Splitting the Atom

Just in time for Heligoland to drop tomorrow.

Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.

I tell a narrative with my tweets—the narrative of my life, mainly. I announced my probable bi-polar II diagnosis on Twitter long before I posted it here. [And before I got some great feedback from friends who wanted to tell me that I'm not alone. That made it worth it.] My friends have an idea what’s going on in my life, because I share a goodly chunk of it on Twitter. Jonathan figured out that I had an obsession to eating sushi last week. My tweeps know I’m sick today. [Oddly enough, I didn't tweet where I went in to work for a couple of hours because I felt I had to do it. It was the right idea, but I'm paying for it now in feeling puny. I'll live.]

I’ve often said that I don’t know why someone who didn’t know me would read my Twitter. I’m largely the same way with Twitter—I care about the people that I follow, for the most part. I know about my friend Justin’s music school debt, how it creates angst for him and has him in a job he hates because it pays him well enough to get out of that debt. I know that some friends saw a lot of snow today, and some saw none. [And folks know that I saw very little at my house but a lot out by where Stephen and Misty live.]

Now, few of these little blips of information make a whole lot of sense if you don’t have some sense of the larger picture, which is why I write here. Why I share my life online, I’m never 100% sure, but the fact of the matter is that I do it. Part of me thinks that it’s self-expression. Part of me thinks that it’s narcissism. But I find value in it, which is why I’ve done it for almost a decade [!]. But these moments make more sense in the context of friendship, which is why I enjoy it when I go visit Rick and Jessica and don’t have to fill in gaps about what’s been going on with me since they last saw me, or how I’m excited when Mike Terry or Josh Stockment come to visit and roll on up to Nashville ['cause that's how we do], or when we meet Hubbs in Nashville.

Fundamentally, I find that Twitter is a channel of that narrative, a way of taking your friend’s temperature. What has their eye? [when it comes to links]. What has their ear? [when it comes to music.] What has their ire up? Are they at GEOFCON TWO? Are they happy about something? Have they been in a car wreck? [Happened to two different friends this week. Found out via Twitter both times.] I care about Twitter because I care about people, both those I’ve met and those I’d like to meet.

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IRM

1999-10-28: Headliners, Madison, WI, USA

Click cover art where extant for the download links. If I don’t have a download link, well, I’ll go and see if I can find the CD and dig that up.

• 2003-09-04: McDonald Theatre, Eugene, OR, USA.
• 2006-10-09: Von Braun Center Concert Hall, Huntsville, AL, USA. This one, etree says it has, but it doesn’t, really. And it’s so good, so I need to find the CD and load it to Owl & Bear or something.
• 2007-06-26: Warsaw, New York, NY, USA.
• 2008-07-04: Roskilde Festival, Roskilde, Denmark. I’ve raved about this one before, but it’s great. And no, I don’t have a torrent source for it now, but I’ll try to find one…
• Andy Osenga: 2009-03-23: The Rutledge, Nashville, TN, USA. I believe you boys have this. I don’t have any record of it here on GFMorris.com. My bad.
• 31 Aug 2007 Over the Rhine show. 2007-08-31: Moonlite Gardens, Coney Island, Cincinnati, OH, USA
• 1998-06-02: Studion, Stockholm, Sweden
• 28 Sep 2000 Elliott Smith. 2000-09-28: L'Olympic, Nantes, France.
• . 1994-04-29: The Blue Note, Columbia, MO, USA. One of the last UT shows ever, and it fucking blows the doors off. This bootleg is almost old enough to drive, man.
• M. Ward on KEXP in Seattle. 2005-03-14: KEXP, Seattle, WA, USA. Short but sweet.
• . 2004-09-18: Butternut Ridge, North Olmsted, OH, USA.

2008-02-27: 9:30 Club, Washington, DC, USA

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Strong Relation

I Should Love You, But I Hate You

Tony sent this to me, so I figured I’d be nice and listen to it. [And yes, Chris Lehman, I got your email, too, and I'll listen to it, but I'm better acquainted with TK.]

Downtown Church

This explains so much about me, and yet I am not even close to settled with it.

I can choose to be my diagnosis, or I can choose to treat the symptomology and see myself as a whole person. Once we came to the idea that this might be what it is—before Christmas, if you must know—I strongly defined myself by that diagnosis. I went into a shell of myself, honestly, living this whole meta-life where I overanalyzed everything. The only reason I was functional at all during this time was because I spent December in hypomania: I wasn’t ten foot tall and bulletproof, but I was at least eight feet high and ready to run through brick walls.

Running through brick walls. That’s a common act here on my end. I get convinced that I can do anything, and being a generally capable chap, I find that I’m able to accomplish much of what I set my mind to—but only when I’m hypomanic. When I’m depressed, I do very well to get out of bed in the morning and put one foot in front of the other. Imagine, then, when I came off that hypomania back to the depths while my good friends Kat and Sean were in town. That first weekend, the only thing that got me out of bed was the knowledge that I’d get to spend some time with them. Spend a lot of time with them, I did; then I’d drive home and the blackness would settle back in.

So, I did what any smart depressive does: ask for help. I met with my psychiatrist a couple days early, then started on a new drug regimen. By the end of the week, I was feeling much better, but the last few days … well, let’s just say that I’m happy that I titrate up to the next dose of the mood stabilizer tomorrow.

This is not easy. In fact, it’s quite hard. But doing nothing would be worse, for me. I can’t go on living like I was, with the antidepressants working some of the time and fighting some of the depression, except when it got worse, and then it would get better again, and that would be because I was hypomanic, and while I never quit my drugs or even stopped the dosages, I’d take my eyes off the prize, thinking I was Fixed.

I wasn’t Fixed. I’m trying to learn how to manage this, this which is so clearly my life and has been for a decade, though maybe I’ve not wanted to face it. But here in my thirties, I’d rather face my demons than be owned by them. I’d rather fight them and lose and lick my wounds than just lie in a pile in bed, unable to move, crushed by the biochemistry being off in my head.

And why the hell am I writing about this on the Internet? In a few hours, Facebook will import this as a note, and all 1200+ of my friends can confirm what they’ve long suspected—that I’m batshit insane at times. Isn’t this a bit of an overshare?

No.

I want the stigma of mental illness to go away. I want people to understand that people they know and love can struggle with these things, publicly, unafraid of who might know or find out. When I took time off at work back in June, everyone there really didn’t want to talk about it. I understood that, but man, seriously … I needed it. I realize now that I was coming off of some hypomania and plunging really, really far down in the hole, to a place where the antidepressants didn’t begin to touch things.

Yes, I need to talk about these things—not out of narcissism, but because others need to know that they’re not alone in this struggle. I’ve had at least two friends who, because I’ve written about my depression in the past, have sought help themselves, saying to me that they felt emboldened because I’d been public with it. In the light of that, how can I not share this fight with you?

I won’t get into specifics on meds or anything, but I’m combining an antidepressant with a mood stabilizer. It takes eight weeks to get to a therapeutic dose of the latter, and that’s proving to be hard, but I’m at least functional. That’s how most people end up fighting this: both barrels. The goal is to get to a normal person’s ups and downs, because those can be handled. I also see a therapist in addition to my psychiatrist, and if you ask if it’s worth it, I’ll tell you that I pay her out of pocket, and when I was seeing her every week last year, it was 10% of my takehome pay. It was worth every penny. I’ve unlocked a lot of wrong thinking in my head, and it makes me a lot more equipped to handle this. Talk therapy is not for everyone, but it’s definitely been for me.

So that’s what I’ve got, and that’s what I do about it. Got questions?