#it's time for the yearly 2 week minecraft obsession!

[gothbot-online]

I've been playing the Transformers Minecraft game with @oneshallball and our official gamer opinion is... 10/10. Feels like you're playing the G1 cartoon as a silly little game hehehe

[o-blivia]

Depression in 10 easy steps Step 1. I remember coming home from work at 2 am and this wave of utter dejection hit me. “I don’t know how I’m gonna make it through the next two days.” The thought was like a lead weight sinking through my whole body. And then I went inside. Got high and played videogames until I could barely keep my eyes open. Step 2. I wake up again at around 5 am, having gotten barely an hour of sleep. My thoughts are racing and I can’t stop thinking about my life. Contemplating my future prospects makes me start to cry for the first time in years. Trapped in a job that will never pay me enough to live the kind of life I want. This isn’t what I want. I don’t know if I can keep living like this. I wake BatDan up and tell him that I’ll finally go to the hospital. He strokes my hair while I lie crying on his chest until I fall asleep. Step 3. At the ER, I’m asked repeatedly if I’m hearing voices or if I have a plan. To both, I answer no, but what I don’t manage to articulate is that it’s not so much a plan as a series of possibilities. I could take every pill in the house, but I don’t. Or I could throw myself into traffic, but I don’t. And that’s not a plan anymore than saying someday I’ll learn how to drive or knit a scarf. It’s just a thought you have to make yourself feel better before you get up and go about your life. The first psychiatrist I see is still a student. She is kind and compassionate while doing my assessment. Being similar in age to me, I think she understands where I’m coming from. She makes me feel like she’s really listening to me, at least. Her supervisor is a much older man who immediately, and awkwardly kicks BatDan out of the room, just to tell me that I don’t need to increase the dosage of my SSRI because all the pot I’ve been consuming is just making it ineffective. So I should just stop doing pot. And since all my stressors are related to work, I should consider quitting my job. Otherwise, no action needs to be taken. And then he says to me, “you look sad.” I say that I’m just tired, that I’m always tired. What I really mean is that I expected something to happen or be done to help me not want to kill myself anymore. Instead it feels like they’re sending me away empty-handed. So I stop going to work and go sober for two months. Step 4. A week after going to the ER, I have my yearly physical. My doctor doesn’t seem satisfied with the actions the ER Docs took with me. She ups my meds, orders blood work and faxes in a non-urgent referral for therapy to the CLSC. She says to call if I have trouble adjusting to the new dosage otherwise she’ll see me in six months. I’m out of her office in twenty minutes. Step 5. The process of a non-urgent referral starts with a phone call to figure out what kind of services are required and how urgently that care is needed. My call came about a week after seeing my doctor. This time it’s a man who calls at what would be a decent time for most people, but I’ve worked nights for the past decade and don’t keep decent hours. So I’m not awake enough to remember his name. He starts by asking me what my problems are and what I want to work on with a therapist. He listens for half a minute before telling me that the waiting list is very long for individual therapy, but I can do group counselling. At that exact moment, the prospect of talking about what’s causing my depression with a room full of strangers is too daunting so I decline. There are more follow-up questions and then says he doesn’t understand how therapy can help me with my problems. I don’t know how to describe that moment. It’s like everything goes still, or something in me just kinda turns off. This is pointless. The hope I felt when I decided to go to the ER, that something, anything is going to happen — that I’m finally going to get help in changing my life is snuffed out. He asks me if I just need someone to go through filling out job applications and putting my CV together with me. No, that is not what I need. Handholding isn’t going to resolve my anxiety or give me any sense of direction. I think at this point he can tell that I am becoming frustrated because he says to me that he isn’t judging me, just trying to understand what is going on, in a tone that clearly says he’d been told he has to say that. It’s insincere at best and obviously a lie. I desperately want to be off the phone with him. He follows up with trying to bully me into accepting group therapy by reminding me that otherwise the waiting list is over a year long and with private therapy, I’d have to pay for each session. I don’t have insurance. Then he asks what I would like to do? What would I like to do? What would I like to do? What would I like to do? What would I like to do? Just put me on the list and I’ll look into private therapy. It’s that or nothing. He hasn’t exactly done a good job of selling me on group. He goes through the usual preamble before hanging up, but I suspect he never adds my name to the waiting list. Step 6. Sleep forever. The frustration is hard to swallow and dejection doesn’t taste any better. It doesn’t matter that I don’t think my life is worth living or that I’ll never amount to anything more than this unwashed, bed-locked 29-year-old, too scared to apply for a new job. Step 7. Oversleeping isn’t cutting it anymore and BatDan complains that he misses his girlfriend, but all that momentum to make changes has fallen flat. You move through the house listlessly, full of a nerve-grinding restlessness. Nothing is appealing. Is sitting staring into space a good enough hobby? You go shopping with money you don’t have. That rush of pleasure from getting something new is fleeting and ultimately unsatisfying. You move on to spending hours and hours obsessively playing videogames like Minecraft and The Sims to simulate the feeling of being in control of your life. When the binging runs its course, your head clears and you start to feel like you want to do things again. Maybe you were just burnt out and all you needed was a few weeks of rest? You write down lists and plans and outlines; give yourself deadlines and set alarms to get up at a more reasonable hour —to see the sun for more than an hour or two. Tomorrow you’re going to get so much done. You go to bed early and lie awake until 4 am. When you do get to sleep, those alarms don’t wake you like they’re supposed to. It’s 3 pm by the time you drag yourself out of bed and make some coffee. Much too late in the day to really get anything done, especially when you’re too groggy to feel productive. So you go back to gaming and vow to try again tomorrow. That’s how you find yourself tidally locked between fits of manic organization to self-defeatism and apathy. You’re not being productive and you aren’t getting anything done. Everything takes so long to get done and you don’t have the attention to focus on anything for the length of time it takes to finish one project. This is getting you nowhere. Step 8. Step    9. S t e p     1 0. Depression is a marathon, not a sprint. There’s no overnight miracle fix. Some times I don’t know myself or know what it is that I’m feeling. And it’s hard to feel scared or upset by that when I’m numb. I don’t know where to go from here. I can’t see a future for the gaping maw of a void spooling out in front of me. What do you do when the people who are supposed to help you don’t? How do I fix this? I don’t have insurance, I just want to stop feeling like this. Someone hid the instructions on me.                                                                        This isn’t an ending, is it?

“depression in 10 easy steps” by olivia black