garote | Wandering in the gray world

I can see myself in some future place, as I am here. Listening to sad or twisted music, late at night in a dark room. Feeling my heart hurt in my chest.

I imagine someone walking in, seeing me in this low state, and quietly putting a hand on my shoulder. Perhaps I touch it in response, make some noise, or maybe I don't respond at all. Then they leave the room again, because we're both used to this, and they know there's nothing more to do.

This just happens. It's been a long time of ups and downs. On the up days, I can be lively and adventurous, crack jokes about my problems, and navigate with a steady hand and a sense of determination. I can let stress glance off me, and immediately seek the positive. But then some time passes and I drop below the line of average, into this quiet, painful place.

I've spent a lot of time digging around in my head looking for solutions -- ways to elevate myself by changing some part of my life. The people I'm with, the work I do, my daily routine. Just lately I put myself on a good positive run by getting regular exercise and consistently sleeping enough. I can't tell if my body has actually changed but I've been looking at it differently, feeling less displeased with it, like I can still move the way I want to. This is coming out of a long period of time where I've only felt overweight and slow. Perhaps it's just my mood shaping my self-perception and I've made no visible progress at all, since my self-perception has gone from positive to negative just as rapidly: Yesterday I was feeling pleased with myself; now I’m not.

Now I'm in this isolated, exhausted place again. The sum of my productivity today has been pushing music around in the computer, taking a nap, taking a bath, feeding the cat, obsessing over my finances, and watching a bunch of silly videos on my phone. That's it. That's another day of my life ticked away, and gone. I should have run outside and made some kind of contribution. The farthest I've gone from my bed is the back yard - 20 feet away - to absorb some weak autumn sunlight and slowly pet the cat.

Sure, people have down days. We can't be on point and saving the world every waking minute. Given how complicated things are, that would be impossible even if we had endless energy and enthusiasm: There are many things that people do every day that feel world-saving important but actually just cancel each other out, or amount to nothing more than rearranging sand on a beach. But the point is not always to make some lasting change - it is sometimes just to have an experience, or to make something happen for a brief interval, etching it into consciousness, or history. Going out and doing things can just be about passing time the way you choose, among limited options. You can't make all of humanity happy for eternity, but you can create some happiness while you're around, and that matters.

I understand that. I also understand that it's not just about me. My life is relatively comfortable and I am lucky to have the space to engage with depression in a way that prevents it from derailing my life. But it's still here. Regardless of how justified it is, it always comes back. In fact, it's a long irregular cycle, and I've grown so used to it that I've moved beyond accepting it and instead sought ways to explain it, or even justify its presence, like a hostage situation that's grown twisted. Am I paying some kind of debt to my more creative self? Are my good days a loan and my bad days the interest payments? Do the crops need to fail for a while so the soil can be productive later?

I don't like the idea that my depression is compensating for something. I want to feel happy where I am, without feeling like a lost soul for part of the time. I want to feel like I fit right into my environment, without having to wrestle down the urge to ditch everything and run into the hills. I want to ride the wave - or what I perceive as the wave, in my happy and active self - without having to hit the trough. And I definitely don't want the purgatory in the middle, where everything is just "meh".

But I may not have a choice in this emotional pattern. It's probably genetic, since some variation of it affects my entire family. I hear there are medications that smooth it out, like pressing myself under a flat pane of glass. I feel revolted by the idea of smoothing it out. Does that even make sense? Is it possible to be possessive about something I hate from time to time? Does it make sense to feel that suffering at regular intervals is part of my identity, and I would be losing something valuable if I exorcised it? It's not like this level of depression stops me from feeding myself and making a living. I just feel like shit for a while. I know how lucky I am to not be sailing in seas so rough that they drown me. Unable to work, unable to string two thoughts together, unable to eat or wash myself, and unable to care either way... I've known those people. I've rented houses with those people! I'm very grateful that even when I'm at my worst, my mind is still moving, even if it's just moving in a circle. Even if it's just clawing at walls.

But here's something that makes my depression much more confusing:

Sometimes I feel worst when things are too comfortable. Sometimes I am least productive, and least helpful to others, when my basic needs are too thoroughly met. It's the paradox of wealth. When people are too independent, they turn inward, and start to attend to self-serving goals that have diminishing returns. Sometimes we act selfishly just because there's no external prompt to act otherwise. ... And maybe my depressed times are only made worse by how thoroughly I can embrace them.

If I was forced to work seven days a week instead of five, and had to cycle ten miles to the office instead of two, where would I even find the time to sit in the bathtub and feel horrible? Maybe the exercise endorphins would never get the chance to wear out and pitch me into this trough. That's how it felt during times when I was constantly exercising, like on my bike tours. During those times it's not a crash, but a gradual slide down to equilibrium. Exercise does have a pretty profound effect on me. So why am I here moping with the cat? Because I can.

Face it, you selfish asshole. You relish this broken version of yourself. You find pleasure in wandering this eerie, grayed-out quiet internal landscape, just as much as you enjoy cracking jokes and hammering nails in the sunlight. You're possessive of it.

Is it right to feel that way? Well, thinking of myself only, I can't say. Looking back, the idea that these depressive moods are an indulgence is not even new to me. It's just that sometimes I fight them, and sometimes I don't. But while I may not be able to decide whether they are a benefit or a hazard for myself, they are clearly a hazard for other people, and even if it's not my problem, it's definitely a problem for others. I should take that seriously.

My friends and family are ill-served by this laconic, shrinking violet version of me. For their sake, I should drive him back by doing the things he instinctively turns away from, like contacting loved ones, getting exercise, doing chores that require interacting with new people, or doing some small creative service for someone who isn't expecting it. It's telling that I can so easily rattle off a list of things that help. (Problems do have solutions, you know.) That those solutions never look effective when I'm in the middle of the depressive trough is because frankly, they aren't effective then. They are nothing but absurd then. But the point is not to do the impossible task of grabbing my own bootstraps and lifting myself out of this trough. The point is to steer clear of the next one when I'm back up on the wave and can see it coming.

I don't need to be here. This is not a place I need to return to, it's just a familiar place at the bottom of an easy downhill path. With a little forethought and some scouting I can end up somewhere else.

Let's try that out for a while, yes? Let's renew the commitment to preventative maintenance, so we're less of a pain in the ass to other people, yes? And again, preventative maintenance doesn't mean sitting in a dark room listening to the same Tim Story album over and over. It means reaching out. It means moving around. It means I need to put myself in new situations so I engage with something other than my inner demons. It means remembering that I have a choice.

Here we go!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

Personal experience: medication inserts a slight time-delay between an external trigger event and the internal "recoiling into a dark tunnel" response. This brief delay affords the opportunity to make a conscious choice about the response (e.g. "OK, maybe I'll just ignore that thing that happened. Do something else now!") This process of recognition, conscious decision making, and delayed reaction ***can be learned***, so after gradual internalization, (e.g. 5 years) the medicine is no longer needed. The medicine's job was to teach this process.

From:

zeugma92

Thanks for posting this. I have had similar cycles but I think not as severe. I've never seriously contemplated getting help because it just doesn't seem that bad or that prolonged, and also I doubt that it really qualifies as depression because my feelings of hopelessness and futility tend to be contained to one area of my life. So for example I'll feel like there is no point in doing creative work, because why bother making anything, for weeks on end, and that's the main reason I'm slow to release anything at all, because I'll often spend six weeks where I'm doing no such work at all because I can't motivate myself to even think about doing so. Ditto for my finances or my personal life. But like I said what usually keeps me moving is that when I feel terrible about making music, for example, probably I feel good about my day to day personal life. Or if I'm feeling hopeless about money, maybe my teaching work stands out as something rewarding and intrinsically worthwhile that I do five days a week.

There has only been one time recently, a long stretch of nine months or so starting basically with the 2016 election and stretching past my birthday in 2017, in which really nothing seemed to matter and I felt hopeless about literally everything except for the fact that my primary relationship was really strong and I felt really good about that. That's what propped me up. But even then, it felt explicitly prompted by external events and not dissociated from them, the way people describe depression. Trump winning the election in November felt apocalyptic, and then the Ghost Ship warehouse fire killed people whom I slightly knew, and then when running at the YMCA in January I almost blacked out on the track. Most of the year that followed I chalked up to being one long midlife crisis. I went to the doctor, was assured I was fine, but didn't feel reassured. I was about to turn 40, which obviously meant I was about to die. My living situation became intolerable when our upstairs neighbor had a nervous breakdown of his own. And of course, my neighborhood was awful. I was pessimistic about my creative work -- so much so that I just sat on a great album I had recorded the previous year, one that I was really proud of, and didn't release it until 2018. I overspent wildly. I bought a guitar and noodled around for months. I sat around the house listening to records and reading books, and frankly not doing much more than that apart from my hours teaching.

I feel like somewhere in there, I seized on that Miracle Morning book kind of frantically and chronicled every little thought I had about it and all the things I was trying to do and stay on top of. In retrospect I think it was an attempt to force-quit this dark sluggish mood and start over on a different note. But I couldn't keep it up.

But it also didn't get worse. My birthday trip that August seemed to break the spell finally. I remember feeling pretty down for a lot of it and being especially sad on the drive back from LA, but my mood lifted quite suddenly in the months after that and since then it's been fairly even. I'm not as productive creatively as I'd like to be, but my lack of released work isn't coming from a deep place of Why Even Bother Anyway this time, and that's a good change. It's more that I'm more realistic about finding an audience and what kinds of things I really can do with my music, and I'm contemplating next moves rather more than I'm making any.

Escaping Oakland has been one of the best things I've ever done, too. It's impossible to describe the contrast except to say that it's different here, markedly for the better, in every single way, and unexpectedly, absolutely everything went right for a change. That has almost never happened in my life. My blood pressure has dropped on average and my digestive problems, which were getting severe, disappeared, as did my allergy attacks and congestion.

There have definitely been stretches of days where I spend just about the entire morning in bed, covers over my head, feeling like the prospects for anything worthwhile happening in the day to be very slim, and I also feel like it's almost unacceptably privileged and self-indulgent to do that. Needing to go earn money in the afternoon is a reliable mood-breaker on the weekdays, and being with my partner on the weekends tends to short-circuit that mood as well, definitely if we have sex because that's such a powerful mood enhancer for the day, but lazy cuddling all by itself really warms the soul too.

Anyway, I don't know why I am relating all this except to say that I can totally feel what you describe here even though my troughs have never (usually) been particularly deep, this total, or sustained (apart from last year's) -- just enough to make me feel like the things I actually LOVE to do, when I'm in a better mood, are totally futile and not worth the effort. Even though I know better. So I hear you.

Hope you are doing better now, ten days later.