I am generally a fearful person. I was freaked out by airplanes long before 9/11. Hell, I think roaches are out to get me. But I'm getting really sick of being told to be intermittently terribly afraid of shoe bombs and liquid bombs and mysterious plagues when there are much more likely dangers that we face in this country, every day, with minimal hysteria.

Yesterday, Atrios and Chris talked about traffic accidents. Holy shit, a lot of people [some 40,000 per year] die in car crashes. And yet, most of us still drive without panicking every time we start an ignition. I am primarily a pedestrian, and I almost got ran over by a stupid SEPTA bus that was blowing through a red light yesterday, but I still walked the exact same route today. My point? I think it's time to declare a war on traffic accidents.

If we do need to be hysterical about things that might kill us, let's direct our mania at the most likely targets. People should not be allowed to drive like drunken lunatics and kill innocent people — a war on them! And let's have a war on cancer, which killed two innocent members of my family in the past several years. A war on heart disease! A war on poverty! A war on AIDS! A war on crime — If Middle Eastern terrorists came to Philly and killed a couple hundred people this year, everyone would be up in arms. When our own thugs do it, for a lot of people, it's shrug central.

I'm certainly not in the position to tell anyone else to stop being afraid, but geez. Let's try to keep things in perspective.

FYI: If you're feeling depressed, one of the worst things you could possibly do is tool around MySpace looking at people you used to know. I really should know better.

It seems kind of scary when a trained professional asks you: have you ever been diagnosed as bipolar? Well, no. And you know why not? Because when I am manic, I would never go to a doctor. I love not having to sleep a million hours, feeling motivated to work out, wanting to do crazy things and sometimes doing them. I talk too fast and I jump out of my skin and I don't have to eat and even though I sometimes feel like I am about to snap, it's infinitely preferable to the opposite extreme. I never thought of these "highs" as symptoms, I thought of them as my normal personality, with the "lows" as symptoms. Today I had to recount my past depressive episodes and I felt like I had stepped out of my body, like I was talking about someone else. It feels strange, but I guess I am learning to handle things better.

Things seem to be evening out a little. I had a pretty pleasant day at work, and my boss announced she is taking me out to a schmancy-pants lunch next week. Hard to complain about that! I am glad I was able to discern that it is not my job that is causing me to be depressed. In the past, I quit several jobs because I literally could not function. I wonder if I knew exactly what to steps to take then, if I would have had to leave in such undignified ways. What would happen is this amazingly liberating feeling would come over me, like when I was a teenager and I realized I absolutely could not attend school that day because I didn't study for a test. Of course, it was only a temporary respite because eventually I would have to return to school and take the stupid test. The exhiliration from not working lasted longer — at least until I got a bill in the mail.

I decided to write about my depression and anxiety as much as I can, just in case it helps someone else. My friend Sara and I were once going to write a self-help book, but our depressed selves never got around to finishing it. (It was awesome, though.) So yesterday, after I calmed down a little, I made an appointment for today with my old therapist. I don't know if it will be helpful, but it certainly could not hurt. After I had cried myself out, I took a nap, and when I woke up, A. was home and cheerful as per usual. He made me dinner and I was able to eat half a package of Korean noodles and some vegetable dumplings. I watched Seinfeld and Jeopardy! and I didn't feel that bad, just exhausted with a splitting caffeine-withdrawl headache. I remembered that when I used to get really down my senior year of college, my roommate and I made a point to go out to movies on Sunday nights. We were often the only people in the theater and we always came home late enough to not really worry about what would happen on Monday. Since I had yesterday and today off, I thought yesterday would be a good day to see a movie. I also remembered that during another depressing time in my life, I was really big on seeing movies by myself. At one point, I went to see the extremely sad Moonlight Mile on a lonely Friday night and I spent the rest of the weekend feeling terribly unhappy. So I decided that this time, I would see a silly happy movie. We saw Strangers with Candy, which was predictably stupid, but I really can't see Amy Sedaris making that face where she sticks her top teeth out without cracking up. During the movie, I cured my lack-of-caffeine headache with a few swigs of Dr. Pepper and some chocolate. I felt a lot better when I came home.

This morning, the first thing I did was shake out my old bottle of Celexa, which has worked very well for me in the past. I counted how many pills I have left until my doctor's appointment in two weeks, and I can almost make it, if I take half my recommended dosage. I hate taking medication of any sort, especially this sort. I am no Tom Cruise, but I agree that we are generally over-medicated and that medication does not solve problems. But the thing is, medication was the only thing that helped me when I could not get out of bed, so there you go. I thought that I would use today to catch up on errands, but it's 102 degrees with the heat index today, and right now I am comfortable watching horrible television.

I have often had the discussion about which is worse: anxiety or depression. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but for me, anxiety is much worse. Anxiety is is like being caught in an endless windmill of fear and worry, while depression is like falling down a hole. I just feel it's easier to crawl out of a hole than to stop the cycle of panic. The thing that is almost refreshing about being depressed is that normally I care so much about things I have no control over. I click on every news story about people getting killed tragically; I worry about missles in the Middle East and gunshots on the streets of Philly and snipers in Indiana and Phoenix and car accidents and plane crashes and tsunamis and earthquakes. Although I hate feeling so sluggish, it is almost nice to not have the energy to care about things beyond my control. For example, when I ride the train, usually I think at least a few times that the train might derail or that someone might have a bomb or go on a shooting spree. Yesterday, I started to think one of those thoughts and then I just thought, Oh well, I don't really care if that happens. How liberating to not have to spend the whole day worrying about dying! Except, of course, the flipside is not really caring about anything.

My mom says I can't call it a relapse because it's just how my life is. She said she was worried because I was saying the same things I said two Thanksgivings ago when I had a breakdown. I didn't think to ask her what those things are, so maybe I can have some advanced warning next time. I lost my appetite a couple of weeks ago and I thought maybe I was getting sick or the heat was getting to me. But I didn't mind all that much, because I normally have a huge appetite and I thought it might be cool if I lost weight. Then I started to feel really tense and irritable at work and I thought maybe I was starting to hate my job. But I don't really hate my job — I don't like working but I know what a really bad job is like and I know this is not one. I figured if I got out of town for a few days I would feel better. I went to visit my family and I made some tentative plans with some old friends which was really exciting. I knew I wasn't depressed because I wasn't sleeping much, and I usually sleep a ton. I was still not really eating much but I felt really motivated to work out and move around to release all of this crazy tension that I felt. I started having obsessive thoughts but I still didn't mind because my normal brand of obsessive thoughts (This train is about to derail/This car is going to crash/I think I have cancer, etc.) were replaced by a more trivial kind (Like, what will I say to my high school boyfriend?) When I got to Connecticut, I was feeling even crazier. I knew that the change of scenery would not help me relax. The trip was hugely disappointing, for various reasons. When I woke up this morning after not really sleeping and not really eating, I felt this horrible knot in my chest, like I was going to cry at any second. But there was nothing to cry about. I made it onto the train before I started crying and I haven't really stopped yet. It is frustrating because who wants to feel like this? When I had my first major depressive episode in college, I tried to tell my mom how bad I felt and she offered me this sage advice: "Why don't you try to snap out of it?" Yeah, like it is that easy. But the reassuring thing is that I've been through this before and I know I can get out of it, even if I don't know exactly how. All of the other times this happened, there was a huge trigger. I never realized it could just hit me out of the blue like this.

Sometimes I just want to make the world stop spinning and the planes land and buses and trains and cars stop and just get all the people I love in one place. I mean, I am glad I live in a time where people are able to travel all over the world — but, on the other hand, I kind of hate the expectation that one must move far away from one's family and everyone must be in constant motion, always going somewhere or coming back from somewhere. Once, I told my dad that I wished my sister didn't live 3,000 miles away and wouldn't things just be more simple if we all lived under one hut like ancient people? And my dad rolled his eyes and said, "Oh please, I can just hear you now: 'That's my leaf!' 'No, that's my leaf!'" which was funny but kind of unfair. Anyway, I don't really want to live in a hut, but I wish I lived in a close drive to my family and closest friends. Unfortunately, none of them live anywhere I want to be right now. Part of me just wants everything simple and everything close by because that seems very Zen and natural. But part of me wants everything simple and close by because I have severe anxiety and eliminating the endless choices seems like a way to eliminate the anxiety. Of course, this wouldn't really work because eliminating my own choices won't stop me from being jealous of people who are able to travel freely.

Traveling to visit people is especially stressful for me because I am absolutely petrified of air travel and not especially comfortable on other transportation options, either. These fears really mess up my thinking, because whenever I hear of people taking cool trips I get jealous in a weird way: I'm not jealous that they went on a trip exactly; I'm jealous that they went and didn't have to stay up all night for a week before hand agonizing over plane crashes and that they didn't have to take Valium to get themselves on the plane and once they got to their destination they didn't spend half the time worrying if they would ever make it back safely. It is actually pretty amazing how much I have managed to travel considering how severe my anxiety can be.

I don't know how much I would want to stop the world if I didn't have anxiety. But I do think there's something to be said for having a strong community of family (bio or chosen) and friends in one general location. I wish I had that.