It is absolutely amazing what the tedium of filing can do for one's sense of self awareness. When one's brainpower has been reduced to a trickle, it is somehow opened to the most unexpected revelations. Case in point: today, while sorting through three hundred employee applications from New York, I realized that my most intense moments of fear, self-loathing, and doubt occur when I am exhausted.
I shook my head to clear it, realizing that the night before, when I wasn't tired but got to bed late, I was quite happy. After waking up and missing my workout, slogging my way to work with bags under my eyes that could catch a piano (you know, like that one commercial...), I discovered that I was depressed. "How odd," I thought to myself, but as I looked back on the day, I hadn't been depressed when I was interacting with my coworkers. In fact, I had been quite merry, but after I had gone off by myself to file, losing that interaction, my face reverted to tired mode, and it all came back to me what my grandma said about smiling: Do it.
When I'm tired and alone, my face sags. Somehow, this continuous sagging translates in my brain to sadness, and when my brain senses sadness, it starts to produce more, spiraling out of control until what was once a "Good grief, I'm tired," becomes a "Ugh, my life sucks!"
To test this hypothesis, I thought back to the previous night, in which I laughed hysterically over a little video called "Jiz" {Warning: video contains potentially offensive language; I mean, just look at the title}. Anyway, I started cracking up, so hard, in fact, that some of my other coworkers had to come over and make sure I was all right. The miraculous thing about it is that after I had wiped away my giggletears, my entire outlook on life had reformed. I only vaguely thought about those other things that had been killing me moments before, and I was ready to get right back into... filing.
So, on an emotional level, this looks promising. If I can keep a series of thoughts or videos in my mind that will produce a smile, I just might have a cure for my bouts of depression. Or I could just get more sleep. Nah...
I shook my head to clear it, realizing that the night before, when I wasn't tired but got to bed late, I was quite happy. After waking up and missing my workout, slogging my way to work with bags under my eyes that could catch a piano (you know, like that one commercial...), I discovered that I was depressed. "How odd," I thought to myself, but as I looked back on the day, I hadn't been depressed when I was interacting with my coworkers. In fact, I had been quite merry, but after I had gone off by myself to file, losing that interaction, my face reverted to tired mode, and it all came back to me what my grandma said about smiling: Do it.
When I'm tired and alone, my face sags. Somehow, this continuous sagging translates in my brain to sadness, and when my brain senses sadness, it starts to produce more, spiraling out of control until what was once a "Good grief, I'm tired," becomes a "Ugh, my life sucks!"
To test this hypothesis, I thought back to the previous night, in which I laughed hysterically over a little video called "Jiz" {Warning: video contains potentially offensive language; I mean, just look at the title}. Anyway, I started cracking up, so hard, in fact, that some of my other coworkers had to come over and make sure I was all right. The miraculous thing about it is that after I had wiped away my giggletears, my entire outlook on life had reformed. I only vaguely thought about those other things that had been killing me moments before, and I was ready to get right back into... filing.
So, on an emotional level, this looks promising. If I can keep a series of thoughts or videos in my mind that will produce a smile, I just might have a cure for my bouts of depression. Or I could just get more sleep. Nah...
