It’s always, fundamentally, about the cold.

Depression is cold. It numbs. It freezes. It chills. Depression is frostbitten fingers desperately fumbling for a match. It’s miles upon miles of cold dead tundra where nothing lives. It’s It’s a period of glaciation, where mountains of ice move over the land and scrape it die. It’s freezing rain that sucks the heat from your blood like a vampire. It’s a cruel frost that kills the tender bud before it can bloom. It’s being stabbed in the heart with an icicle over and over and over again.

Depression is the cold and unforgiving heart of Death.

Patient readers know my theory as to why this is. I think that the mind produces a kind of anesthetic in response to psychic trauma. This is necessary because it allows the individual to function while this  emotional trauma heals. It’s analogous to the body’s response to physical trauma via the production of endorphins.

But what happens when the emotional injury does not heal? When it is more than the mind can handle, for whatever reasons, and so the wound remains indefinitely?

Then so does the response. These unresolved traumas continue to be met with this numbing effect of which I speak, and this effect causes the mind to lose contact with the communal feeling of humanity and hence leaves the sufferer feeling utterly alone. It also makes the mind sluggish on some levels, making it hard for the individual to cope with reality. Furthermore, it drains the afflicted of energy by shutting down the connection between desire and achievement of said desire, in addition to giving the mind the feeling of being weak and overburdened and helpless.

In essence, it leaves people feeling dead inside. But they are not dead, merely sleeping. All that they were and all that they were meant to be are still there, just like our hands or feet are still there even if they fall asleep and you can’t feel them any more.

It’s especially pathological because the effects of this numbing often lead to further emotional traumas, and the patient’s mind becomes a museum of frozen and unresolved emotional issues, all of which radiate their own coldness, and before you know it, the whole psyche goes numb and you are left with a very depressed individual who can no longer feel much of anything from the outside world and is thus turning ever inward to experience the emotions left to them, namely those generated internally.

And those emotions are not going to be healthy ones, because without that external emotional input, the mind grows stagnant and rots from within.

A harsh image, to be sure, but true nevertheless.

Medications help counter some of the effects. SSRI’s like Prozac and Paxil can interfere with the ways depression operates, especially how it results in and/or from the depletion of serotonin in the bloodstream.

But that merely treats the symptom. The root cause of the problem  is the unresolved emotional issue provoking the numbing response in the first place and the individual cannot truly be free of their illness until these emotions are resolved.

Especially, presumably, the initial trauma.

Interesting how I started out poetic then went straight into clinical, isn’t it?

In my case, resolving the initial trauma is tricky because I was only three when it happened. That means both that the memory is extremely primal and vague (yet also extremely powerful) and that it’s an extremely old memory and thus hard to retrieve.

I mean, who remembers a lot of what happened to them when they were three?

Plus, it is such a profound trauma at so early an age that it is buried deep in the very structure of my psyche. I have mentioned before how between the ages of zero and five, we gain most of the brain mass we will have for the rest of our lives.

This is obvious if you compare the size of a newborn infant’s head with that of a five year old. There is simply no room for a fully functional human brain in there!

That’s why those years are so very very very important to the child’s future development. Whatever happens and whatever they learn during those precious years will get encoded into the very structure of the brain itself, and get programmed into the fundamental base code of the operating system of their mind.

If more people understood this, maybe they would understand the enormity of what is at stake in those magical early years.

And smack in the middle of those years, I was raped by a stranger.

I don’t consciously remember most of it. Which is a blessing, and probably the only benefit of having it happen at such an early age. Had it happened when I was older, the memory would have been clearer and easier to access.

But I know it’s in there. Lurking.

I do remember making the decision to “take my mind away”, like so many other victims of child rape. I did this by deliberately and desperately unfocusing my mind till everything was a soft, warm blur on every level.

And I think that became a deeply ingrained psychological defense. It’s the root of my tendency to retreat into my mind when emotionally distressed. Once I defocus from the world, I can focus on my inner life and in there, I feel safe from the horrors of the outside world. The bullying I endured in elementary school, and especially the boredom I endured in class due to my advanced intellect, only reinforced this tendency.

And that’s the source of the “inward tide”  I have mentioned before. Just to focus on the world as much as I do,  have to fight a constant battle against the pull of gravity from this black hole deep inside me. I live in a state of constant terror that I will fail to keep up and go crashing through my own event horizon.

And as we all know….

Nothing can escape the black hole after that.

Fighting my own gravity drains most of my energy, which is why I have so little left for everything else. That’s why i can seem gobsmackingly absurd when I am asked or expected to do something which is patently impossible for me.

It’s like asking a man dangling from the edge of a cliff to juggle.

But the world cannot see my inner struggle. They can’t possibly understand what it’s like for a person of me to make it through the day. They cannot conceive of the burden we depressives carry around with us or how much that drains us.

It’s like we are wearing thick heavy armor nobody can see.

It’s not hopeless, though. Therapy can disperse the mass of the black hole so that its gravitic pull lessens over time, and suddenly, you have more energy for other things.

And if, some day, I can get at that primal trauma and release its cargo…

…then I might finally be free to leave this stinking solar system and explore the univrse with all the other ships.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.