Something came up in therapy today that I want to explore, much as one explores the empty socket of a pulled tooth with one’s tongue after an extraction.

It has to do with a stark and desperate truth : that the chemical imbalance of depression renders you incapable of believing certain things, no matter what the evidence says.

I find that idea extremely offensive to my intellectual sensibilities, as would anyone. We all like to believe that we arrive at our beliefs through observation, insight, logic, and deduction, and that no matter what the truth is, we will believe it if the evidence supports that conclusion.

Certainly, I have lived a great deal of my life thinking exactly that. From my first philosophy course onward, I envisioned myself as a rugged philosopher, willing to examine anything at all in this mad reaction chamber of a mind of mine in my pursuit of the almighty Truth.

The idea that there are things I would be incapable of believing, no matter the logic, no matter the evidence, flies in the face of such conceit. And to face this hard truth is humbling indeed.

And yet, in a way, I have known for a long time. For many, many years now, I have been blithely saying that it was one thing to know something intellectually but quite another thing to feel it. I have even talked about the difference between knowing something and believing it.

But it has only been recently that this picture has taken on this new layer of clarity, and only today, during therapy, that I put it out there into the world in words which I cannot take back or suppress.

There are things I have no choice but to believe, and things I cannot believe, no matter the logic, no matter how much evidence, because of these goddamned chemicals in my brain.

It is a frightening thought to face one’s mental illness head on like this. Looking one’s insanity standing there, naked in the clear light of day, makes one feel small and helpless in the world.

If I cannot even trust this phenomenal mind of mine and its ability to reason, to observe, and to find the truth of things, what can I trust? Where do you turn when your mind is suspect?

In a way, I have been fighting this fight ever since I was a little kid. Like a lot of kids, I was afraid of the dark. I only conquered that fear with reason, namely, telling myself that, logically, there was nothing in my room when it was dark that was not there in the light.

In that case, I was able to conquer irrational fear with the power of logic and reason. Perhaps this is what set me on the path I have pursued ever since.

And to this day, when I am struggling with my inner demons, it is my mind I use against them. I push myself hard towards the truth as opposed to the filthy lies my chemical imbalance pushes me towards.

I told my therapist this morning that fighting against depression is like walking against the wind. It is this force always pushing you back, and it takes a lot of effort and determination to make any progress.

And that is how I feel about it now. For the first time, I see my struggle clearly as a fight to make myself believe the positive things about myself that I know deep down are true, but that depression has kept me from believing until now.

I am hoping that now that I have this better understanding of the nature of the problem, I can better steel myself for the fight and press onward towards not just the truth, but my own happiness.

Of course, this battle will not be won by reason alone. It is, in fact, a contest of will, and will and reason are not the same thing. Reason is of the mind. But will is an emotion, at its core. It can be shored up by reason or drained by false belief, but it is an emotion nevertheless.

And the truth remains that no amount of willpower or skulduggery will solve this problem by itself. The real healing is purely emotional, and in some ways out of my conscious control.

I don’t mean that there is nothing I can do to help myself get better. Not at all.

But it means that it cannot be done entirely under the power of this amazing brain of mine. I will have to walk past the edge of my reason and deal with the deep mystical truths of my own soul.

It means I have to let go of trying to rigidly control the process and the outcome via this overpowering brain of mine and thus force myself into a mold of my own devising.

Instead, I have to release control and accept that I have to walk whatever path is before me, without knowing exactly where it leads, and even just follow my heart sometimes.

Even the thought of doing something purely because I feel like it, without knowing if that feeling is “true” or “right” or “smart”, scares the hell out of me and makes me break out in a cold sweat.

But I have been taking the easiest path for way too long and it has gotten me absolutely nowhere. I want to build up my courage instead, and learn to fight the urge to try to hide from life until it goes way.

It is never going away until the day I die, and if I want to get some living done before that, and show the world just how amazing I truly am, I am going to have to learn to fight the current and get my ass upstream, no matter how hard I have to row.

Hopefully, with Wellbutrin’s help, I will find a way to get on with my life at last.

I can’t wait.

I just had an awesome idea for a business, and it sort of came to me in a dream.

I dreamed that me and two other people were going to go scare the crap out of some little thug who had bullied a kid we knew and destroyed the kid’s backpack. What’s worse, the bully had been taking food off his victim’s lunch tray for weeks.

So we decided to stage a little intervention, put a real scare into the little shit, and hopefully get the money to pay for his victim’s new backpack plus all the food he stole out of the bully.

Yeah, this is clearly illegal and a terrible idea in reality, but hey, dream.

However, when I woke up from my nap and the events of the dream were floating around in the as yet unset Jello of my mind, I suddenly realized that there was the germ of a great idea in there.

Imagine this ad :

Is your child being bullied in school? Is the school refusing to do what it takes to protect your child? Are you at your wit’s end trying to protect your child? Is your child afraid to go to school?

Then call Bullyguard. We will assign a trained professional to protect your child. Our professionals are adults trained in both child care and self defense. They will walk your child to and from school (or accompany them on the bus), and stay with the child all day, protecting them between classes and during lunch and recess as well.

This acts as a strong deterrent to anyone looking to harm your child. Most of the time, this deterrent alone is enough to keep your child safe.

But don’t worry… in case a physical intervention is required, our professional Bullyguards are highly trained in stopping schoolyard violence without any harm to any child.

So call Bullyguard. We step in where the school system fails.

We can keep your child safe.

Would that not kick ass? Ideally, this would be a volunteer service and therefore free to any parent who needs it, but I am realistic enough to know that to provide such a service would probably be expensive and it might just have to be a not-for-profit instead.

It would be hard to get enough people to be willing to stick with a kid throughout the entire school day without offering them some kind of financial compensation. Even with all the adults who were bullied as children as potential volunteers.

And it goes (almost) without saying that these people would have to be highly trained and extremely disciplined. The job is not to take revenge on the bullies that tormented you as a child and it would be absolutely unacceptable for them to strike or otherwise seriously injure a child in the call of duty, no matter how much the little cretins might deserve it.

The priority is protection, not schoolyard justice. Keep the child safe.

And honestly, if you are an adult of average size and strength should be able to easily restrain a child without harming them.

Also, every child would be given a standard lecture at the beginning about how this is not a license to be obnoxious and mean to other children, knowing they cannot retaliate.

If the kid gets too obnoxious, their Bullyguard would simply walk away (after giving them many warnings, of course) and then they would be left to deal with the consequences.

This would only be in extreme situations where the client child is completely out of control, of course. Essentially, when the client child becomes a bully themselves. The goal of Bullyguard is to end bullying, not end up protecting it.

Now, I am not sure what the legal picture would be for such a service. It is not impossible that schools, quite irrationally, would resent the implied rebuke of the presence of a Bullyguard, and would look for legal reasons to get rid of them.

And there are laws keeping adults away from schools and children, although those are mostly targeted at known sex offenders. But it is not impossible that a school would put in a policy that no adults that are not parents of children are allowed on school grounds, period.

You know, for the kids’ “safety”.

So our Bullyguards would have to be bonded and with full background checks and all that can possibly be done to assure parents they are safe around kids.

Even then, it would be likely there would be some schools that just would not allow them, and the service just plain would not be available there. There would be no way to legally force a school to allow the service there, although the Bullyguard organization could certainly advocate to be allowed access at every available venue, and accuse schools that will not allow it in of being “soft on bullying” and even, should it come to this, a “haven for bullies” or “the bully’s favorite school”.

The other legal angle to worry about would angry parents of bullies trying to sue you because one of your Bullyguards dared lay a hand on their precious little snowflake, no matter how gently.

I think the best angle of defense on that would be if Bullyguards all had lapel cameras that documented everything they did, and therefore have legal evidence of both the bullying and the response to show in court, should the need arise.

The bully’s parents would probably not want the whole world to see what a little shit their kid has been, let alone trying to plead their case in front of a jury or a judge with such clear evidence.

No uploading videos to YouTube, though. As bad as bullies are, you do not want to tar the kid for life.

They DO grow out of it, most of the time.

So what do you think? I think it would be a highly valuable service, and be a very strong force towards ending bullying once and for all.