The disaster which is my home office

Why did I just take a picture of this mess and post it? I’m not exactly proud of my setup, compared to other people’s swank chairs, multi-monitor setups, and so on. There’s nothing really noteworthy about the picture, really.

So, why post it, then? Well, I’m trying to motivate to clean this mess up, and this picture is going to serve as my “before” photo so I can see what kind of progress I’ve made. I’m realizing that I really downplay any progress I actually make when I set out on a task and that really feeds my sadness, anger and depression. Maybe having something tangible to measure against will help me get out of this hole I’ve dug myself into.

Okay, why not keep it to myself, then? Well, posting this publically makes me feel more accountable. Now, you all have seen it and those of you who are inclined to, can help me stay motivated to work on it.

This is an experiment. Hopefully a change in approach combined with the Wellbutrin XL I just started taking can help make a difference.

Tags: home office, motivation, brainhack

Last year, I started taking Paxil CR. Today, my doctor decided to add Wellbutrin XL to the mix, starting with a 150mg dose, possibly going up to a 300mg dose. In a few weeks, we’ll see how it goes.

Coincidentally, today I received an unsolicited invitation to join the Depression Support group at the Revolution Health website. The irony is, what depressed person wants to hear another person whine about how crappy their life is? It’s like taking advice on how to stop drinking from a currently abusing alcoholic.

Lately, my wife has been using my car more than I am–because I don’t need to drive much any more–and she went and took out the Pink Floyd CD from my CD player and swapped it with an Indigo Girls CD. As I got into my car to drive home from the doctor’s appointment today, Prince of Darkness started playing–a song I haven’t listened to in quite a while. The first few lines really made me cry (which is not good while you’re trying to drive):

I don’t know when I noticed
Life was at my expense
The words of my heart lined up
Like prisoners on a fence

My dreams came in like needy children
Tugging at my sleeve
I said I have no way of feeding you,
So leave

Sadness is an incredible emotion; it seemingly has no limit.

Tags: drugs, depression, Wellbutrin XL

This morning, I came across Serdar Yegulalp‘s blog entry where he writes about writing. He tells a story about two of his friends and while I think we could be better friends, I doubt he’s writing about me, even though the story he tells could have been about me.

Lately, I’ve been seeing myself more as a writer than as a computer programmer. I’ve had a passing desire to sit down and write books about AOLserver, but I’ve always had a problem starting. For a long time, I’ve told myself, “I’m a programmer, not a writer,” but I began to realize that programmers are writers. But, me? Lately, I’ve had trouble writing anything. To borrow Serdar’s analogy, I’ve been suffering a drought. The rain just wouldn’t come.

Recently, I asked friends for suggestions on books to read for someone who wants to write but is struggling, and Bill Kocik suggested a book by Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. I bought myself a copy and now I flip through and read a few pages of that book daily–I just wish I’d known about that book 15 years ago. As infrequently as I post new blog entries, what little increase in frequency there has been lately, I owe to Natalie’s book.

After all this, is programming really like writing, though? What if, like me, you’re a writer without a story to tell? Sometimes, I wonder if there is a great masterpiece trapped inside of me, struggling to get out–a great program, say–or if I truly am as empty and shallow as I feel. I have a hard time deciding which is worse: to die, never freeing that great work from within me, or never having it inside me in the first place.

Tags: programming, writing

I’ve been very depressed again and I just can’t seem to get my head in order. I’m going to try to get them all out here before the zombies eat my brain. In other words, I’m going to reduce my intellectual essence into a meaningless trail of bullet points:

• Can my life–my thoughts, my feelings–be reduced to a list of bullet points?
• I think I’m burned out on AOLserver. There’s so much I want to see happen but it’s more than I can do on my own.
• I want to visit northern VA to hang out with my ex-coworker friends from AOL, but I just can’t motivate to make the 5 hour drive.
• I hate fighting with my wife. I wish we could be happy together … happy with each other.
• I’m glad my oldest daughter seems to have adjusted to public school okay.
• I “know” a lot of people online, but I still feel incredibly lonely.
• I’m really disappointed, but perhaps not surprised, that TWX stock is still tanking.
• I hate being ugly.
• I wish I weren’t so damn lazy.
• Maybe I really do belong in California–my inability to find ubergeek friends in New Jersey is really making me sad.
• I really don’t want to move to California. I don’t want to have to live in California.
• How does some 6th grader raise $6.5M of funding for a ridiculous business (marketplace for buying/selling MMOG crap), while the company I currently work for, TrustELI, can’t seem to get any?
• I wish I could figure out what would make me happy.
• Someone recently bought some $300+ worth of stuff via one of my Amazon.com links–whoever you are, THANK YOU.
• I wish I could just write my thoughts down like other people can. Why is this so hard for me? They race around my head but as soon as I try to type them out, they disappear.

I give up … I can’t just sit here and stare at the screen any longer. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.

Tags: Dossy, thoughts, sad, depression

ME “Liz” Strauss blogged about a neat little personality test which reveals your “personalDNA”. For some reason, I love these little tests. Apparently, I’m a free-wheeling experiencer.

You are an Experiencer

Your inquisitive nature, imagination, and hands-on practicality make you an EXPERIENCER.

…

You are Free-Wheeling

Your charismatic nature, liveliness, and independence make you FREE-WHEELING.

Take the test and share your results in the comments below!  I’m curious to see what it says about you.

Steve Goguen and I regularly discuss all sorts of things, and today he made a fantastic observation and gave me some incredibly sage advice:

I want to give you some advice which I think you’ll find when arguing with someone, especially if you want the argument to be productive. You need to tell the person what parts or assumptions you agree with otherwise you will create an atmosphere where the person will think you disagree on every possible point and they won’t want to continue the conversation. I know you, and I know we are in agreement with a lot of things, but if I didn’t know you there’s no way I would come to that conclusion.

He’s right; when I argue, I am incredibly adversarial and I know it hurts my ability to move the discussion forward.  I don’t know why I argue this way, but it’s what comes naturally.  I do need to start working on a strategy of discourse that frames the conversation in a win-win atmosphere.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have good friends, like Steve.

Tags: psychology, advice, wisdom, friendship

It began last night, in talking with my friend Steve, in the cold air after an evening of conversation and pastries, a deep despair and depression. I don’t know when it started or why, and I suspect the details of it aren’t really important, anyhow. But, the feeling was very strong and very real and I just couldn’t escape it. I felt lost, small and worthless; everything I valued about myself seemed unimportant.

Today, I struggled to shake this feeling. I prepared the girls’ lunch and brought them to school as I normally would, but I just couldn’t shrug it off. It grew inside of me, until I finally raged against my frustration and spoke to several people about it. One of them, Torben, directed me to the text of Listen, Humanity (PDF) by Meher Baba. I was clearly gripped by existential angst and I described this to my therapist today as a feeling of “being adrift, without goals.” As I read through the text, this jumped out and grabbed a hold of me:

“As long as you do not wake up from a dream, you are dream-bound to feel it to be stark reality. A dream becomes a dream only when you wake up; only then do you tell others that the life you lived in the dream was just a dream. Good or bad, happy or unhappy, in reality the dream is then recognized as having been absolutely nothing.” (p. 36)

I recognize the damaging nature of my overwhelming misanthropy, but I feel powerless to escape it. I have been ignorant to the love freely given to me, surrounding me in the form of good friends and good fortune, because I cannot see why I should ever deserve such love, as worthless as I am. But, I am discovering that that is not the nature of love–it is not earned, or deserved, or otherwise conceived through recognition.

“Love is meant to be experienced and not disclosed. What is displayed is not love. Love is a secret which is meant to remain a secret save for the one who receives it and keeps it.” (p. 19)

I have nothing left to say.