I come to you know from the blackest of funks. The last time I felt like this I didn’t write for weeks, which made me feel super great. Only not. Fine then. I don’t feel like writing the wonderful post about literature where humans come together to solve problems in interesting ways. I’m going to write about you depression, because fuck you. I might even touch a spider later.
Some of this is cribbed from a conversation I had with a friend who was in a low state, but I find myself using it now that I’m down there too. The thing with being depressed is that it doesn’t work like you think it’s supposed to. It fogs up your judgment. In some ways it’s not you, but in other ways it is. Your way of valuing things, especially yourself, gets really skewed, and there’s all this maddening logic that we use to justify why our depressed expressions are the truth.
The thing is, that’s not how it works. Depression isn’t just psychological, it’s chemical. We spend so much time wandering around being people that we sometimes forget we’re also brains. Our feelings are also chemical reactions happening between neurotransmitters, and sometimes things get out of whack. That’s a technical term. Sometimes those feelings will be entirely inconsistent with our experiences, and we wind up inventing all of these post hoc justifications for why they’re legitimate. After all, we have lots of other legitimate feelings. We trust that our feelings, to some extent, are a reflection of our inner state. I’m not making an argument that depression is entirely chemical, but everything we do and think is at least partly chemical. We’re brains and bodies.
Let’s be honest, one of the worst things about depression is being sad when you have no reason to be. Forget all the other people who tell you to cheer up because your life is awesome. You sit there in your bed knowing your life is awesome and being unable to explain why you still can’t bear it. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with things out there, so there must be something wrong with you. You should enjoy yourself, you should be present, but you’re not. And then the thought creeps in: maybe you’re just not good enough? Maybe you’ve had the earthshattering realization that all the things you have and all the wonderful things that happen you don’t deserve, and what you’re feeling now is the brutal scrape of honesty on the chalkboard of your brain. After all, there has to be a reason that you feel this way.
But that’s not how it works. It’s a feeling without a reason. That’s why you can’t just cheer up. That’s why no amount of cake will make it better. But the more time you spend looking for reasons, the more you’ll find. But it defies reason. It doesn’t work the way that you think it’s supposed to work. It’s just this thing that you carry around with you all the time. You want to get rid of the pieces of you that are sad for no reason, or just get better, because everyone else seems to have their shit together, and they think everything around you is hunky dory.
But that’s not how it works. Being depressed isn’t like having a really vicious cold. You know that one, that you picked up from some plague-carrying toddler that everyone else has beaten and it’s just you left snotting all over everything and feeling like a jerk for not soaking your face in bactine after they insisted on moose kisses. It was sooooo cute. You just need to treat the symptoms, and the rest will go away. A bit of soup, bit of tea, bit of rest, and you’ll be good to go. When those don’t work, you consider more drastic measures like drilling your sinuses, because it just doesn’t seem like this cold is going to ever go away.
But that’s not how it works. Being depressed isn’t like a cold, it’s like losing a leg. You might forget that it’s gone sometimes, or even get a prosthetic, but it’s never the same. You don’t get better one day, no matter how much time, tea, or talk it takes. You just get better at living with it. You find things that work for you, you pick your battles when you can, and you take it day by day. This thing isn’t something you’re ever going to get rid of. Not ever. It’s you. It’s part of you. And it sucks, and it makes you flawed. But everyone is flawed and busted up, and if we spend all our time worrying about the ways people are broken we never see the ways in which they’re beautiful and brilliant.
And that’s what matters. Not everything that’s broken needs fixing.
