Uninformed Opinions: Depressed Edition
On starting somewhere and going nowhere slow
Depression is a young woman’s game. Shaving their hair off bald, chain smoking cigarettes, medicating themselves into a coma, intense meaningless sex with random hot strangers. It’s all languid moves and grand gestures resolved in 2 hours, 265 pages, 40 minutes with time left over for commercials.
As an older woman, it’s not so romantic or easy to diagnose. Maybe it’s menopause or just tired-of-this-shit-itis. How can one tell?
1. Taking two hours to cook bacon and eggs for breakfast on a Sunday morning because your kids got you up at 7:30am to make brioche bread french toast from scratch. Yeah, no. You cook the bacon in the oven at 250 degrees because you might burn it. You cook the scrambled eggs on super low heat so you can sit down and close your eyes and dream about a world where someone else does this shit for you. You wish you allowed boxed cereal in the house, but you’re still carb-phobic, although slightly reformed.
2. Sitting awake in silence for hours because listening to Fiona Apple didn’t deliver the emotional release you needed. It hits like the musings of a wealthy white woman, and you are neither white, wealthy, nor in the mood to muse.
3. Reading Kindle Unlimited literotica to feel something and getting distracted by the uninspired descriptions of orgasms — pleasure rocking through, surging release — until you’re so overcome with Red Pen Syndrome that you toss your e-reader down in frustration.
4. Hearing the opening strings of the Mad Men theme song 92 times in a row and wondering if your pain will ever turn into genius.
5. Driving to the supermarket and missing every turn necessary because you’re just trying to focus on the feel of the imitation leather steering wheel in your hands and stop before you run a red light.
6. Coming home from the supermarket with a bag of Honeycrisp apples and 2 packages of pepperoni and asking Alexa how to turn it into dinner for five.
…filed from my kitchen