Your power is weak old man

One of the basics of CBT is the search for disconfirming evidence for the negative and disabling cognitions that accompany depressive episodes. For me, the idea that I could no longer write was foremost and, increasingly, I believed that I’d lost my report drafting mojo. I spent hours sitting in front of the computer with a report deadline looming, paralysed, unable to put together a sentence, with critical voices in my head saying 

“They’ll just think it’s shit. You’re power is weak old man. It’s game-over for your career.”

I could speculate about why I think this was happening and might in a later blog, but I had a slender hunch that my intellectual powers and writing ability hadn’t entirely deserted me...just the will to churn out yet another report.

This blog is therefore an attempt to write in a different genre to ‘the academic report’ and produce evidence that contradicts the powerful conviction that I have become a feeble-minded dolt. If I can blog cogently, engagingly and with occasional moments of wit, the future will seem less bleak. 

Okay, it’s still pretty bleak if you’re an academic who can’t write reports any more, because that’s usually the pay off for the funder at the end of the contract, so your academic career is, as they say, F.U.K.T.  But if it is just the report writing bit of my brain that is disordered, it does mean that there is some possibility of reinventing myself in some way that is still intellectually rewarding (and pays the bills).

I can, of course, see that blogging about the experiences of a depressed Diceman is not a very cutting-edge idea. Luke Rhinehart has had numerous imitators since 1971, including – as I am discovering - roughly 10% of my friends. 

It feels bewildering to understand how completely I had missed hearing about the Diceman. Such discoveries generate the inverse of the surprise when I learn that some celebrity is dead, months, or perhaps years, after their demise, because I was on holiday in Cornwall the particular week that ‘The artist formerly known as Prince’ became missing presumed dead after a tragic hang gliding accident in which his minuscule body was dragged higher and higher into the stratosphere until he vanished permanently from sight. 

In a moment, the person shifts from the category of ‘living pop star’ to ‘defunct concept’ as rapidly as Luke Rhinehart recently changed from ‘unknown 1970’s fictional character’ to ‘constant companion’, or some idiot starts another unfounded and highly improbable rumour on the internet that then circulates endlessly from one fool to another.

A thing about writing academic reports is that generally they contain many thousands of words that go unread about stuff you have carefully reviewed or investigated, whereas the blog seems a simpler literary discipline, insofar as it mainly just draws on the rubbish that goes on in your head and is much shorter. I’m setting a self-imposed limit of 500 words per entry, which this one is exactly... now.