Daily Archives: July 3, 2011

Sleepy Sunday scribbles

Posted on by

Quite unusually, today I find myself entirely without foobles I feel like flinging at you, and I am feeling way to lazy and sleepy to think of an article concept, let alone write the darn thing, so guess what?

You folks just get me talking at ya. Lucky you.

So how the hell am I, anyhow? I am doing OK. Still feel like my life is trapped in the doldrums, but that is just the way it goes when you have the sort of health problems that I do. Part of the madness of depression is to know you are sick and still go on feeling like you are a failure and a loser for not doing anything with your life.

You ARE doing something with your life. You are living it.

But the basic drives are still there, that’s the problem. As human beings, depressed people still want to be part of society, to participate and have that participation recognized by one’s peers, to earn money and hence be able to improve your lifestyle and indulge yourself and feel like you have earned these pleasures instead of feeling guilty and humiliated by your constant reliance on handouts and help from others.

The sad truth is, being depressed is depressing. It’s a bad way to be.

But who knows, perhaps I have simply not found the right solution to my personal life equation yet. I am always trying to think of a way that I can connect with the world and earn some money and (far more importantly) some self-respect and dignity, and it’s not an easy process, nor is it linear and contiguous, but maybe some day I will stumble upon a solution that works for me and who I am, instead of coming up with dreams and plans that are simply not going to work for me.

The problem, as always, is momentum. I simply lack the ability to generate my own. Left to my own devices, I just keep doing what I am doing, which, without external structure to rely on, is not very much. Last year’s Million Words was a great thing as it kept me busy and gave me a feeling of purpose, although now it feels like I am not sure why I bothered, but here it is more than half way through this year and I still haven’t found anything to replace it in my life.

This writing 750 words or so a day in a blog named after myself was supposed to just be a temporary thing until I came up with something new. Looking back, though, I can see now that this was not a realistic way to approach the problem. Doing this is far too comfortable and comfort is, and it pains me to say this, the enemy. When I am comfortable, nothing changes. I need to become less comfortable and more driven if I am to get out of this stupid hole I find myself in.

Easier said than done, of course.

What I need, I think, is inspiration. Actually, scratch that, I have tons of inspiration. My mind is always teeming with ideas, notions, insights, and what have you. And that is part of the problem…. you can’t follow one without abandoning the rest, at least for a time.

And it is so hard to choose which one of your darlings lives while the rest die. So instead, they die in the womb. Everything (well, mostly everything) just stays in my head.

And if all your dreams stay in your head, none of them come true, do they?

The thing is, that is how this all started. I am pretty sure that my imagination developed primarily as a way for a lonely child to amuse and entertain himself while bored in class or alone in his room. So as much as I dream of using this extraordinary faculty to make my way in the world, the truth is, just by occupying my mind and keeping me distracted and fascinated, it is serving its primary function.

And actually following my inspirations and notions would involve opening my life up to a lot more chaos and unpredictability, and at this point, I am still clinging very hard to hyper stability.

I am not yet at the point where I feel confident and safe enough to explore, after all these years.

And once more, I am back to the point of my personal crisis : how do you escape when you are not even strong enough to do the things you need to do to get out?

A cup full of rocks

Posted on by

Take a cup. Any cup. This cup is you.

Fill the cup part way with water. The water is your mind.

Look at the surface of the water. The surface of the water is your conscious mind.

In the course of life, the water of your emotions starts off running freely and without congestion or restraint.

But as we grow, we learn self-control. We learn that we cannot always do what our emotions tell us to do. We learn to delay gratification and restrain our impulses.

In short, we learn to repress.

Now this is a vitally important skill. It is, in fact, the very basis of what it means to be a human being and not an animal. Animals, lacking sentience, have very little but emotion to decide their actions. The brighter ones can learn a little restraint. For instance, dogs can be house trained. But for the most part, animals operate purely on emotion, or instinct, and human beings have a choice.

Imagine a classic “state of nature” scenario : an encounter with a dangerous predator. If you were feeling lazy that day, and had no way to shunt that emotion from your mind and deal with the immediate situation and choose the right choice (hint : it involves running), you would not survive to contribute your genetic legacy to humanity’s genome.

In order to exercise this choice, however, we human beings have to suppress out emotions. We have to clear the current emotion out of our mind so that we can do what we want to do and not just what we feel like doing. We have to have a mechanism for ridding our conscious mind of unwanted emotion.

We have to take the current emotion and push it below the surface of the water…. into the depths below our consciousness, into the unconscious mind which makes up the vast majority of our psyches.

We do this by basically freezing the emotion and turning it to stone. The petrified emotion then drops down into the murky depths of the mind, clearing our consciousness and letting us get on with things.

In theory, this is merely a delaying tactic, meant only to set the emotion aside until we can deal with it. But in reality, with unpleasant emotions, we tend to heavily favour long term procrastination. After all, dealing with emotions requires feeling them, and by definition, feeling unpleasant emotions is unpleasant, and putting off doing unpleasant things is the very definition of procrastination.

So by and large, especially with the complexities and demands of modern life on our clever but finite monkey brains, it is out of mind, out of sight. The rock of the emotion drops into the depths of our minds, and we do not give it another conscious thought. We act like it is gone forever, and had no effect.

But the water level has risen. And the higher it rises, the shorter the distance between our minds and the outside of the cup, in other words the world, becomes.

This is not just a metaphorical truth, it’s a biochemical fact. The more we suppress our emotion, the higher the levels of stress related chemicals in our bloodstream and the more likely we are to have a lot of very unpleasant reactions that actually remove the element of choice from the equation entirely.

Why? Because part of this emotional procrastination process is the idea that these emotions are gone forever. After all, all we consciously experience is the surface of the water, and there’s no sign of the emotion on the surface of the water, so it must be gone, right?

But as more and more of these rocks drop down into the depths, not only does the water (and your emotional stress level) rise, but your mind fills with rocks, making it harder and harder to do anything without one of them randomly bobbing to the surface, seemingly ‘out of nowhere’, and making us suppress them again all the harder.

And as this process continues, without an outlet, the mind as a whole can become more rock than water. The short term gains of banishing an emotion come at a heavy long term cost of carrying an unknown and unresolved burden with you for the rest of your life.

And the worst part is, without knowledge of what is going on below the surface of the mind, we cannot understand what is happening to us, or why. Things just seem to be getting worse and worse and the worse they get, the more negative emotions we have to suppress just to get through the day.

If this goes on too long, it can shut the person down entirely.

That is called depression.

The solution is to reverse the repression to depression process, to reach down into the waters of our unconscious mind and remove the rocks of suppressed emotion that are weighing us down. To bring them back up to the surface of the water and finish what we have started by experiencing them, despite how negative they are and how we would rather not experience negative emotions.

Often, this process is known as therapy.

If we do not, the water level will rise and rise, bringing those repressed emotions closer to the outside world and taking away our ability to choose our reactions. This can lead to depression, sudden rage out of proportion to the stimulus, bursting into tears for “no reason”, panic attacks, and anything else on the “mood disorder” spectrum of mental distress.

Emotions never go away until they are felt. There is no other solution. The only way out for these heavy rocks inside your soul is through the surface of the water… through your conscious mind. If you keep pushing these repressed emotions down when they surface, and continue to add to their number every day, you will slowly have your emotions and sense of self entirely displaced by them.

But if you can deal with these emotions, you can free yourself of their burden and become more happy, more content, more stress free, and more yourself than you have ever been.

You have a choice.