I have March madness.

 

Not for sports. I don’t actually enjoy sports much, and certainly not watching them. An athlete I am not. There are a few exceptions to this. I’m okay with volleyball and badminton, and I can almost play them. I don’t watch them, though. I enjoy watching figure skating. The others? Not so much. Well, not at all.

 

We’re also not talking about a sales event, either. This isn’t a limited time deal offer or anything to rush out and get.

 

For reasons that I cannot explain, though perhaps it is somewhat seasonally based or something, March is simply a bad time of year for me.

 

The madness, you see, is depression. It has been about ten years now since that diagnosis was made, and the March time pattern is repeating itself again.

 

It isn’t always bad. Sometimes March passes with little incident. Like the lamb in that little poem.

 

Other times, March is more like a lion. More like the insomnia that started a withdrawal from my second semester of my senior year in high school (in spite of which I graduated with an honor’s diploma and in the top ten percent of the class–I was able to pull things back together later. Depression is a cycle, after all, and you’re not always at the lowest point, though sometimes it feels that way.) More like the March where I simply stopped going to my job when the economy was bad and not being able to find a new one.

 

This March has been one long fight to get out of bed, a lot of insecurity when it comes to writing, uncertainty when it comes to publishing, and a not insignificant amount of tears.

 

Part of it might have been the difficulty of attempting to complete a story that began nearly ten years ago. It has been sitting aside, waiting for me to type it and fill in a few pieces, but I have had trouble with that and overcoming a plot hole in the past. I finally solved the plot hole, but it’s still a slow process typing it up, and it does bring back a lot of memories from the past few years.

 

I already know that my word count totals will be down for the month, as it has been a hard month for writing. Between the typing and the way I’ve gotten blocked after one or two scenes despite the fun banter of my “geek” story. Still, without writing, I really don’t know how I’d cope with my particular madness.

 

Part escape, part a way of looking out at the world and solving my issues by exploring the situation in another setting or situation, writing has enabled me to be far more adept at dealing with the lows of depression. It never fails to amuse me how my coping mechanism, my outlet, can also be one of the sources of my frustrations and sorrow. It usually tells me how I’m doing, though. If I can still write, I know I’m okay.

 

Well, I am when the slippers of doom aren’t making more attempts on my life. I cannot believe I fell down the stairs again.