Saturday update

Well, folks, it's Saturday and Chester and I are sitting on the couch with a log burning in the fireplace. I'm drinking tea and he's watching the log...will it move? What's it going to do? Watch! Watch! Of course we can't figure out which way the flue is open and closed so I've smoked up the whole house. When it gets really cold outside we'll be able to tell the difference. Right now it's only in the 50s, but I'm trying to avoid turning the oil heat on. Since it's just me here today, I don't need to heat the whole house.

Did you all see the post about Nancy's book? Check it out! (Gracie, she moved back to TN, she's Southern through and through!) Until that book comes out I'm reading Harry Potter 2. Well, re-reading for the fifth (at least) time. I had a wonderful morning of laying in bed reading for an hour before I got up. It was delightful!

Has anyone else ever wondered about how the Internet--and blogging in particular--can tend to exaggerate our emotions? It's like we almost feel embarrassed when our lives are stable and healthy because it's disinteresting. Of course, folks like Nancy can turn any mundane experience into a hilarious account, but the rest of us just sort of putter along and go through life. It seems that it's become fashionable to highlight what's wrong with ourselves--to make each individual life into a soap opera. I wonder, though, if it's just me who has noticed that. A slight funk suddenly becomes a deep depression, and a marital tiff becomes cause for intense therapy. It's almost like we have no patience for working through things--it's so much easier to think we can farm out that work to doctors, therapists, and drugs than to think we can or should do it ourselves.

I'm not at *all* saying those three things aren't useful--they definitely are in the right circumstance--but it seems to me that it's become a first reaction ("I'll just go get some Prozac from my family doctor") rather than one part of a comprehensive treatment. Incidentally, I've never known any treatment that worked that did NOT involve a significant investment from the person being treated. Drugs do help but they must be in tandem with therapy. Therapy does work but it requires a change of lifestyle and a support system. There's no easy solution, and you can't really "farm it out" to anyone without doing some work yourself.

Given that there's no easy solution for real mental illness, I wonder why people are so quick to categorize themselves as being mentally ill. For example, my desire to have a clean house coupled with my love of orderliness does NOT inherently mean that I suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. People truly do suffer from that and would be an insult to lump my enjoyment of order with their suffocating need for it. Similarly, a situational issue that makes us sad and disoriented does not necessarily mean we are "depressed" to a clinial extent. Some people absolutely are--and deserve treatment--but I am continually surprised at how quick we are to pass off situational sadness as full-blown depression. What is it that makes people eager to categorize themselves as mentally ill?

There's a song that goes, "If you want to be somebody else, if you're tired of fighting battles with yourself, then change your mind." It seems to me that many of my generation *don't* change our mindset and we don't take active steps to change the situations that cause our sadness. It's almost like it has become fashionable to be dreary.

I suppose I find it fascinating because it's completely counter-intuitive to me. Wouldn't we all want to be happy? Wouldn't we fix the situation rather than medicate the symptom? Or is this perhaps just dramatics and we all know it?