Depression

I don't know if I know what I'm talking about here, but free of charge, I offer the little I've learned in life about what some call depression.  I could be wrong, but I thought "better to speak out of turn than not have spoken at all," which is something I'm in little danger of doing.   Ever.

Moods/Phases/things that people call "depression": It's all cyclical.  That means when you're trapped in it, orbiting helplessly, exactly the right kind of random thing (person, change, thought, sight or the like) can really break the cycle for a time.  It really can reverse for the moment the direction you're moving in, can "snap you out" of it.  This is why it's so irritating when people try and fail (or suggest lame ways for you to do) to snap you out of it.  You can snap out of it, of course, eventually.  It takes that last bit of energy, the one that it feels like you don't have, to even try it, usually.  Hope takes a lot of energy to have and see, but a tiny bit of it does a lot and with none of it, nothing happens at all.  That's why it's essential.  John Bunyan wrote puritanically in Pilgrim's Progress of depression.  He made it a swamp, a "slough of despond."  Once you walked, unaware, into it, you were stuck in there (hopefully not in the dark) , and it took some major flailing (and a correct direction) to get out again. 

You need a direction, of course, even if for just standing up and walking across the room.  Noncommital dilly-dallying is a daily death, or so concludes John Cusack in High Fidelity, and his character Rob in the book of the same name.  We have too many options and choose to not choose, usually.  We wrestle enough with the daily "sinner/saint" choice, and each of those comes with way too many choices too.

You sure can get pretty disgusted with absolutely everyone and everything around you, and have really good reason to, but no real gratification is ever going to come from doing that.  The better you are at seeing the folly of others, the easier it is to get hooked on being in that sneering place.  There's no shortage of folly around, after all.  Fish in a barrel, really.  Hard to be proud of knowing better.

This hope-sucking cycle soon becomes about increasingly shutting yourself off from external stimuli and thoughts.  You want everyone and everything and their expectations and demands to just go away.  Usually it's about trying to make things soothing, predictable and familiar for yourself so you won't have to think and feel the stuff.  Obviously, you need good stuff, stuff that often isn't any of that (soothing, predictable etc.)  Hard to arrange, especially in the part of the world where we live, where it's pretty safe, but consistently depressing.  It's the price we pay for not having an inundation of horrors.

It's a retreat of a kind in which the retreating itself builds on itself, gaining inertia, and makes you feel and actually be less (rather than more) safe.  Erich Fromm defined sanity as one's ability to maintain healthy connections with what's going on around one.  That's only one definition, but I like it.

For me it's always like every little bad memory, every little traumatic thing that I haven't dealt with has been following me around waiting to nibble on me, and, without my really quite feeling it, my sense of self, my energy, my confidence, my forward momentum has been nibbled almost totally away until there is barely enough left to not just slide further into it.  Then it's a direction I'm moving in.  It's a pit I've dug that I'm lost in the bottom of.  It's weighing 5000 lbs.  It's falling endlessly with no bottom in sight.  It's exploding in slow motion all day, waiting for it to rip you entirely apart.  It's being all dead inside.  It's being walking wounded.

For sure, "dealing with stuff" is vital.  You really have to do that.  But, depression will happen anyway, if that's your thing.  My theory is that being sensitive (aware) usually comes as a package with your being sensitive (frail) too.  The words "blissfully" and "unaware" are paired up so often with good reason.  

You can't deal sensitivity/depression away, of course.  If you don't deal with stuff, it is worse, and if you deal with stuff, it isn't as bad, but it still happens and there's always stuff.  You don't have to psychic to see an alarming number of things about anyone you actually look at.  Everyone can do it.  Most important things about most people are really frikkin' obvious and can't be hidden for long.  Most don't care/bother.  Many have lives of their own to lead.  Most pretend that when people look at them, no one can see the "real them."  Most pretend this because it means they can walk around pretending to "have it together" all the time.

It's hard to just be yourself.  Especially when there are other people there.  Equally hard to get what you want.  Hard for some people not to be invisible, kind and nice and polite to everyone all the time as a reflex when sometimes you really need stuff yourself and to BE yourself.   Hard for others not to always be the dissenter, the nonparticipant, the nay-sayer, the one who opts out and hates on everything.  Sometimes the same person is sometimes one, and sometimes the other of those two extremes.  Hard to look after yourself when you're not liking yourself (and maybe anything at all or anyone else) much.  Start by looking after yourself like you were your own kid (feeding yourself and so on) and never be ruder about yourself in your head than you'd be about a stranger to their face.  That's a pretty good standard to start with.

Taking in new good thoughts from various sources is vital.  It gets harder and harder to find good sources of good new thoughts you haven't already heard, though, the more thoughts you take in and the longer you live.  However, letting all your own stuff out (we all have stuff) is really, really vital.  You need regular emotional energy enemas, and not experiences that numb you or the like, to make you content with shit, but rather cathartic, orgiastic stuff, moments you can lose yourself in entirely and get a much-needed rest from yourself.  Things that pull energy out of you.  Energy that you didn't know was in there short-circuiting.  It takes ridiculous amounts of emotional energy to keep your emotional energy (anxiety, despair, anger etc.) in the way so many of us always seem to do.  You feel like you have *no* emotional energy, because your huge resources of energy are all turned in on themselves, fruitlessly working at containing themselves, and essentially short-circuiting themselves.

That's really pretty much all I know about stress/anxiety/depression that can be tossed off in a hasty, off-the-cuff, blog entry.  Tossing the plate of spaghetti at the wall and hoping some strands stick, so someone can get some use out of some of it.