In which Piers realizes something that he should have known already.

There has been a tendency to think about my mental health over the past ten years as a set of poles:  I'm either "depressed," or "experiencing depression," or I'm "not depressed."  I don't know if anyone other than myself has thought of it in those terms, but that's the way I've tended to view it.  I have been wrong in my perspective. I realized today, as I have been sitting at my desk being mostly useless because I can't really find enough energy to focus on any one thing, that this too is a symptom of my condition.  As is the tendency to want to sleep a lot.  As is the general sense of anhedonia that I've felt for most of November.  As are periods of deep withdrawal. As are periods when I don't particularly want to eat.  When seen as a set of symptoms of a chronic illness, each coming and going at different times and in response to a huge range of stimuli, these individual episodes make a lot more sense.  None of them should individually cause a panic or a sense of crisis; they are unpleasant, but hardly disastrous in themselves.