Moody Too

Many of us bloggers religiously read each other’s posts. This is particularly true in the enforced chastity genre. There are relatively few of us who post regularly and are clearly speaking from experience and not fantasy. One of us is Thumper. His blog, “Denying Thumper” has been around over six years. He has been very forthcoming about his most interesting life. Monday and yesterday he wrote posts about his current struggle with depression and panic attacks. This drew a flurry of comments from other bloggers and his general readership, including me. He opened a floodgate of admissions from other guys that they suffer from depression and lost sleep too.

I’ve mentioned my struggles with depression and self-image over the nearly-seven-months I was out of work. I had a few big “melt downs”, as Mrs. Lion calls them, about being unable to pay the bills and about my employability. For almost the entire seven months I had a knot in my stomach. It was made worse by the fact that I kept landing in-person interviews and then being rejected. I sound much younger than I am. I have a rather impressive resume so I got a lot of calls from hiring managers. Almost every call resulted in an in-person interview. After seeing me, I was rejected time after time. It’s not that I am inarticulate or that I look horrid. I was because I am not under forty years old. How do I know that’s the reason? Because hiring manager after hiring manager told me on the phone that I was perfect for the job and they just wanted the in-person interview to follow their process. Some of these people were nearly rude; they would cut the interview short with an obvious excuse just to stop wasting time on the old guy.

In the beginning I thought I wasn’t right for these jobs. After a while I realized that wasn’t the issue at all. It was my age; one thing I am powerless to change. My days were filled with applying for jobs I found on Monster or Career Builder. After some of the aborted interviews, when I got back to my car, I cried. I wanted to just give up and curl up into a pathetic ball. I couldn’t do that because we had exhausted our meager savings and the bills were piling up.

I stopped sleeping well. Shortly after falling asleep I would wake up in a panic, sure that we would be homeless and no one would ever hire me again. Then I would turn on the TV, softly, so I wouldn’t wake Mrs. Lion, and watch reruns for hours. Finally at four or five AM, I would finally fall asleep until the alarm at 6:30.

Fortunately, the depression was situational. Now that I have been back to work for three weeks, the gloom is lifting. I still get those knots in my stomach when I worry whether I am capable of holding this job. Intellectually, I know I am doing a good job. But I can’t help but worry. I’ve stopped waking up in a panic and I actually sleep through the night almost every night. For the record, I can’t take anti-depressants. I react very badly to them.

I’m very lucky to have found the job I have. The company is truly age-blind. They have lots of people over fifty. The only drawback is that this is a contract position. I am hoping that eventually it will be converted to a full-time job. In the meantime I am working and earning exactly what I want. Crises averted, at least for now. I still worry. When this contract ends and I haven’t been hired full time, will anyone else give me a job? I don’t think I could face another ordeal like the one I just finished. Sooner or later I will have to stop working. I have no idea what will happen then. It’s just one more concern.

I decided to write this because I think that too many men don’t share their feelings. Every day I write about our enforced chastity and FLM experiences. I discuss what I have learned about topping and bottoming. I try to provide information others can use. Yet, over the last seven months I didn’t really share the pain I was feeling. I know I alluded to our difficulties and made repeated assurances that they didn’t affect our kinks. That isn’t exactly true. The financial and my emotional problems didn’t stop us, but they made it more difficult to continue. Mrs. Lion was much more forgiving and less strict because she was aware I was having a problem.

She didn’t know how bad it was. I knew that she was very worried too. She hides her feelings, but I know her well enough to see under the veneer. She knows me well too and knew I was not sleeping and I was worried. I didn’t tell her how depressed I felt. I didn’t want her to feel worse.

Did Thumper start a chain of “true confessions” in the enforced chastity blogosphere? Maybe. If so, it’s a very healthy trend. One of the things that has bothered about our blogs collectively, is that we give a very unbalanced picture of our lives. I understand that you aren’t reading my blog to get the day-to-day drama in our lives. But you do need to know that Mrs. Lion and I are people who have to deal with many other things that have nothing to do with our power exchange or with sex. Tomorrow, I will be back with my usual post about the ongoing saga of our lives in enforced chastity and FLM. Thanks for taking the time to let me share this with you.