"Get to work!"

Yesterday proved to be a very interesting counterpoint to the day before.

Whereas Thursday I’d been fogged in and unfocused,  after my ECT session Friday I went home and became nothing but focused.

Actually, it started earlier than that. For the second night in a row I slept terribly, my mind racing with thoughts of recent sadness. It just wouldn’t shut up. By three I was fully awake and couldn’t get back to sleep.

But after suffering a while longer, I realized something. My thoughts weren’t just a stream-of-consciousness parade of feelings and memories, they were self-organizing. My mind was composing sentences and paragraphs, actually editing each thought, polishing it up before moving to the next. I hadn’t planned to write anything more about my heartbreak, but my mind clearly disagreed and wasn’t going to leave me alone until I did. I got up and started trying to capture those thoughts, and as I wrote my mind calmed; it had my attention now, it no longer had to yell.

I wrote until it was time to get ready to go to ECT.

When I got back home, I started writing again, shaping all my thoughts into a blog post. I didn’t stop until deep into the evening. The result was a post nearly 3,500 words long (this from the guy who has trouble making 500-1,000 words a day). And it’s a pretty damn good post. I may even post it here, but not right now.

I have, at times in the past, written in journals to deal with tough times, but as far as I remember this is the first time my mind has insisted I do so. And it helped somewhat, especially while I was actually writing, focused on getting everything down. I’m still hurting though; that’s going to take a while to heal.

My brain kept me awake ruminating on the hurts of the past few weeks, then forced  me to write as a way of coping. For a writer, that’s not a bad sign. Perhaps it’s a signal that what’s going on in there right now, sparked by the ECT, is reawakening or reorganizing the parts of my mind that make me a writer in the first place. Maybe it cleared some rubble from the passageways and it’s easier to move around in there again. Or maybe my mind just did what it had to do to keep me from imploding fully into despair.

I’m still depressed. I’m still heartbroken. But I wrote. Was it because of the ECT? I don’t know.