A Question of Why?
On (not) going along to get along, the masks I wear to placate the Sunny-Side-Up Cultists, and the weariness which results.
I’m tired of life; weary and tired. I’ve been living with chronic depression longer than I ever lived without it, and I resent having to deal with it. I resent not being able to live and thrive as easily as those around me, and I’m tired of pretending like it’s no big deal when I’m around others because it’s expected of me to wear that mask. If I didn’t make the effort to kiss the asses of the ‘toxic positivists’ then I would get no substantial social interaction. What makes it doubly hard is that there are times where I frequently can’t handle being around others because it physically hurts to receive any sort of encouragement or positive reinforcement.
Most of the time, I only go out because I have to. Maybe I need buy food or attend a medical appointment, or a hold has come in at my local library. Frequently I find myself peering outside from behind the curtains before leaving the house, because I do not relish having to interact with others. It’s also not a rare thing for me to hesitate for hours on end before going out. That’s how my anxiety manifests. I don’t sit around shaking nervously; I just hesitate, mulling over the fact that I have to be around people to live. For whatever deep-seated reason, my life has come to a place where half of the time I can’t be around people because it is too emotionally draining to do so, and the other half of the time I have to wear some kind of mask because it’s too much of a burden on others to exist as my broken self, genuinely and openly.
I’ve even had to, on the rare occasion, ask people not to interact with me because I couldn’t handle being where I was in the moment, only being where I was out of necessity. On one occasion, there was a bubbly receptionist at my then-clininc who was always upbeat and would try to boost you, as one is wont to do when they work with the public, and try to be cheerful, but on one occasion it was too much and I had to muster more effort than I felt I could in the moment to say ‘Not today, please.’
On another occasion, I wound up attending an appointment at my clinic, by chance, on my birthday. I was barely communicative and thoroughly numb, getting bombed with birthday salutations. It felt like hell having to endure all those positive vibes, so I swore then I would never go anywhere public on my birthday where it was likely to be known that the day in question was my birthday, because I never want to endure love bombs like that again when I’m at my lowest. Some might question why I didn’t just reschedule my appointment, but I wasn’t expecting to feel like shit on my birthday. Depression is a fickle bitch; it doesn’t give you a manageable times-table, or any sort of advanced warning that it will strike. Maybe you will feel it come on gradually, but it will trick you into thinking that it’s not so bad until it is so bad that you can barely function.
I don’t know where lie the psychological roots of my dysfunction, but whatever it was in my past which twisted my sense of self-esteem into it’s current state, this demon has been so effective that I actively choose to remain apart from most people because most of the time I can’t handle wearing the masks they demand. The chemical interactions in my brain cause a reaction to register in my body making it more and more difficult to exist on the same wavelengths as the rest of you when in common company. On most things I am merely neutral in my reactions. It’s difficult to accept when someone gives a positive critique of my art or writing, and it’s next to impossible to garner any measure of joy from the things I do. I’ve created a lot of writing and art in my life but not because it brings me pleasure or satisfaction. It only happens because my brain deems it necessary to produce the things I produce, when the cortex decides to release them.
The cold fact of chronic, treatment-resistant depression is that it chips away at you, little by little, until very few affirmative things are left to ensure a healthy sense of self. I used to listen to Cubs games regularly on the radio until that interest dwindled to one or two games per year. It was then that I realized sports had no joy left for me. I played guitar and bass for several years, from the time I was in high school, until in the end music no longer held any tangible satisfaction for me. At that point I had only touched my guitar once in a course of years, so I gave all my musical equipment away because it was doing me no good to stare at the remnants of a joy I could no longer recall. Even now, I stare at stacks of CDs I barely listen to. My depression has chiseled away so much of my connection to music such that ghost stories are all that is left of that time when music was a balm for my anxiety.
I’ve lost who knows how many friends over it as well. Every three to five years I seem to suffer a total reset of my life because my mental health issues necessitate a break of some kind. Most people have no desire to feel bad so they actively avoid being around people with chronic mental health issues. Sometimes they don’t know their friends are suffering and take the signs of suffering as indications of disinterest. At other times, they grow disenchanted with a sufferer and choose to chastise them for not being a part of the crowd, as happened to me once many years ago when a former friend who ran karaoke at a bar called me a pussy for not wanting to come out one night. In his ignorance, he chose to relegate his perception of me to one of physical cowardliness rather than recognize that my mental health issues were standing in the way of effectively managing an outing at a crowded bar. I haven’t spoken to him since.
Naturally, I’ve grown to the point where I don’t suffer fools lightly, particularly where it concerns my mental health issues. When I first started manifesting what I came to know as depression, I was in high school and I was without any sort of parental influence, effectively on my own for all daily intents and purposes. I had no support network apart from ensuring that I didn’t fail out of school. I couldn’t talk to anyone because I didn’t feel like I could trust anyone given my upbringing, and when I tried, people were, at the very least, dismissive if it wasn’t a crisis situation. I couldn’t trust in anyone, trust that what I had to say wouldn’t be swept under the rug by any given person, because at that point I was so used to masking my feelings that I didn’t really know I was masking my feelings. I couldn’t explain it to myself so, in hindsight, how in the hell could I hope for support from anyone unless my life was at risk…?
This carried through a series of bad decisions, not the least of which was an aborted attempt to join the military (a bad decision in its own right), and a long drawn-out process of failing at getting an education after high school, though I did manage to squeak out an AA with something like a C average. As I’ve intimated, I’ve never been able to enjoy a tangible support network thanks to the ignorance of others, their assumptions on mental health and related issues. The very woman who gave birth to me, or rather, had me excised from her body (she used to hold her scars over me to drive home how much she suffered bringing me into the world) had the ignorant nerve to ask ‘what do you have to be depressed about’ when I first came out at 22 with my diagnosis and the fact that I was on medication.
Friends came and went because I couldn’t follow their line at every turn. One friend wanted me to buy boxing equipment in college because he was so influenced by Fight Club and wanted to start an underground club of his own. I couldn’t do that because of my PTSD issues from childhood, getting beat with a belt constantly by the bible-thumping ‘spare the rod spoil the child’ zealots in my family. Other friends just drifted way as it became apparent that I couldn’t keep pace, not because I didn’t want to but because I couldn’t afford to and didn’t have a lot of energy to spare when I could. Even online friends proved less than adequate to the task of acceptance and understanding.
Once when I was still ensnared by Facebook, I interjected with what I thought was a constructive bit of input in a conversation that had popped up in my news-feed (meaning it was public) but then one party to the exchange, whom I had assumed was a friend, physically typed out the action of grabbing me by the ear and shoving me back into my corner of the internet, as if I were a petulant child sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. I didn’t speak to her again. What makes it doubly insulting is that she would pop up subsequently with a ‘how you doing’ every once in a great while, not even bothering to acknowledge how badly she affected me and my sense of dignity.
Even here, in this place where one would think reason in the face of mental illness might prevail, a girl named Kitty took certain actions on my part in a wrong light and assumed the worst, blocking me forever without an opportunity to explain myself, not even doing me the courtesy of explaining what I had done to cause offense. I wouldn’t have minded but she also managed to get another of my ‘friends’ to do the same without explanation. So yeah, as long as the prospect of ignorant assumptions reins supreme in society, I will always be wary of placing my trust in others. I’ve been burned by people jumping to unfounded conclusions once too often to have any other mindset in this regard. Even my grandmother, my only ‘solid’ means of support over the years, has been imperfect in her applications. When I first started manifesting serious depressive symptoms, she basically mandated that I do something to get treatment because she wasn’t going to waste her precious time and money if I didn’t. I barely speak to her anymore.
And even today, people I would like to think I can trust to be intelligent on these and other matters prove themselves less than capable of the task. One of my nieces assumes I’m the unreasonable party because I refuse to consider her tenuous assumption that UFOs are real. She claims to be convinced by evidence she’s come across and that I’m being unreasonable because I choose to scrutinize the evidence in order to get to the bottom of the UFO issue rather than blindly accept common assumptions associated with the phenomenon. My own father dared to demean me as less moral than he was because I chose to vociferously opposed Trump’s elevation to the presidency. Imagine that, a supporter of one of THE most corrupt and unethical presidents in history claims his own son is less moral. I haven’t spoken to him since.
Conspiracy mongers and political toads aside, my own sister had the nerve in recent months, admittedly not intentionally or maliciously, to ask if I had ever tried just ‘trying’ harder to live given my state of adverse mental health. Her assumption was that depression and the associated difficulty is due to a lack of effort, and this is not uncommon in neurotypicals. Most people who’ve never had to suffer long term pin difficulties due to mental health on a kind of moral failing on the part of the sufferer. With the religious it’s doubly insidious, as it’s been in my family, because the end result is that they say a few prayers and leave it in the hands of their ‘god’ to lead the sufferer out of darkness. Perhaps it’s well-meaning but it’s insidious none the less because faith, in this case, denies wisdom, which hinders affirmative action and makes having a constructive support network a pipe dream.
It’s ignorance like this which makes me reluctant to venture into the world. I don’t want to live like this and I’m certain I would do things differently if I could because I know it’s possible. I’ve had lapses in my medication treatment where I had bursts of energy and creativity a hundred times more potent than previous months, these bursts of energy setting in once the ‘coming down’ period had lapsed. As much as I felt good and alive in those moments, I’ve recognized that it’s not a good idea to forego medication for my depression because the despair I’ve felt in my life is so much worse than anything I can describe and I tend pray to the ether for a way out in those times when it sets in. What’s more, it’s been demonstrated somewhat that people who go on and off medication tend to have more episodes of illness than they would have having never gone on a med regimen in the first place.
People are prone to assumption, however, and it’s for this level of ignorant assumption that I can’t abide anyone who jumps on a bit of news about anti-depressant research and then reaches the conclusion that they don’t work or aren’t genuinely valuable as treatment, as happened recently when that idiot of a talking head Tucker Carlson opened his mouth on the matter on an episode of his show. Anti-depressants work, there is evidence for it, even if continuing research has figured out, or at least refuted, one bit of information where it regards the mechanism of action. Other areas of science have shown that structural defects in the brain are at the root of mental health issues, and it’s been shown that these structural defects respond, or rather reorient, after a combined course of treatment involving medication and talking therapy, the best strategy so far devised even if it’s not a perfect one.
Science may miss the mark from time to time but the trajectory for sound discovery is a positive arc, and it really speaks volumes about the continuing ignorance of common people when they can be so naively swayed by talking heads with an agenda, despite the overall reality that sound medical and scientific research have both improved our lives. I mean, Edison may have been a bit of an asshole, but when he spoke about his attempts to to create the light-bulb, he didn’t speak of repeated failures; he spoke about a long string of learned lessons on what didn’t make a functional light-bulb. So yes, the presumed serotonin link may not have a lot of evidence behind it, but a chemical imbalance is still at the root of our mental health issues.
Our very existence is at the mercy of chemicals, for that matter. Genetics is the result of DNA programing. And for those of you who paid attention in school, as opposed to sitting in the back of the room playing Magic or smoking weed with all the other stoner nobs at the skate park all day, deoxyribonucleic acid is a chemical compound. Genetic defects are literally the result of a chemical imbalance, so if your brain has an inherited structural defect which leads to a life of mental health issues…you get my meaning. Hell, even dehydration is the result of a chemical imbalance, because water is a chemical substance and our bodies (and brains) rely on it for proper function. Too little water = improper bodily function. Can you think clearly when you’re dehydrated…? I know I can’t.
Some might say it takes a lot of faith to rely on medical science as an effective source of relief, but I don’t have to rely on faith in the medical establishment to know antidepressants work. I’ve experienced improvements in the process of taking them, albeit not in a significant measure to make it feel as if I’m in a good place. It’s true that I haven’t had the best of luck where it regards medication for my mental health. A good proportion of people who take them don’t respond as well as would be hoped if at all, some thirty percent, maybe even as high as fifty depending on the estimates.
In my case, once I got around to Viibryd in the course of my game of medication roulette, I found that my body didn’t feel as heavy in the course of normal activity. I don’t have to stop repeatedly while washing dishes because my back aches too much. Holding my arms up in the shower to wash my hair doesn’t feel so difficult, because my limbs don’t feel like dead weight which I have to struggle to move. I’m able spend more time mowing the lawn in one go because I don’t get fatigued as easily, and when I say mowing I mean merely guiding a powered mower as I walk, not pushing a manual mower with no transmission. Hauling my laundry up and down the stairs isn’t as much of a struggle. Life may not be great, in fact it sucks quite a bit, but I have seen a slight improvement in certain areas. So no one can tell me that psyche meds don’t work merely because science can’t adequately explain why they are necessary. That will be revealed in time.
Having a sense of self is important when fostering resilience in the face of mental health adversity, and while I do a decent job of keep a grip on the few affirmative things I have left, I do feel that sense of self and resilience slipping away on a constant basis. I struggle to produce writing and art, for one. This essay will be the first solid bit of writing I’ve been able to muster in over two weeks. And the only two tangible pieces of art I’ve been able to muster in recent months, you can see just below. Are they good? Objectively I can probably say yes because I try to cultivate my rational mind as an active strategy to maintain my resilience, but I’m nowhere close to feeling good about them or the processes that went into creating them.
I even managed to create something of a functional LED light box for this community arts program downtown, but even that success brings little joy or comfort despite the obvious benefits to the community. In fact, one could easily say that I’ve had a positive impact on this group of artists, but I’m far from being able to feel good about it myself.
For now, I manage to keep myself as grounded as I can by watching videos on my computer, mainly British comedies and superhero films, and playing simple puzzle games on my devices. It’s nice to have competent primers on various art subjects to read when Kamna Kirti and Jess the Avocado post them. And I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t get some contentment from reading the varied religious critiques at Happily Faithless when Danielle Hestand and Lisa Osborne make new posts, but it’s all one big exercise in distraction, a panacea to keep my mind off of the fact that life doesn’t feel livable. In order for there to be sustained joy, the dopamine receptors in your brain have to work properly, and mine don’t. What’s more, I don’t know how to get to a state where they might, absent some expensive, and somewhat risky, medical treatment options, like ketamine nasal spray and electro-convulsive therapy.
I try to make the hours less tedious and marginally productive, obviously, but most of the time, it’s wasted effort. Recently, I checked out four books on Edward Hopper, one of my favorite artists, in order to try and do some research for an essay, but I’ve barely touched them despite having them in reach for almost two months. The will and energy to act on the opportunity just haven’t been there. It’s probably hard for normies to comprehend or imagine how one would have so much difficulty when opportunity is so close at hand, but not for people like me. If you’ve ever been depressed for significant lengths of time, you know what I mean, and you know how badly the blind discrimination opens the scars just a little deeper.
The farther along I go in life, the less certainty I have of a purpose or a place, despite my obvious creative talent. In order to thrive in this grand tribe of humanity, one must necessarily connect on some level with others and be able to sustain those connections. I can barely sustain a connection with those parts of myself which seem vital or essential; I just don’t have the will or the energy. So how am I to maintain connections with others in light of that deficit…? As days go by and I step farther into the undiscovered country, I’m constantly mulling over one line of lyric in my head, sung by Shirley Manson of Garbage fame during the intro to the Bond film ‘The World is Not Enough.’
Most days I hear her words in my head — “There’s no point in living if you can’t feel alive” — and most days I ponder just how much time I have left before the dopamine receptors in my brain go cold forever and I have no way to feel good again, no sense of self left to sustain or justify continuing as the sack of flesh and water I am, glued by gravity to this lump of rock hurtling through time and space; no further means available to put off feeling worse for just another few days or hours; no resilience left to justify staying alive. And even if I do have a substantial amount of resilience left, what is the use in living for whatever length of time I have left here if I have to live in this chronically low state…?
NOTE: I’ve closed comments on this essay as a preemptive measure. I don’t want encouragement, I don’t want sentimental cliches, I don’t want hallmark card homilies, I don’t want affirmations of any kind. So please don’t offer them. They are of no use to me at the present moment and will only serve to make me feel worse.
You can read more of my work on mental health issues through the following link, if you are so inclined.
