Thoughts

Originally written during treatment

‘Stay Positive.’ I’m so fucking sick of people trying to ‘Stay Positive.’ It’s a denial of what is, an illness; a disjunction between perception & reality. It’s anti-mindfulness. It’s like your car starts making a rattling noise, and you just turn up the radio so you can’t hear it. The problem goes unaddressed.

And the worst part is, it never works. Maybe for the most simple of problems, those that don’t even require treatment. For anything else, it’s willful ignorance. Treat the problem like it’s not there, and hope it goes away. Works with the common cold, not so much with pneumonia.

So no, I will not ‘stay positive.’ Not because I am weak or melancholic. On the contrary, I will swallow the red pill; I will accept things head on. I will stay present. I will be with what is, not deny them. I will feel my feelings, not stuff them. I will walk through sorrow with radical acceptance, knowing that it is part of life. I will sit down with Mara for tea, not attempt to shoo her away. I will not renounce that which is real, that which is valid; I will embrace it, love it, until it melts away and only I remain.

This will, I hope, be outside of the area of “Those Feels”. I do this partly so that, if I ever do get “Better”, I can be sure to never make light of how bad it could get with rose-tinted hindsight. But also, I avoid writing “feely” posts because they tend to be very fleeting, and this particular topic is something that does not seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.

I’ve made a lot of progress in the past 2 years. Those close to me and my therapist would say as much. But if you grabbed me on any day of the week, nearly any time of the day, I’d say I’m just kind of waiting around. At this point, depression for the rest of my life is a matter of degree, and I accept I’ll always have it, but I don’t expect to get better. Yeah, I’ve gotten “better”, but I’m not going to get “Better” with a capital “B”. To be functional or “normal”, where mental illness is a person’s attribute instead of a definition.

Let’s skip the part where I pretend to know all about Dialectical Behavior Therapy and just get to the part that my therapist has given me.

Hopelessness is a very strong thought for me; it’s taken years for me to try to even acknowledge that maybe things realistically have a chance of changing. Having this small degree of freedom has allowed me to see just how incredibly devoted my thoughts have been to this hopelessness, to this immobility, to this futility. It has been more than a belief, it has been as foundational as “I think, therefore I am”.

It’s almost as strong, one could say, as a belief in god. The belief that people hold so concretely that they know it to be true, without question. It is the belief that is at the center of all others for them. They’ll do any number of mental acrobatics to keep it in place, and anything that may cause them to question the belief questions their very self.

Several years ago, after I actually started taking steps to treat my depression, I slowly came to the realization that part of me was resisting the change. Yes, a part of it was the bravery required in trying new things during the process of recovery. And yes, a very large portion of it was hopelessness for the future. But as time went on and both of those things began to wane, I still felt some reluctance. Some fear of getting better. It’s taken me quite some time to try to make any sense of it at all because it quickly becomes a recursive loop of fear.

In a small way, it feels a bit like Stockholm syndrome, or at least vaguely resembles it. Depression and self-loathing almost killed me, but in a very strange way, they also saved me. Because of them, I left a situation that I found unbearable, but what made the situation unbearable was the depression and self-loathing that it created. In a strange sense, depression and self-loathing saved me from more intense depression and self-loathing. The result is this odd affection I have for depression (and self-loathing to a lesser extent) because it’s reliable and I know what to expect, even if what I expect is horrible. Leaving would mean new pains, new experiences that are unfamiliar and thus freshly terrifying.

But there was also something else. Something much more tangible that made me uncomfortable just to try to think of my life without depression. It was as though I actually felt that something of value would be lost.