bawdy without organs

The profound self-critic I have is one thing, but I have felt a distinct lack of meaning in writing, and, really, most things I do. I can ascribe this to Major Depressive Disorder, which is part of it, but that provides an explanation and too many possible ways out(therapy[and a subtree of all the kinds of therapy], medication[and a subtree of all the kinds of medication], meditation[also many kinds], exercise[doing it, doesn't really work], better sleep[I'm bad at it] etc, etc). My abstracting, conceptual brain needs to attach words to these feelings, not a diagnosis.

There was a sense of meaning I had when I was younger. I would characterize it as an impulse to act from within. As my sense of self shifted to external sources, that impulse quieted and the big, unwieldy sense of obligation took over. My debt to the people who were kind to me, a karmic debt I owed a world of beautiful creatures and things. So I would get meaning from serving others - how very Catholic of me, which I was raised as, so I can trace that thought at least. But helping others, serving, obligations generally, became my life in substantial ways. I think this is good to a certain extent, but not really sustainable for writing(well maybe a certain type of writing). More generally, this sense of obligation also became work, and I took less and less pleasure in it. I needed to clear my obligations so I could get to living, but living happened only in certain ways, not the writing I wanted to be doing(not always, I've written some things). What I'm circling around is this slide from meaning to obligation, and a collapse of pleasure from that slide. Obligations become work, and all I do, and many people do, is work! And this is not the work of humans that refreshes the spirit after effort. It is terminal, a compartmentalization of work into something bad, and the rest of life as this inaccessible good thing you have to finish all your work to do. As far as anything can feel unnatural, this feels unnatural. I can only ascribe the cause to a Fordism of the mind and alienation from labor. We do so much meaningless work the poison of it breaches containment and the entire concept is rendered unlivable. So much so, we have AI to do "work" for us that would otherwise be pleasurable and rewarding with novelty, like research, writing, thinking.

Today I took a low dose([redacted]mgs) of my prescribed antidepressant, and as is typical, for me, I felt effects immediately: heightened energy, slight tension and a fluttery feeling around my heart(anatomical, not metaphorical), certain digestive issues. My psychiatrists are uniformly surprised when I report back these immediate effects. This can be chalked up to placebo, perhaps, but regardless, the standard line I hear from psychiatrists, the line I've heard all my life since I've been on these things for almost all my life, is that you won't feel different for a week or so. This has never been the case for me. Contrast with *recreational* drugs where the whole point is to feel the effect immediately, and no one questions that. Same with prescribed amphetamines like JD Vyvanse and presumably other drugs, which you are also told you'll feel the effect of immediately.

Setting aside the actual neuroscience here, which I don't know technically but the outcomes of which is certainly a felt knowledge for me, I wonder if this is a kind of normalization of psych drugs to distinguish themselves from recreational drugs. Like these are drugs to integrate into your life in order to be a more functional worker, so it will take time to be productive. Trust the process and the doctors prescribing these. Don't use them to get a boost or rapid outcome, because that's what the bad drugs are for and these are the good drugs. Rely on these to become a kind of pharmacontology that cannot exist without these pills, rather than supplementing with them.

tagged by @sounisian-magus, thank you for the tag : D my first written thing ever was on sheets of paper when I was seven years old(it was about time travel. I was extremely sophisticated). My first fan fiction was on web 1.0 forums from way long ago and is now entirely obliterated. Here's something I wrote when I was like 20 as a joke: "See, I think you dick is a Platonist and is easily swayed by my purely deductive reasoning. It's stretching out towards God right now.”

And this isn't from my last story, but this post made me revisit old writing(like, way old stuff I have squirreled away on the internet) and found this from a short one I wrote in the early 2010s.  I hadn't posted much to my PEP because I hadn't felt very positive lately. Really, I've been feeling pretty negative, and PEP --it was called the Perpetual Encouragement Paradigm when the platform was being refined and streamlined in an office somewhere in the Bay Area-- isn't a place to share negativity. PEP distilled and purified the old social media networks. Your profile included the barest of personal details: real name, location(current), birthdate, profession, and a picture you are required to update weekly. You can do two things on the platform: post a personal accomplishment of some kind or give a PEP to the posts of others. A PEP showed you approved of the accomplishment, whether it was someone brushing their teeth or getting married. Posts that mentioned a product or brand would be automatically PEPped by bots, and high numbers of PEPs would be rewarded with discounts on products, the purchase of which would then be celebrated on PEP. The circle drew itself.

Spoiler warning, the story ended with the narrator masturbating in a public toilet!

As I pull up my pants, a curiosity catches me. I open the PEP app. I tap the search button and enter #public #masturbation. Over eighty thousand posts in the past day. PEP is used by six billion people. I read some of the posts: “Just masturbated in a public toilet!” Five thousand PEPs. “I really needed to jerk off in that stall. Feeling great now!” Nineteen thousand PEPs. I feel something inside of me become brittle.