Depression

One of the great goals of my life is to help people understand how life looks through eyes that aren't theirs. A lot of my life was (read: is) spent not realizing this and subsequently making stupid decisions. However, I do not wish to be this way. It almost always leads to someone experiencing some kind of negative emotion. Anger, sadness, sugar...and I don't like to be the cause of that. I don't like it when people look at my life through the lens of their life experiences. Well, I guess they have no other way to look at things.... I think what I meant is, I don't like when people judge me without seeing the universe that I'm looking at. And because I don't like that, I try to offer people the courtesy of acceptance. And, like a Hare Krishna, I am trying to share this thing I think is good.

In my quest to share the gospel of acceptance (or tolerance or love or whatever you want to call it) I have become rather honest. Really honest. Maybe too honest. I tend to overshare on occasion. Which likely is some sort of subconscious tactic to make my neuroses seem normal. I mean, if I casually talk about it, it isn't shameful right? Sure.

So for today's topic of conversation, we are going to talk about depression. Depression is a strange beast. It really is hard to understand without experiencing it. For most of my life, I thought depressed people were just being lazy and it was all some sort of mental bullshit and they should just zip up their man-suit and get it together. I was wrong, and I feel bad for judging people. In an effort to help someone understand how depression affects your life (spoiler: it affects everything), I am writing this post. You should also read this post. It is a very enjoyable read and nails a couple nails right on the round, flat part at the top.

I am trying to think of some good analogies to help you understand what depression is like. First thing I need to do is determine who my audience is. You probably aren't someone who used to be able to see, and is now blind. You probably aren't someone who lost the ability to fly. But are almost certainly someone who has eaten a frozen burrito, and I can work with that.

Remember that time you microwaved your burrito ninety seconds too long? Remember how you were watching some quality lunch-time programming and forgot to check if the burrito was hot? Remember how it burned the holy shit out of your tongue? Depression is like trying to taste things for the two days after that burrito. You know these cupcakes have flavor, you just can't figure out what it is, and only vaguely remember what they are supposed to taste like.

On the off chance you aren't a burrito person, I'll try another one. Find that giant scar you have. You know, the one from the war. Now poke it. Use something that isn't your finger. Use that shuriken you have lying around. Depression feels like that. You know something is poking you. You can tell that you should be feeling something, but you really don't. The only reason you didn't accidentally draw blood is the years of self-preservatory habits you have.

Now let's try to look at how this applies to a human life. Let's look at how this might change your view of someone you know, or someone you knew, or someone you might know someday. When you lose all the emotions, you lose all the reasons to do things. You lose the motivation to act. And often the motivation to live. With the will to act, the will to live and all those emotions gone, you are left with an enormous void inside of you. That void become your new resource pool. It becomes the Apathy Well. Unfortunately, this new resource pool only does two things: not care, and destroy. Not caring is a pretty obvious side effect. It is called the Apathy Well, after all. But the second side effect, the urge to destroy, is the weird one. This destructive tendency can take a lot of forms. Self-harm, other-harm, meta-harm....(I don't actually know what the last one means, but it seems bad). I have a theory about why this tendency develops.

In the mind of a depressed person, pretty much anything can become an enormous stressor. I mean, if you don't have the motivation to do anything, pretty much everything becomes an impending failure. The very act of putting on pants becomes an exercise in futility, because you weren't going to look good anyway, so fuck it...underpants all day. When everything is bound to become a failure you begin to want less everything in your life. So you destroy stuff. Jobs are just failure holes. So I'll quit going and get fired. No more job worries. College is just a formalized way to say "you aren't good enough," so if I fail out I don't have to hear that anymore. Families? Disappointment machines. Sabotage those relationships and I no longer have to hear how they wish I weren't such a waste of the family name.

Are you starting to see it?

Even if you aren't, I want to describe what I think is the weirdest thing. Now, I know everyone is different, but my depression has been very self-aware. I know exactly how stupid all of my decisions and actions are. I know that they are depressive. And I do it anyway. Because meh....it's too hard to fix it, and I'd probably fail anyway.

By every logical system I can think of, that is the worst decision making imaginable. But that doesn't make it any less real. Knowing it's stupid doesn't suddenly bring all the flavor back to life. Someone who knows they are depressed and making bad decisions is still feeling life through that scar tissue. Still tasting life with a burnt tongue. And that is a really hard way to live.

Not to say that a depressed person can't live. They can. We laugh, we dance, we sing, we live fairly normal lives.

Now, this thing that I've written isn't meant to make someone sad, or get people to bring me sympathy cookies (which you are totally welcome to do, btw). It is meant to allow a glimpse of life through someone else's eyes. Yeah, I may have gotten some things wrong. I may have written poorly. I may even have said some things that made you uncomfortable. But I hopefully made you think, too. And maybe that will give you the perspective you need to help someone someday. I know it has helped me.