you know what life does sometimes?

sometimes, life tries really hard to make you feel bad, right?

and when you let it, you can get sucked into all kinds of spiral-ish behavior or fossilizing apathy. (i know all this stuff vicariously, by the way. in super rare cases i get kind of low-key glum or fatalistic, but i have an awesome boyfriend who won't let me stay like that for very long. and it's also just not really my nature. on the other hand, it is weirdly his nature, and even though he has multiple awesome girlfriends who won't let him stay that way for long, he ends up circling back there on a pretty regular basis.)

recently, msg has had some urky splurts of this behavior, and it's resulted in ...

• neglecting his writing
• buying way too much manga
• watching absurd amounts of youtube and anime
• making several big-ticket stress purchases

... and other things along those lines as well, but i'm getting kinda bored of listing them off.

only here's the thing.

most of that stuff has turned out pretty damn awesome. holy stromboli, have we read some awesome manga this past year! and watched several anime that are among the best tv shows we've ever seen. and found phenomenal music to listen to, and played a bunch of fun games as a way of ignoring bad stuff going on in the world and procrastinating all kinds of bleh responsibilities msg ought to take better care of but wigs out about and dives into whatever escapism he can to avoid. some of those stress purchases have been new sets of his favorite game, heroscape, which sash and aers have gotten madly addicted to, and another even more irresponsibly expensive one is going to be arriving in a couple weeks and will rock everybody's world here at worthy acres (at least, according to my predictions -- and as a spoiler hint, there may be some saucy photoshoot activity going on as a result, which i'll post on whichever one of my blogs the pictures are a better fit for).

so what's my point?

my point is, yeah, msg has not been very productive lately. and he's given himself some stress boosts by over-procrastinating to the point a number of things have almost bitten him in the ass about. not so many years back, he would have gotten pretty deeply depressed over all of this.

but do you know what the best medicine for depression is, if you can pull it off?*

enjoying yourself.

like, really enjoying yourself and the people around you and whatever art and fiction and music makes you swoon with good emotions.

and he's actually been doing that, and the rest of us have been reminding him that he's been doing it whenever he starts to steer into a guilt/apathy/depression whirlpool.

because the thing is, no matter how bad current events or personal issues or work stresses get, there is still a crap-ton of wonderful stuff in the world to enjoy, if you can steal even a few moments here and there to experience it.

so remember that and use it to take care of yourself and then keep your day-to-day existence afloat enough that you don't capsize or sink.

it's working pretty well for us around here these days!

xoxo,
claire

(*disclaimer! enjoying yourself is not actually literal medicine! and some people do need actual literal medicine, which nobody should be afraid to look into if they need help with depression. msg takes some stuff called bupropion, and i'd say we've seen some pretty good evidence it helps -- although i'm not going so far as to say it helps as much as having six scrumptious and fun love-bunny girlfriends does. your mileage may vary!)