The Handmade Geek

So, after my depression made a reappearance with the advent of this project, I made a little vow to myself: I wouldn’t spend every single entry chronicling exactly how crappy I was feeling. It was well-intentioned—this is supposed to be a journal about one man’s quest to build a house, and spending multiple entires discussing the hurdles my brain erects trying to stop me from achieving my goals is a subject I couldn’t help but feel would be rather boring to casual readers. But as the weeks have worn on, I’ve had a bit of a change of heart on this front for a couple of different reasons.

Firstly, the depression got so acute that it basically drove my progress to a standstill. I couldn’t talk about my depression, but in this particular case, if I didn’t write about it, I wouldn’t be writing about anything at all (and, indeed, haven’t).

Secondly, it’s become increasingly clear that without dealing with my depression on a very basic level, this house will never materialize. Consequently, my finishing the house has become contingent on me conquering my demons. So, dealing with my depression is actually a very real first step to me building my house.

Thirdly, in talking about this with various friends, it’s also become clear that many of them are also afflicted with depression to some degree or another. It really seems to be one of the last elephants in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Or. To be more precise, it’s a gigantic elephant in a tiny room which is pressing everyone into the walls, but everyone still seems predisposed to behave like if they wait long enough it’ll just go away on its own. Except it won’t. The other thing that’s become clear is that my friends and I are all looking for solutions to our problems, and while I definitely don’t have all the answers, I can certainly talk about my steps and missteps so other people out there can avoid them.

I spent a long time recently talking to one of my best friends, Jenn, who also happens to be getting her PhD in Psychology. There were no dramatic revelations over the course of our conversation, no “AND NOW YOU SEE HOW THE TIME YOU STUBBED YOUR TOE IN SECOND GRADE IS THE REASON YOU HAVE THESE ISSUES!” Just a lot of: “This is how you should structure your day,” and, “This is how you write daily goals and to-do lists.” But that conversation has had more of an effect on me over the past week than any amount of self-analysis over the past 20 years, and while I feel like I’m not quite on the road to recovery yet, I think I’ve got some basic tools to help me get there.

Because, aside from good advice, the other invaluable thing Jenn gave me was this: The Antidepressant Skills Workbook

Seriously, if anyone reading this is prone to mild depression, I can’t recommend this book enough. Problems I’ve been wrestling with for my entire adult life are deconstructed and given solutions to—the principal one being (at least in my case) setting unrealistic goals. Setting goals that are WAY too large and ambiguous. Like saying, for instance, “I’m going to build a house in two years!” “Cool! How are you going to do that?” “I have no idea.” *promptly spiral into depression and abandon project*

The guide gives you step-by-step instructions for how to break down both daily to-do lists and massive projects into bite-sized chunks, hopefully helping you avoid some of the crippling anxiety that comes with staring blankly at goals so big you don’t even know what the first step is in dealing with them.

So, go read the PDF. It’s really, really worth it. I honestly can’t stress that enough. And then in the next column I’ll talk about taking my previously unreasonable project goals (i.e. wanting to have a finished house design by the end of November when I don’t know the first friggin’ thing about house-building) and breaking them into achievable sizes.

Being depressed sucks balls. Hard. Like, sweaty, unwashed donkey balls. But being given the keys to manage and potentially put your depression into remission is like being given a new lease on life. A new life where you’re not forced to put donkey testicles in your mouth.  

Not too much to report this week, so let’s get right to it.

• Dealing with depression (as outlined a couple of posts back) has been taking up a good portion of my time, and any opportunities I might have to work dilligently on house planning and design have been given over to mitigating that situation. There’s been a bit of an unfortunate collision of stressful and depressing circumstance, really: starting a new project (exciting, but stressful) and the abrupt appearance of fall/winter, where the temperature’s dropped dramatically and the cold, cold rains have begun again. It’s trite to say I’m affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder, because I’m not sure I know anyone on the West Coast who isn’t annually affected by the blanket of grey that covers everything for seven to eight months, but it honestly doesn’t make things any easier. On a related topic, Hyperbole and a Half just published a very accurate (and darkly humorous) portrait of depression. Read it and laugh to keep from crying… literally.

• I sold those 11 boxes of books I was talking about earlier at Pulp Fiction, my local new/used book store of choice. Net total? $1100! The owner post-dated the cheque until November, since it’s kind of a larger-than-average amount, but that doesn’t matter too much, since the money is going straight into my savings account. Anyway, in summary, WOO!

• I finally finished re-reading A Feast for Crows and have now been able to start reading A Dance with Dragons. This has nothing specifically to do with me building a house, aside from the fact that due to my depression I just want to lie in bed and read about my crew in Westeros. Apparently, however, I have other things to deal with which demand my time. *sigh* Fine. Whatever.

Depression—both a mental condition and an old-school Australian hardcore band.

Of all the budgeting I have to do in my life (money and time being the two most obvious examples), the hardest one is probably depression. Yeah, I have to budget for depression. I have to factor it into the equations for any project I start out on and factor it in tenfold for any project I want to see through to completion.

Here’s how it works for me:

1. I get an idea for a really great creative project.

2. I brainstorm and come up with an assload of cool ideas and notes.

3. I start to work on the project itself.

4. I get depressed and extremely unmotivated.

5. The project usually falls apart.

6. Repeat as necessary.

In terms of the why and how, I don’t really want to go deep into the underpinnings of my psyche for a blog post, but this is something I’ve been wrestling with for my entire life and it manifests itself in any creative project I undertake. House-building is the latest one.

It takes effort to get out of bed these days, and chores I used to find routine and untroubling (dishes, laundry) are now arduous and pains-in-the-ass. Working out, which used to be a six days a week activity is now a three day a week activity and it’s probably only that frequent because I have a gym buddy for two of those. In short, my subconscious self would like my life to grind to a halt until I give up my dreams of building a house, at which point things can return to their regularly scheduled averageness. “Don’t rock the boat,” it says to me. “Just be happy doing what you’re doing.”

But I’m not. I’m really not, and while I’ve succumbed to its seemingly logical arguments over the years as to why I should set aside various projects, I’m not doing it with this one. This one is critical to my present and future well-being, as well as that of my wife. So, no. Fuck you subconscious. Even though it takes me about triple the effort it would normally, I’m going to sit at the computer and write until the blog entries are done. And I’ll still get everything else done that needs doing. To do that, though, requires a huge amount of determination and organization. Everything that used to be routine now needs to be plotted out. To-do lists need to be formulated for the most minute tasks of the day. And energy needs to be allocated for.

They say that around 35, your energy levels take a bit of a nosedive, and I can confirm that. I’ve spent the last five years adjusting to the fact that, like the water table in Nevada, the boundless reserves of energy I’ve been accustomed to tapping into my entire life are swiftly drying up and I need to either scale down the amount of things I want to get done in a day or find new ways of doing things. Probably both. So, I’m trying to eat better. I know that’s critical to the way I feel and my general sense of well-being. Let’s face it, I can’t sit around in an evening and drink a two-litre bottle of Coke to keep me awake until the writing’s done like I used to. (And yeah, I really did used to do that. Fairly regularly.) I’m actually trying to slide my diet toward vegan. I kind of doubt it will ever entirely get there, but it’s something to shoot for.

Naps/siestas are something I’ve also come to see the long-term benefits of indulging in, not just because naps are awesome, but because of the physical and mental benefits. The difference in my general emotional state in the late afternoon on a day where I busted my ass all day without a nap vs. one with is practically incalculable. It turns me into a cranky, stressed-out asshole, and nobody needs that (least of all me). Fifteen minutes is usually enough for me to feel better and a half hour is round about perfect. We’re so wrapped up in the Protestant work ethic over here in Canada and the U.S. that taking a break in the middle of the afternoon seems like a compromise with either laziness or weakness, but it’s not—it’s really, really not.

The thing that’s most important for me to keep in mind, well, forever, but certainly until my house is built, is that stress can be minimized by taking everything one step at a time. Yeah, it sounds like advice you’d read in Chicken Soup for the House-Builder’s Soul, but it’s honestly something I could stand to hear more. I have two years to build my house. While it would be cool to skate in under the deadline, pushing myself too far, too fast will end up with me burning myself out. This is the point where I have to be the tortoise and not the hare, doing everything in order and taking everything in stages. My subconscious feels like if I don’t give 100% of my available energy for the duration of the project, then I’ll lose interest and find something else to fixate on, but (as you may have pieced together earlier in this piece) my subconscious has a habit of lying to me.

Oh, I almost forgot: the most, most, MOST important thing I have to remember on a day-to-day basis is not to forget to drink my tea in the morning. Seriously, I did that yesterday and felt spaced-out for half the day until I remembered and remedied the situation. Half a day wasted thanks to a lack of caffeine. I mean, if you’re prone to depression anyway, depriving yourself of your morning upswing is stupid beyond words. Bad times; don’t do it. Caffeine is your friend.

You know, when you say, “This is week 3 of my 104 week house-building time limit,” it simultaneously sounds like you have all the time in the world and so little time that you should start running around flailing your arms wildly in the air. At least that’s what it feels like to me, anyway. So, what have I been up to for the past week?

• Well, for starters, I’ve been wrestling with depression and anxiety. No, I know—it doesn’t sound very fun or constructive, and it’s not, but I am finding ways to circumvent it. In fact, I’m writing a blog entry on the subject which will be up on Friday, so let’s save that exciting talk for later.

• I’ve also been culling the crap out of my book collection. You know the Billy bookcases from IKEA? About 7’ high and 3’ wide? I have three of them in the hallway just for my books (Carla has one for hers as well). There’s no way we’ll be able to fit all those books into a tiny house, so I’ve been trying to whittle my collection down so it fits onto two of them. (Two of them might not fit either, but one step at a time…) That’s right, I’ve spent a portion of the past week trying to further eliminate 1/3 of my already shrunken library. Still, it hasn’t been as hard as I thought it was going to be. Once you get over the concept of “Collections for Collection’s Sake,” getting rid of things becomes much easier. For instance, I’ve been collecting John Bellairs books nearly all my life. He wrote gothic horror novels for children and was damn good at it, but when I’m actually in the mood to read one of his books (which is fairly rare), I usually reach for five or six out of the 30-or-so books in the set. The question then becomes “would keeping only my five or six favourites inhibit my love of his books as a whole?” Hmm, probably not. And BAM, twenty-five of them are on the block and a foot and a half of bookshelf space is freed up. The interesting thing is once you make the transition to thinking like that about a single thing, you start looking at all your possessions the same way and once you’ve given all of your stuff a critical once-over/purging, your house quickly becomes a repository for everything you feel really strongly about. Looking around and only seeing things which are excellent or beautiful is freeing, and genuine affection and respect for your things overtakes feelings where before you only kept things around out of obligation. tl;dr? I culled 7 more boxes of books from my collection this week. Boo-yah.

• Went to the library and thoroughly browsed their architecture and design sections. What I learned: my conception of a “small house” and most people’s conceptions of a “small house” are VASTLY different. By way of example, many of the houses in the small house books I looked at were at least double the size of the house where I spent my teenage years. There were a couple of of cool and inspirational volumes, yeah, but most of it wasn’t remotely applicable to my needs. I need to go back and have a look at books which collect innovative storage ideas—those are going to be way more useful.

• I spent a bunch of time poring over various house books and making notes, so I’ll have a coherent design by the end of November. In all honesty, it’s probably not going to take that long.

• Oh, I also indulged myself with the latest (and potentially best) bit of house pron which just came in the mail: the Lee Valley hardware catalogue. All the storage solutions and wrought iron drawer pulls I can handle… *drooooooool*