Bad period

I haven't posted for a while. This is partly because I haven't had much to say, but mostly because I have been suffering an extended period of feeling absolutely bloody awful.

My normal downward swings in mood last three or four days. My current episode is now approaching three weeks.

I am suffering from all of my normal symptoms:

• Variable mood, often changing suddenly, and easily becoming extreme (sudden crying, or easily becoming frustrated for example).
• Mood predominantly negative, and the full range of negative states: complete apathy, melancholy, fear (particularly about the future), general lowness.
• Periods of lacking emotion, I usually use words such as flat and empty to describe these.
• A desire to give up.
• Constant negative thought processes; running myself down, convincing myself that everything I attempt will fail, playing out depressing or very negative situations that could occur.
• Hints of my old paranoia and sense of persecution.
• Anxiety in public and around people.
• A feeling of being mentally blocked when I attempt things.
• Poor self care.
  

These are all things that to one degree or another I have learned to cope with, and can at the very least wait out until I find my way back into my usual rut.

That I have felt this bad for so long is starting to worry me, and is taking its toll. Being low and being tired, both physically and mentally, feed off of each other. My body is struggling with general tiredness and interrupted sleep. My mind is running out of energy and fight completely.

I have been coping quite well, better than I have in the past. Bits of last week were hell, but I fought through it and managed to be in work Monday to Thursday, only giving in on Friday. I didn't achieve much when I was there, but I tried.

Of course things have been hard for people around me as well. My wife is wonderful and has been so much help, but I worry about how much stress I am causing her. My work colleagues have been very supportive, putting up with me being next to useless and trying to encourage me along. I have gone from being mildly unreliable in World of Warcraft (WoW) to extremely unreliable.

I really want this to be over. I am running out of strength and I am getting worried. Mostly, I want to stop troubling everyone around me.

A little while ago I said that I would try to post positive things. Friday evening and Saturday bucked the recent trend and were great. On Friday evening I was part of a successful WoW raid; it was the best performance my Guild have put together and a big improvement on our previous attempts. On Saturday I baked cookies and cakes with my wife and we went to our friends' house to watch Eurovision. Which as ever was terrible/brilliant.

Small steps

I have many difficulties in communicating with people; I struggle to use telephones, I find it hard to speak up in person with all but a handful of people that I feel comfortable with, in situations that a lot of people would think would be easier and of less importance (OK, I mean when playing World of Warcraft) I am still very anxious about letting myself be heard.

It has long been a belief in my mind that if I practice things that I find hard, including challenging communications, I will grow more used to them and ultimately more comfortable. This is something I think applies particularly to using the telephone. The practice makes perfect, or at least not scared, theory is something that other people have pushed me toward as well.

There are times when I really doubt that it is true, when I can see nothing beyond me always being a pathetic individual too scared to pick up a phone and too self-absorbed to ask for something or voice an opinion in even the most friendly and safe environment.

Today at work I have managed the unthinkable; I have made two phone calls within the space of about ten minutes; one to a Help desk of the company that manages the payment of one of our bursaries and one to a parent of a student who left a message on my voicemail.

Do I feel good to have overcome my anxiety and to have completed a basic part of my role? Do I feel satisfied that I have taken a step in the direction of a more rational view of things? Do I buggery. I am terrified that the phone is going to ring again. I am scared of having to send an e-mail to the student who prompted the first phone call. What I want to do now is go home, climb into bed, and curl up under the duvet.

For some time I have been meaning to ask one of my WoW guildmates if she is able to make one or two items that would help me in game. All I needed was a little bit of information, it would take her a few seconds and a handful of mouse clicks to help me. She is a nice person and always seems happy to help people. I didn't even need to do it in a public way, I could communicate entirely privately with her.

Finally last night I managed to do it after hours of avoidance. Even then I still felt guilty about taking up her time and frustrated with myself for making such a fuss (an internal fuss that is, no-one else knew). At best there was a sense of relief that I didn't need to worry about not doing asking any more.

Every step that should be taking me forwards seems to drag me down as much as those that are clear mistakes.

Wow, what a geek

There is a large part of my life that I have only hinted at in previous posts. In actuality, I thought I had posted about it in previous years, but having browsed my archives it appears that I didn't. At any, I have a problem, I play World of Warcraft (WoW). It is actually worse than that; the Lovely Lady Duck plays as well, and I am the one who introduced her to the game. I have geekiness and I infected my wife.

For those who are only vaguely aware of WoW, it is a Massively Multi-player On-line Role-playing Game (MMORPG). To dissect the jargon, a large number of people play the game on a central sever, interacting with other each as well as computer controlled entities, taking on the roles of characters in the world.

In particular WoW is a fairly normal high fantasy setting, although one with a great deal of depth and development in the background and history. Blizzard, who created and run the game, claim more than 11 million active accounts, although you never interact with that many people; there are multiple servers each with (this is a guess) around ten thousand active players.

Anyway, why did I decide to start talking about this now? There are I think three motivating factors:

1. WoW is such a large part of my life. In blunt terms of time, I typically spend fifteen to twenty hours each week playing, which is a substantial proportion of my free time. WoW has had substantial effects on my mood and mental state over the two years or so that I have been playing; both positive and negative. This influence is something that interests me, much as the influence of music does.

2. I want to write a few things about WoW itself. I don't want to become a full time WoW blogger, but that are a few things that I want to throw into the mix.

3. I have always enjoyed writing bits of fiction. Some of this has been fan-fiction set in gaming universes (X-COM and Laser Squad Nemesis before WoW). If I were to put a little of my writing up here, it would seem odd to include WoW fiction without first setting my WoW background up.