FIRST THINGS FIRST



The Big List of Gifts
My New Sketch Blog

WHAT'S NEW?

Well, it's been a whole couple of weeks since I've updated. Alas, I'm not expecting that to change any time soon.

Recently I began attending therapy for a condition I knew I had that only appeared to surface recently - depression. Now, don't let that term fool you. Depression isn't a condition of moping. Rather, depression is a "chemical imbalance" of the brain that results in a lack of seratonin, a chemical responsible for feelings of pleasure. What's more, my emotions have been out of the roof. Before this week I started ecstatic and dropped to miserable with no apparent cause, with periods of apathy - an incapability of feeling anything at all - in between.

This week I've undergone days and days worth of nothing but apathy.

It's a difficult feeling to describe; unlike happiness and sadness, not everyone experiences total apathy, but I'll try my best. Under normal circumstances, if you receive a compliment, you feel a fleeting happiness. For me, even when people complimented me on my outfit, my hair, my makeup, that fleeting happiness never came. It's a sensation of numbness, of loneliness, of hindering fatigue.

It isn’t until you’ve felt a succession of apathetic days that you realize what a blessing it is to feel anything at all.

Apathy comes with a bigger price tag than just indifference. Doing much of anything has been draining. Even doing what I love - drawing, writing, ect. - has become monotonous.
It's easy to see, then, why I haven't updated in so long.

My therapist tells me that feelings of apathy that last for days on end are a symptom of an advanced stage of depression. She's referring me to a child psychiatrist to get an exam to test whether I need antidepressants or not.

I can't tell you when I'll be out of my funk, but for all y'all out there who cared enough to read all of that, I promise you I won't stop drawing, ever. One day I'll get back into drawing regularly and I'll start updating more often. With any luck, the first to come'll be trade halves that are by now woefully overdue.

Thank you all for being so patient with me. I hope it isn't too much to ask for just a little longer to climb over this hurdle, antidepressants or no, so I can get back into the swing of things.


I wanted to thank all of my wonderful friends, including ~TinFoilHatPengy, ~TheGreatWall, ~Salferna and ~diligo for helping me through my fluctuating emotions. I love you all to pieces.