jennings rampage

If I owe you an e-mail, I apologize. I’ve been sleepy.

It’s a good thing that I love irony, otherwise I wouldn’t be sure what to make of the fact that I’m the #1 search result on Google for the query “story of motivation.” Seriously. You go to Google, you punch in “story of motivation,” you hit the lucky button, you get here. That’s fucked up.

My story of motivation goes like this: I’m very very unmotivated. I’m consistently thirty or so minutes late to work every day, not because I oversleep, but because I’m sitting on the couch watching the clock on the cable box tick minutes away. My output at work is in the toilet — I pass the time surfing the Internet even though I’m completely aware that my managers get a periodic report detailing my Internet usage down to the millisecond, and I’m pretty sure my coworkers hate me. No hard evidence there, but a definite shift in attitude. I leave my office as soon as I can every day and head back to my apartment, which I half-cleaned last night for the first time in months only because the owners will be inspecting the renovations today, and the piles of laundry and cat hair could be distracting for them. I could also be writing when I’m home, and I’m the proud author of the first couple of paragraphs of several brilliant essays, but instead of staying on task, I choose instead to look at the same Web pages I look at in my office, and maybe switch it up with a little Internet poker. Weekends are a little better since I’m not at work, but I didn’t even really enjoy my vacation that much. So yesterday afternoon, after my third take-a-book-to-the-toilet break of the day, I catalogued that last paragraph and decided it was enough.

When I finally got into work this morning, I jotted down the phone number for my insurance company’s mental health hotline and snuck into an empty conference room. I phoned them up and asked for a referral to a psychiatrist. The woman on the other end wanted to know what was wrong, so I did my best to summarize the past seventeen months of my life — the whole “I quit my job in New York then my mom was diagnosed with a brain tumor then I wallowed around for awhile doing nothing then I finally decided to move home to care for her just in time for her to die then I had to have my brother bail me out and get me an apartment in Norfolk then I got a shitty job which I hated to get by then my brother got deployed off to that war thing then I finally got a great job here but now I’m all depressed and unresolved and self-destructive” story. I have an appointment for next Wednesday.

I feel better having made the appointment, but that’s an awesome symptom of depression: the little accomplishments get completely blown out of proportion, and it doesn’t take much to have a sense of productivity. That’s what I felt last summer, unemployed in Brooklyn, running myself into the ground in debt, clinging onto the notion that I was ready to be a professional writer or actor or performer or anything at all but a fucking computer guy, while my mom was dying at a rate that I just didn’t understand at the time. I was thrilled with myself for just having logged onto Monster.com, despite the fact that I wasn’t actually submitting my resume for anything, and the fact that I wasn’t going to any other job websites, and the fact that I hadn’t left my apartment for three days or more. It felt great to just pick up and move away from all of that and finally be where I needed to be, but it’s a good thing I love irony, otherwise I wouldn’t be sure what to make of the fact that my mom died twenty-eight days after I moved home. Wait, that’s not irony. Nevermind.

The counselor at the mental health hotline asked if I had considered suicide, and I told her I hadn’t. There’s a voice in my head that says “I hate my life” every few minutes or so, and I’ve been operating under the assumption that everyone’s at least a little suicidal, but I have several dozen things to live for, and I’m nowhere near done with the stuff I’m here to do, so that’s just not going to happen. I’m just pissed that the stuff I’m here to do is piling up while I watch the clock on the cable box tick the minutes and I can’t make myself focus on practically anything. It takes me forty-five minutes to jerk off. I’m sorry I had to share that, but I think it makes my point.

Bring on the professional analysis, and bring on the psychotropic drugs. (Just not the ones that would make jerking off altogether impossible.) I’ve been proud of myself for not doing anything like that my entire life, but that’s a pretty silly thing to be proud of. Whenever a friend of mine shares a fear or an uncertainty with me, I point out that our society and our lives are so different than what they would have been a hundred years ago, that a man brought from that time to the present day would breakdown within hours from the stress. Our species hasn’t evolved in that century — it should seem miraculous that we cope with our lives as well as we do. I’m just going to get a little help.

I should also get back to work.