minutes before, that I put the smile on just for them before I opened the door. No one knows.  

I want to scream my feelings out. I want to tell everyone that I'm hurting. And yet when push comes to shove, I never do. Or I do but in a way that comes of as incredulous. Because that's how I am.  

I don't want to go to institute. I want to stay in my office and mope and think about how much everything hurts and how I'm sad and maybe cry. 

I am going to institute because what I want isn't healthy. Being around people is. Participating in life, even if just a bit, that's what I need to do. 

Spring Day 4

Again, holding up pretty well (unanswered emails aside, I swear I'll get to them tomorrow). Big fun of the day was one of the other TAs accidentally curving our last assignment so that the average was 60%. Except that there were enough 100% submissions (we graded too kindly) which the computer wouldn't change, which meant that even if you got like a 99 it would show up as something like a 40%. Of course, there was no way to reverse this (despite the program saving the grading history!) so we had to go back and manually change each grade back to what it was supposed to be, all while answering e-mails about why the grades were wrong. Really glad I made detailed comments about why I gave each grade I did, since looking up the grading history for each individual student is a pain. Also had to answer a bunch of emails from students asking for me to regrade their assignments or for explanations for why they got what they got (see the detailed comment I made!). The answer is "all grades are final" for everyone but I did flat out tell one student that her offer to redo the assignment would be a huge waste of everyone's time since she was arguing over 7 percentage points, literally less than half a percent of the final grade. Between all of that, played games at English Corner (our weekly English practice sessions with some of the grad students who want to improve on that regard).

I read like 120 pages of Paradise Reclaimed last night and will probably finish it today. Then you will get a book review because why not. This is a hobbyist blog after all, not just a public diary and a therapy session. I just don't have hobbies other than self-therapy right now. And writing down my thoughts I guess. Still thinking about Fishing for Birds, not sure when I will get around to writing lyrics for it (again).

Oh, I listened to Camping in Alaska's please be nice again, like I do all the time (it along with Moenie and Kitchi by Gregory and the Hawk are two of my favorite short albums to revist and just listen to all the way through. Both are very comforting and I like the sincerity that bleeds through them). Though Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 4 tends to be my favorite and is truly the climax of the album, c u in da ballpit hit different today. 

It's funny thinking about how much the band hates please be nice. I mean yeah it's poorly recorded and cringe, but they were like 17 when they released it. It shouldn't be good but it's still part of the growing process. And like I get it. Dead Ponies in the Rain is also poorly recorded cringe (much more so than please be nice) that I released when I was 17. I dislike a lot of it and very very very rarely listen to it (not that anyone should enjoy it per se). Even as I was finishing it there's a lot of directions I wanted to move in and away from what I was doing (Hence the first song on Fishing for Birds, which is We hate our fans and all we want is your money, a song about about everyone wants me to do songs like Dead Ponies in the Rain but I want to do other stuff, while staying experimental of course). And there's other directions I want to move in for Doctrines of Annihilation, far from where Fishing for Birds is now. But there were some good ideas on there and I can occasionally see what could be brilliance in a competent musician's hand. It's okay to laugh about your past cringe.

Diachronic conlangs

Yeah, I've been really lazy about updating. Still doing plenty of conlanging, as can be seen on reddit, just not updating here. I've been working on a big "papualang" project. But I'm getting on to do a minor, inconsequential rant about conlanging.

One thing that many conlangers like to do is diachronics, so deriving languages from other languages. That's cool and all, especially when done a posteriori (and well) or for a conlang family. Even I'm part of a diachronics project. My problem isn't with diachronics.

No it's the whole thing where you create a proto-language for only one daughter language and even more the idea that this makes the daughter lang inherently better. Why does this bug me? Because it doesn't make the language actually more realistic, especially since many of the sound changes and grammatical changes found in the daughter langs might have been a stretch to occur naturally. Also it leads to this weird idea that proto-languages were more regular than daughter langs, which isn't actually true. The other thing that bugs me about this is that the proto-lang itself is still a conlang. It's not like you made the conlang less constructed. If you have no plan on making a language family, why do the protolang. You're getting all the features you wanted anyway, but now you are taking extra steps. Just make the language without those steps.

It's a minor gripe. I'm not going to discourage people from making proto-langs, not at all. It's mostly harmless. But I do wish more people understood that proto-langs are reconstructions and aren't what people actually spoken. Are they close? In many cases, yes, probably, at least somewhat. Of course there's dialects in real protolangs, something not often reflected in constructions, academic or otherwise (at least as far as I have seen). That's okay, it's difficult to do, but people gotta remember this.

Praat

I'm never going to get the hang of praat. Good thing I'm not going into phonetics. Acoustics (and transcriptions in general) is just too hard.  Here's the chart I came out with for english though: