It’s been a while since I have published anything on this blog. There’s a a very simple reason for this, but one I’ve been reluctant to talk about publicly—I’m depressed. That’s a simplification of my emotional state for the last several months, however it is accurate.

I know that I’m one of those individuals who is prone to depression. In part it runs in my family (on my father’s side I can trace back undiagnosed depression for several generations, including a great-grandmother who killed herself), and in part there has been a huge confluence of events in the last year that hes held me down in my funk.

1. For more than nine months now I have been unemployed. Ever since moving to North Carolina I’ve had trouble finding lasting employment, but until this year I’ve managed to keep myself working on a string of contracts that helped keep us afloat. But as the recession worsened earlier this year, the contract jobs dried up, and since then we’ve been keeping this family of six alive on unemployment and food stamps. There are quite a few politicians who would say that I’m coasting through life by sleeping and slyly collecting unemployment as a way to sponge off the hard-working people of this state. But I can tell you from first hand experience that there is nothing relaxing about living on less than one-fourth of what I was living on last year, and there is nothing vacation-like about wondering why no one seems to find your skills valuable any longer.
2. About ten months ago a good friend passed away. It wasn’t exactly suddenly, but neither was it expected. His son was 17, the same age I was when my own father died. His death affected my family in a host of ways. Not only did it bring back a lot of unresolved emotion regarding my own father’s death, but it was also the first death Jeni or the kids had to deal with up close and personal. And there is nothing easy about explaining to a six-year-old that his “Uncle” wouldn’t be around anymore.
3. Now a common response when someone has a bad string of luck is to offer, “At least you still have your health,” but even this advice is moot our household this year. When our friend got sick, and ultimately died, Jeni got sick as well. She got a nasty case of pneumonia that took over six months to completely go away, but not before it gave her a, thankfully temporary, heart condition. She had her gall bladder removed in an emergency surgery, and for the last four months has had a constant migraine headache that prevents her from eating more than a few bites at a time, and has interfered with her sleep almost every night. This is on top of her bad back, and doesn’t even touch the cancer scare—those pink ribbons are all over our house this year.
4. And not to be outdone, I’ve had my own battle with headaches this year. If you’ve never heard of cluster headaches, take a moment to pull it up on wiki. They are called suicide headaches because it’s not uncommon for those who get the worst of the headaches to kill themselves in a logic-clouded attempt to stop the pain. Last year I was diagnosed with cluster headaches by my GP, who proceeded to give me six injections into my skull to try to alleviate some of the pain (it didn’t help in the slightest). But this year the headaches worsened significantly. There are some treatments that work for some cluster headache sufferers, but with my health insurance lapsing along with my unemployment, I’m forced to treat the headaches with Coca-Cola and Advil. During one rather traumatic visit to the ER (for my youngest) I had a sudden attack that crippled me and scared the hell out of my kid and the hospital staff who said they’d never seen an attack like that.

You may read the list above and roll your eyes, thinking that I’m just complaining to get some sympathy. While many who have had the year I have would do that, I still (most days) have the perspective to understand that there are many people (and a few I know personally) who have had a worse year than I. The young man who lost his father also lost his grandfather and two of his teenage friends…that’s a pretty bad year. Another online acquaintance, who suffers from cluster headaches, took his own life after the hospital refused to treat his headaches, instead claiming that he was just looking for a fix.

Yes, we are still a family, and yes, for the time being we still have our home, but that doesn’t give me a whole lot to fall back on when I’m looking for a reason to be introspective or creative. And that is the crux of why I’ve been so quiet. When I’m depressed I always assume that one else will want to hear my problems. In my head I know this is ridiculous logic, but that’s the danger of depression…what we know is the truth often doesn’t feel like the truth, and we just pull even further into ourselves.

All this is not meant to say that 2009 was all bad—although in just under a week when the calendars change over, I will not, for a single second, mourn the passing of this year.

I started a new hobby—I’m learning to play the harmonica. Nothing formal yet. I’ve bought a few how-to books and a few entry-level harps, and I satisfy my musical inner child with painful honking and accidental chords. But it is fun, and it’s an instrument with a lot of online support, so it’s easy to take the first few steps at my own pace, and free of charge.

Also this year, a couple of my fellow columnists at Write Anything approached me about contributing a story to an anthology. I accepted with a great deal of reluctance, not because of the venture, but because of my depression I wasn’t sure I could get my creativity up and on a deadline to boot. But it turned out that the biggest hurdle to completing a new story was to overcome my cluster headaches, which peaked during the time I should have been revising my story. I still owe my editors a huge thank you for sticking with me even when I pushed my deadlines to the max. The Chinese Whisperings Red Book is due out January 1, 2010.

So that’s my 2009, and that’s why I’ve been so quiet.