How Dubya is Making Me Depressed

I've been wandering around lately, bitching and moaning and woe-is-meing about how I just don't understand where all this anxiety is coming from...and the depression. Oy, the depression. If you ask me, I'll tell you that I reallllly don't understand where the depression is coming from; I've only been mildly depressed before, and only a few bried times in my life. It's my neurotransmitters, I'll tell you. They're just fucked up. I have nothing to be depressed about. It's just those doggone chemicals in my brain playing some kind of game of hide-and-go-seek.

When I tell you that, I'll be lying through my teeth, of course. And I start to realize it more and more each day, as the torpor that seems to have enveloped me grows more and more...is there such a word as torporous? Stuporous? Whatever. You get my drift. I'm sluggish and slow and lethargic, and so apathetic that while I have the occasional vague thought about bursting into tears, the truth is that I simply can't be bothered. And I know that there are reasons for this. In fact, I can even tell you what the reasons are. What I can't tell you is why they're suddenly bothering me now, weighing me down now, making me torporous and stuporous and unable to pick up a thesaurus to come up with real words to describe how I feel now.

There are, basically, two such reasons: work and Dubya.

There's nothing new about the work thing. I don't want to be a working mom any more. Period. I'm done with being the bread winner. I want to be supported, coddled. I want to be able to make choices about what I do with my day that are not based on keeping us with a roof over our head and food on the table. I want the pressure off of me. I want to be taken care of. I want to be able to play with someone else's money, and not have more than nine out of every ten dollars I spend be one I earned. I want to do what I want to do. And so I'm acting like a big, spoiled brat, simply because that's not the way my life is. Yeah, I know. Poor me. You're no doubt crying me a river, right? I'm telling you, half the reason I don't like to 'fess up to this being one of the primary causes of my current apathy is because I think it's ridiculous to feel this way, and if the roles were reversed and it was Baroy saying this, I'd basically be telling him to suck it up and deal, because there are worse things in this world than having to work for a living. And I know it. And yet, how many entries does this make now where I whine about how I hate my lot in life?

And then there's Dubya. I can't really say that Dubya's depressing me, because he's not. He's terrifying me--or at least the people around him are. What's depressing me is that it seems like so many people don't see it, it being the threat that I believe he represents to all of us. When I think about Dubya and his team getting into office again, this time without the need to modulate themselves in order to be reelected, I get the same feeling of panic and fear for myself and my family that I get when I think about Stalker Girl. But mixed in with the panic and fear is sadness. I feel unutterably sad--like tears-in-my-eyes sad--every time I think about the fact that there are people out there, close to 50 percent of the population, more or less, who don't see the looming threat that I see. Or worse--much, much worse--don't care about anybody except themselves. People who don't care that this regime wants to legislate and codify discrimination against people based on sexual preference because they're not gay, so it doesn't hurt them. People who don't care that this regime wants to bring together church and state because it's their church and their beliefs being pushed forward, so it's not going to hurt them. People who don't seem to care about the lies and the cover ups and the flat-out propaganda, because they're lies they want to believe.

It depresses me that there are people who actually believe these politicians when they say that our economy is getting better and our schools are getting better. People who actually think that our civil liberties are a small price to pay for a sense of security, even if it turns out to be a false one.

I know I'm not the only one so paranoid that I think something truly dire will happen if these power-hungry old white men get four more years. I know I'm not. But sometimes it sure feels that way. I'm scared. I'm so scared of what might happen, what can happen, what history has shown possible, that I literally can't stand to watch what's going on any more. News about Bushian politics has now joined news about child abuse and the like in my list of la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you-I-don't-want-to-know-because-it's-too-painful-and-horrible-to-contemplate topics. It makes me literally and physically anxious. I'd say that I'm worried about who's next in the panoply of people no longer considered to have rights equal to the 'rest of us,' but that would be assuming that I'm not heartsick, not just plain sick, at the list as it stands right now.

So that's where I stand. There are two things that are making me depressed and anxious, and they permeate pretty much every single aspect of my life. Not to mention that they continue to force me to think about myself and my freaking moods and my state of mind and lack of mental health on a minute-by-minute basis, and I AM SO FRIGGIN TIRED OF BEING INSIDE MY OWN HEAD THAT I CAN'T EVEN BEGIN TO TELL YOU. I'm bored and anxious, depressed and paranoid, apathetic and terrified. Whee! Party at my house! I'll bring the Weight Watchers Core-friendly bean salad, if you'll bring the antidepressants and anxiolytics. How about it?