Depression sure as hell doesn’t waste any time.

I had one and a half days out of school, due to illness, and in that short time, I reverted to my pre-Kwantlen state, where all I wanted to do was sleep and play videos and get through the day like that. When it was time to head out to my afternoon class, I really really didn’t feel like going. The whole school thing seemed like so much work and stress and hassle. It would have been so easy to just go back to sleep and let the whole thing crash.

And then I would be free!

That is seriously how depression thinks. Like I have said before, a long time ago, the key mechanism of depression/anxiety is the desire to escape situations at any cost.

That’s how depression uses anxiety to protect itself from interference by the forces of healing and sanity. It ramps up the stress of a situation until all you can think about is escaping that stress and fear, and therefore makes you willing to pay any cost to escape it.

Such suddenly acceptable costs include losing a job, wrecking your career prospects, alienating your children, sabotaging a relationship, failing your friends when they need you the most, and in the worst scenario, your continued existence.

Panicking animals don’t care about the long term effects – after all, you have to live through today in order to get to tomorrow. Hence the poor animal gnawing off a limb to escape a trap. Or the old myth that horses would run back inside the barn during a fire. When that adrenal response is going, the mind becomes very narrowly focused on what is happens right now at this very second, and the animal will do things that in a normal state it would never dream of doing.

And that works well for animals in the wild. But we human beings, the monkeys with computers, live in civilization and that means a lot of the threats and stresses have nothing to do with an immediate enemy – or prey for that matter – but things far deeper and more complex than evolution, which gave us these big brains in the first place, could ever have prepared us for.

There just hasn’t been enough time.

So when we panic, we get stupid. And in a terrible sense, that works out in the short term. The sense of relief you get when you have escaped the situation is a powerful reward, almost narcotic in intensity, and it reinforces the behaviour no matter what the rational mind thinks of the solution once it comes back online.

No wonder conservatives love being scared and/or angry. It turns their thinky parts off so they can revert into the bovine contentment they crave.

Talk about positive reinforcement!

I’ve been reading Vonnegut lately, and I just realized that it’s from him that I got the whole big paragraph/short sentence thing. Well, inspiration steals.

Of course, I am wise to the ways of depression now, so I know that the harder my depression fights doing something, the more important it is for me to do it. It’s the only way to take back control of you life and your ability to decide what to do with it. You have to prove, over and over again, that depression doesn’t call the shots any more. You have to do what it most dislikes.

You have to embrace life, which is the opposite of the deathly chill of depression. You have to overcome fear, which is the main enforcement mechanism of depression. You have to be willing to feel the negative emotions depression keeps sealed away in its icy vaults, and thus take away the very things from which it draws its wintry power. Less frozen pain makes for a less frozen you.

But you have to be ready to give up your depression. That’s a lot harder than it sounds. One of the major steps along the way is that you have to admit to yourself that your depression serves a purpose : it shields you from reality. To give it up is to drop your shield and face reality directly. It means coming to grips with all the things you have been avoiding for so long.

It might even involve growing up.

Unless you are ready to take that journey, you will forever be “stuck” with depression, because you will cling to it as a security blanket even as you try to eliminate it. You will end up doing something depression loves, namely going through the motions in order to seem to be “trying” while deep down you know you are just bullshitting yourself and you didn’t really try at all.

It was all pantomime.

Real trying means putting more than the absolute minimum amount of thought and effort into it. Really trying means you invest in the outcome instead of just assuming it will fail from the getgo and therefore not investing one erg of energy over the minimum.

Real trying is a threat to depression. So it discourages it with anxiety and ennui. So much easier to just give in to depression’s gravity and fall apart. Which is why another thing you need to do in order to break depression’s hold is to repeat this mantra as many times as it takes before you believe it :

Easier isn’t always better. It’s just easier.

Maybe I should write an article called “Six Harsh Truths That Will Free You From Depression”. Submit it to Cracked.com and see if they bite. After all, that other Six Harsh Truths article is their most viewed article of all time. And the way it pissed off so many people was, I think, extremely good for society in general because it forced them to confront their assumptions and question their bullshit.

I would love to have that kind of effect on public discourse. That’s the trickster’s job, after all : to make people examine what they believe.

We tricksters, if we are wise, know that very few people are going to thank us for that. People don’t like being taken out of their comfort zones.

But those comfort zones can get so small they cut off your oxygen. When they are challenged, they grow. When they grow, you grow. Stronger, healthier, happier people result.

And you’re welcome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.