I really, truly do feel like we as a tribe have made some spectacular progress when it comes to comprehending and handling mental illness. Maybe that’s because I have more synthetic chemicals in my brain than a Hostess factory, but still. Awareness is much wider, education more comprehensive, and new forms of treatment are coming from literally everywhere – I can’t say I’m sold on the whole ketamine biz, but hey, if it’s giving you some medically beneficial juju, then by all means keep riding that pony, friend. Alas, hurdles still lurk amongst us. And some of them are especially heinous, because they involve a certain sense of culpability and shifting it to places where it ought not be shaft. To wit:
You Create Your own Happiness/You Determine Your own Reality
That latter bit of piffling twaddle has been said to me by every dreadlocked white person I’ve ever met who graduated college with a music degree and zero debt. But what happens if somebody creates a reality that totally negates mine, who gets to hang on to theirs? Is it like a Saint-Martin/Sint Maarten thing where we set up a soft border and allow unrestricted travel, or do we alternate reality custody every other Thursday? How long have humans had this ability and why aren’t we all using it all the time? If reality is whatever we want, why do so many of us still include stuff like Gary Ridgway or American Airlines? Isn’t it a crazy coincidence how this notion was thought up and perpetuated by moneyed middle-aged dudes that society fully catered to?
Yes, I get that it’s actually about how we react to our trying times and actively pursuing what you desire in life. And it’s the largest socially accepted form of victim blaming since “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips. Should you do everything in your power to at least mildly quash your travails to try and make the best life for yourself? Totes. Does that mean I’m a complete failure with no one to blame but myself if I do my absolute damndest to achieve my ideal existence but still feel sad all the time due to the dysthymia I most assuredly didn’t ask for? Apparently, I guess.
Complex experiences like loss, trauma, poverty and abuse are realities that are very often outside of their sufferer’s control that require arduous, painful recoveries that aren’t always successful, but we’d all look askance at anyone who shook their head like a smiling bemused yogi who’s about to benevolently lecture you on how your outlook affects your reality. Yet somehow it’s totally fine to tell someone with a mental disease that the negative feelings they get little say in being “put out into the universe” (whatever the rubber-coated hell that even means) are what’s making them unhappy and it’s full-on your own fault? Weird.
It Gets Better
I am so very, very, very, very, very, very, very much not encouraging anyone take part in any type of self-harm or suicide, but you really need to stop telling people this. Because you can’t possibly know that, let alone promise it. Depression has a tendency of creating unrealistic hopes or expectations to counteract severe desperation, like an emotional immune system. So even if things do improve for said despairing soul, if they don’t improve highly enough quickly enough, the fallout from the crushing disappointment could push them even further down than where they climbed out from. Encouragement is a surprisingly tricky business in situations like this, and I’m not you shouldn’t absolutely do the best you can to pull someone back from the ledge just, you know, think before you say stuff.
You Like to Suffer/You Enjoy Being Miserable
Well… no, actually. See, you’re confusing “enjoyment” with “conditioned acceptance,” but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I very much doubt that you need me to tell you that feeling contented, happy and whole is the ultimate plane of being for me and my fellow chronic depressive journeymen. And yours too, I’d wager. It also happens to be legitimately terrifying.
Persistent Depression often has a peak and valley emotional contour to it, and sometimes you can just randomly feel completely splendiddles for no reason of any ken whatsoever. Which, yeah, woohoo while it lasts, but it makes the drop back down to the bottom all the harder to go through when it inevitably bites on to you and starts dragging. And the more time goes by, the harder those collapses are to traverse.
If I woke up tomorrow a retired EGOT at age 40 living in the San Juan Islands and married to my soulmate, I honestly think I’d become impervious to physical harm, since the anxiety would thoroughly fry all of my nerve endings. Because I wouldn’t be able to not tell myself that “this is the one I won’t come back from when it shatters and I’m impaled on the jagged edges.” The only thing worse than only getting periodic glimpses of well-being is having it and losing it over and over again. It’s wanting that ultimate peak of true satisfaction more than anything in this dimension but being scared to death of it at the same time.
But you know what never feels like falling to the bottom? Already being down there. When you’re feeling cracked and defeated and alone a big swath of your time, it gets to be familiar. And, sure, there’s a perverse sense of comfort in that kind of familiarity. Depression won’t surprise you, it won’t set you up for disappointment by saying things will get better, it knows you more intimately than most of the people in your life and it’ll never, ever reject you.
It’s the psycho-emotional equivalent of the Domino’s app on my phone.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
