Shades of Gray Revisited

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on August 13, 2010 at 3:08 PM

Several people have emailed me, etc., about my most recent blog about depression. Their obvious concern, commiseration, and suggestions have made me realize two things: 1) I’m glad I blog about depression and 2) that post may have come off as heavier than I intended it to. Allow me to explain.

1.

As with any personal problem, there is a stigma surrounding depression. People are embarrassed to admit they struggle with it, and other people feel uncomfortable when hearing about it. This is a normal part of our society, but also unnecessary and potentially harmful. If shame prevents a single person from seeking the help they need to be healthy, well, then shame on the shamers is what I say. And in a small way, on a small scale, I feel like I can begin to change this, or begin to help other people who feel like I feel. It is a very real disease with sometimes fatal consequences. If you need help, for love’s sake, get help.

2.

That being said, my depression isn’t dangerous to anything but my moods about 90% of the time. I can remember a very small number of times that my depression affected my life to the point that I couldn’t push through it to do things I would normally have done. I am lucky enough to have never once been suicidal. Or even considered killing myself. It isn’t even a possibility for me, so your mind may rest easy there.

Now, does this make my depression less “severe” than other people’s? I don’t know, and I don’t really care. It feels severe enough to me. On the other hand, I have sought help, and was able to find a cognitive exercise that changed my life. I know how to self-treat when I want to. I don’t always want to. I embrace the darkness of life more than anyone else I know, and part of that is allowing myself to feel the pain. Feel the sadness. Emotions can’t break you; all they can do is change you. And the artist in me likes that, so sometimes I let it ride.

When I described how every negative feels like depression for me now, I wasn’t clear enough about one thing: it feels like depression (and maybe is), but it doesn’t last like depression. If I got truly, long-term depressed every time I felt sad I would always be depressed, and that certainly isn’t the case. I’m happy a lot these days. Depression isn’t even upsetting to me anymore. It’s like an old friend, and when I get tired of it, I ask nicely and it’ll usually leave without too much trouble.

So thank you, to those of you who messaged me about one aspect or another, for caring. And for those of you who struggle, I wish you the best in finding your medium. And to all, happy Friday the 13th.

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Shades of Gray

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on August 11, 2010 at 2:20 PM

Where does one emotion end and the next begin? Is it always shades of gray?

I’ve always battled with depression. Depression with a capital D, actually, as in Clinical Depression and not the over-used sentiment, “I feel depressed.” Depression is known to be at least partially genetic, and that holds true for me. Still, I can’t help but wonder: would I have ever gotten depressed if such horrible, tragic things hadn’t happened to me? There’s a difference between being sad because something sad happens and just always being depressed… isn’t there?

At some point, if sad things continuously happen for an extended period of time, I would have to say no. Because sadness is like a fraction of depression, as is tiredness, and if you’re exposed to that emotion for a long enough time, the brain gets used to it. The neuropathways literally get more worn for sadness than for other emotions, making it difficult if not impossible to “climb” out of those deep grooves. Genetics certainly effect depression, but it seems to me that so does life. If really sad things keep happening to a person, it would be inhuman not to be really sad about it.

The problem though, is that once a person has been severely, clinically depressed for a length of time (the length is part of what differentiates depression from grief, or sorrow), the brain can never undo the effects of that. Those grooves are worn deep, and no amount of happy living can build them back up. What this means for me is that when I get sad, I get depressed. Not the light sense of it that people toss around, which just means, “I’m currently sad and tired.” No, somehow it’s different, isn’t it? Depression is familiar, and my mind goes to it like an old friend when any related emotions pop up. Grief? Depression. Sadness? Depression. Tiredness? Depression.

So when I say, “I feel depressed,” I don’t toss the phrase around like many people do when what they really mean is they feel sad, or they are grieving. For me, it is one in the same. All shades of sad have blended to one color: dark, gray, Depression.

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In Case of Fire

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on August 8, 2010 at 1:22 PM

It was sometime in the afternoon when it started to storm. It wasn’t raining, but clouds blew in and the wind picked up. Hub-a-dub and I were both sitting in the office at our laptops talking about finances when lightning/thunder (They’re the same thing, you know. They only seem different because usually it’s far enough away so that you hear and see it at different times. That day they were so near that I was forced to remember that they were one.) struck so close to our window that I screamed—one quick, girly sound before I could contain my shock. Then something in our house beeped. It sounded like the security system or smoke detector, and I initially assumed we’d lost power. But our lights were still on, so we kind of looked around and shrugged. Kyle said he thought it struck on the other side of our back fence. I thought it was between the office and the big tree.

About 10-15 minutes later, I heard the fire truck siren, but ignored it like I always do. I don’t mean to sound uncaring or jaded, but no one can have sympathy for every tragedy; you’d burn out and be unable to care for anything. It’s part of why I don’t watch the news. But soon Kyle looked outside and our entire block was filled with fire trucks, ambulances, cop cars, and the works. Our next-door neighbors’ house was struck; they weren’t grounded; the house caught fire. Their entire attic was on fire, smoke billowing out literally feet from our house. Not immediately knowing the damage and extent and danger, Kyle said, “We need to be ready to leave. I’m going to go talk to someone; you get ready to go.”

There are very few times that I feel words unable to serve me. That moment, that feeling, is one of them. I move fast in emergencies, and within probably 2 minutes I had put on shoes and my UT class ring (I was wearing my wedding ring) and gathered Buttons’ carrying crate and my zip drive with all of my writing on it. Then I was standing there in the middle of the house thinking, “What else? What else do I need to save?” I’ve thought about this scenario before, believe me, and made a mental list of things I would grab first. But in that moment, with my life’s work and my cat and my main memento of school and Dad safe, I couldn’t think of a damn thing.

“Value,” I muttered, “What has value?” but the word value made me think of money/expense, not emotional meaning, and my mind supplied the incredibly expensive business suit that I use for job interviews and stuff. Then I thought, “No, insurance will pay for that,” since I never really liked it anyway (it was the only professional suit I could find in my size). But what? What should I get? What should I save if everything goes up in flames?

Luckily, I didn’t have to think about it beyond that point, because Kyle came back in and said we were okay. They already had hoses in the house and there was no danger of it spreading to us. No one was hurt. At that point, we both went outside to watch, just like all the other neighbors did. We’ve never been overly outgoing people, especially as homeowners, and we don’t really know those neighbors. I would have liked to have gone up to them and told them I was sorry, offered a hug, and asked if they had renters insurance, but neither of us could do it. I hope they know my heart was with them and that we weren’t just out there to gawk. It was heartbreaking to think of all the things they probably lost.

As we stood out there in the light rain—the kind of rain so scattered that you feel like you could stand in it for hours and still not actually get wet—and watched the firemen work, random items kept coming to mind that I could have saved. My stack of scrapbooks. The box full of all my Dad’s mementos (because he’s dead and I couldn’t replace them). My wedding dress. Our laptops. Our insurance documents to make it easier to call. Some clothes to live off of. Because it all gets destroyed, you know. Even the things that don’t get burned are ruined from smoke and water from the fire hoses. Even now, two days later, that poor family has the guts of their home spread across their lawn and I keep thinking of things I should save if this ever really happens to us. We’re grounded, so it wouldn’t be lightning, and we have smoke detectors connected to our security company, so help would come fast, but something like this doesn’t just go away. You can’t “tune out” tragedies that are literally next door. It’s like a new handful of sorrow and worry in the back of my mind. What would I save from a fire?

What would you save?

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As if from Nowhere

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on August 3, 2010 at 4:10 PM

When we were on vacation, I got an idea for my next novel. It takes place in Lake City and is a horror novel, and that’s pretty much all I’m willing to tell you at this point. So as you can imagine, walking and driving around Lake City for a full week, I was continuously inspired by things to add to my plot, characters to create, and nice details to fill things out. I tried to relax and just enjoy being there, but I don’t work that way. When my writing brain gets an idea, I will be thinking about it on the back burner (or front, if I’m IN the situation like that) until it’s written down. There was no use fighting it; I was, essentially, working on vacation.

That’s part of the creative artist’s blessing and curse, I think. At first I thought I was just doing that because for the past few years, I’ve made writing my priority, which means I’ve trained my mind to actively look for inspiration. Especially since I regularly write new poems, I’ve become pretty in-tune with things that catch my fancy. But when I really thought about it, I realized that that wasn’t actually the reason I couldn’t get my mind off of the new novel idea. I’ve been creating fiction from vacations since I was a little girl.

In fact, the first time we ever went to Lake City as a family, back in 1997, we stayed in a cabin for a week during the summer. My brother and I shared a room with two beds, and in the closet of that room was the crawl space access. Now, being from Texas, we’d never even heard of a crawl space before. So when we discovered a “secret” door in the floor that led under the house, I was immediately inspired. I concocted a whole storyline—which I appropriately dubbed, The Vacation from Hell—in which a vacationer is locked in the underground crawl space and left to starve. I even wrote out a note that ended in shaky, fading letters saying, “But it’s been two weeks now without food, and I can’t… go… on… much…” I begged my parents to let me leave the note partway sticking out the door for the next vacationers to find, but I think they said no. I was ten, and already trying to write novels, regardless of my lack of follow-through.

Likewise, in our family trip to San Francisco (I don’t know how old I would have been), I plotted a horror novel I was calling The Muffin Man, about a serial killer, Trevor McVille, dubbed “The Muffin Man” who, literally, lived on Drury Lane. He left half-eaten muffins at each of his victim’s bodies as a clue for police. The idea was ridiculous, of course, but the first “chapter” that I actually did get around to writing was surprisingly good. This was maybe in middle school. I think I was into reading Mary Higgins Clark at the time.

Around that same time I came up with another idea that was poorly written, but inspired me as an adult to write a piece of flash fiction that I absolutely love—”She Sleeps.” And now that same concept has become a poem in my Around Dark Corners collection. Although most of the other early “novel” fragments were less useful, it does show that I’ve always been working on fiction plots in my head, and typically on vacation. What does this mean? I don’t know if I believe that some people are really, truly “born to do” something with their lives, but if so, it certainly seems I was meant to do this.

The new novel idea is better than The Muffin Man, I promise.

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Leave no trace… or else.

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Annie Neugebauer

Originally posted on July 25, 2010 at 4:30 PM

I’m calling you out, jerk. That’s right. You know who you are. I hope your face is burning with disgrace.

What kind of person goes into the wilderness and harms it? I would like to know why someone would make a campfire and then throw glass bottles into it, shattering them into tiny pieces that stick in the earth’s soil like a thorn in the soft paw of a wild fox? Why bother traveling hundreds maybe thousands of miles to get away from other humans and then leave trash behind? Have you no respect? Have you no shame? These people disgust me.

Nothing in this world makes me quite as furious as intentional littering. Lazy littering. It is one of the only things—one of the only groups of people—that I would honestly say I hate. I hate litterbugs.

The first night we arrived, we drove to the top of a mountain to camp. Being well-learned and well-intended, we found a previously created campsite in wonderful seclusion nestled in the sky-scraping pines of the Uncompahgre wilderness. What at first glance we saw as a beautiful campsite soon revealed itself as scarred. Hunters, based on the bullet casings littering the earth, had camped there previously and left their mark. Although someone before them had already picked a fine place for a campfire, they chose to make not one, but two new—and HUGE—campfire rings. This is a no no.

Not only that, but they threw trash into their fire that could not burn. Beer bottles & caps, aluminum cans, random metal things, and more. And around the rest of the campsite, they scattered such lovely human remains as Monistat boxes, anti-diarrheal pills still in the individually-wrapped packages, tent stakes, remains of tarps, shoe laces, rope, more broken glass, screws, plastic, and so much more. Also, they had dragged enormous tree-trunks into a pile in the middle of the ground and left them there.

Did you know that a single cigarette butt can remain for 25 years? That it takes a million years for a glass bottle to decompose? That plastic will NEVER break down?

Of course, we cleaned it all up as much as we could. But there were tiny pieces of glass that we couldn’t fish from the ashes, and certainly other items had already worked down into the dirt. Haven’t they ever heard, “Take only pictures; leave only footprints”? Didn’t their mother ever tell them, “Leave your campsite cleaner than you found it”? These people didn’t even try. They didn’t give a shit. It makes me so mad I tear up. Why? Why do they not care?

This is perhaps a negative way to start the blogs about our rather wonderful vacation, but if you were to go to this place, if you were to witness the awe and beauty of a land so wild and lovely that it makes your heart ache, you would be protective, too. Lake City and the surrounding San Juan Mountains are my favorite place in the entire world. It is perfection where nature meets people. It is the best vacation spot I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been blessed enough to see some amazing places (Ireland, Italy, Germany, Hawaii, Austria, Paris, Amsterdam, Mexico, the Bahamas, California, Oregon, Louisiana…;), and I want it to stay that way. I want my children to be able to enjoy it, too. So take the minimal effort to throw your bottles in the trash, asshole. And so help me God, if I see you toss a cigarette butt out the window, you can bet your butt I’m calling the cops on your license plate.

So educate yourself, bitches.

Happier vacation blogs to come.

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