When Facebook Becomes Blogging

“When I lie waking all alone,
Recounting what I have ill done,
My thoughts on me then tyrannize,
Fear and sorrow me surprise,
Whether I tarry still or go,
Methinks the time moves very slow,
All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so sad as melancholy.
'Tis my sole plague to be alone,
I am a beast, a monster grown,
I will no light nor company,
I find it now my misery.
The scene is turn'd, my joys are gone,
Fear, discontent, and sorrows come.
All my griefs to this are folly,
Naught so fierce as melancholy."

- Robert Burton 

Christmas is a difficult time for a lot of people. I have about as little to do with Christmas as any American, growing up in a neighborhood where there are not even so much as Christmas lights on more than one in fifty houses. But the lack of light and the cold can get to any of us, so can the fun and happiness that is everybody else gets to experience this time of year but 'me', the loneliness of no spouse or children to spend it with, worries that the time to rewrite one's life-story begins to run out, and worst of all, the ruminative speculations about all the ways one screws up along the way to one's failures to acquire a better life and what it may demonstrate about the quality of person one is, and how one's defects and mistakes and errors may have done harm to others, which then leads to speculations on future ways one can harm others. I've seen a number of posts about people feeling depressed right now. For anyone who doesn't find this one of the easiest times of year, this is one of the hardest times of year. But there are two other quotes though from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy that seem helpful to me: 'Melancholy can only be cured by melancholy,' and 'a quiet mind cures all.' The illness is far stronger than one's mental capacities, the more prodigiously fearsome, the more reason becomes raw material for the melancholia to shape as it wills. Insanity is formed just as by excess rationality as by irrationality. An excess of rational thought is a prison with no windows, and even the deepest thoughts can only skim the surface of our existence - containing so little evidence for what is ultimately true and false. And therefore, as the Bard says, 'there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,': depression, or melancholia, or the black dog, or whatever else, can be quieted by a lower temperature of mind. First by finding ways not to think, then by distraction, then by the distraction growing into different goals, one finds ways to offset the melancholy. It comes and it comes, but it goes. 

...This is more for me than anyone else.