What if I need to be depressed?

The personal revelations just keep coming lately.

What if I need to be depressed? What if it serves some function that I don’t perceive because I am in the middle of it?

I’ve talked about this sort of thing before. The idea that depression is, in a very sick and maladaptive way, functional. Its main function is to protect the depressive from the world via keeping them permanently in a parasympathetic state of running and hiding. It’s like it’s a maze designed to keep the depressive busy, thinking they can find their way out, when all the time all they had to do to escape the maze was to stop needing it.

Easier said than done, I know.

But today, that questions seems more raw and primal than my lofty language could hope to encode. I’ve been living on the raw ragged edge of mental illness lately, and that’s good, because that’s where the answers lie and where the real damage can be healed.

But it can be a tad rough.

Behind the question of the day is a vision I had – no, not a vision, a feeling – that the whole entirety of my depression is some kind of long cycle of ups and downs that act as a kind of slow and lazy eliminatory function to my psyche. Something akin to a kidney builds up a certain amount of mental waste product then shunts it to another portion of the consciousness for disposal.

Or perhaps what I am really talking about is recovery. Depression as it was for all those wasted years was the disease. Depression as it is now is a healing process.

Maybe. Or maybe this eliminatory process has been churning way the whole time, but it took four years of therapy’s assistance for it to make enough progress to be able to do any more than make glacially geologically slow progress.

And now that I am not in therapy any more, it’s slowed down again. Going to VFS definitely speeds up another part of the process, the burning away of all that emotional scar tissue. It also makes me have to deal with my issues instead of just limply letting them lie and doing whatever it takes to minimize my pain.

Kind of like breaking your leg and deciding the best solution was to just lie there and not move for the rest of your life.

I think a lot of what keeps people from making the changes in themselves that they desire is an unwillingness to pay the initial cost. Going from a point of stability, even a really bad one, to a much better point of stability is always going to be hard. You have to overcome your own inertia first, and override that little voice that says “You know what would feel good? Giving up. ”

That’s the main appeal of the Wrong Option. Giving up is the faster and easier solution to the stress of trying to change and the relief of that stress can feel downright narcotic. Such a sweetly cool, relaxed, mellow sensation! What a perfect positive reinforcement of a maladaptive behaviour!

So the price of change is always high, especially at first. If you persevere long enough, you overcome inertia and then you only need to supply enough energy to replace that which is lost via friction. Not only that, but you begin to be cognizant of the benefits of the change now that the strain and pain are mostly over.

So people get stuck in their lives – and I speak as the King of Stuck on this matter – because they can’t see past that initial cost. Or perhaps that’s just internally generated bullshit. Not a real reason, just an excuse not to try and thus not disrupt the equilibrium of their lives, or force them to look outside the tiny cage they have made of their lives.

After all, looking outside the cage only leads to wanting to escape it, and the official position of the politburo is that escape is Officially Impossible, so looking out of your cage can only lead to suffering and pain. Right?

This is how the sheep convince themselves their pen is the entire universe.

That got weirdly political.

My point is, there’s lots of people pretending to themselves that it is this factor or the other that is holding them back, and if it wasn’t for that one pesky thing, they would totally live out their hopes and dreams, like, right away.

But there’s just one little problem : they’re not looking for solutions any more. So they have no idea whether their problems are as impossible to solve as they pretend them to be. And if the malaise is deep enough, you could even hand them the perfect solution on a silver platter and all they would do is find some tiny flaw to fixate on and make THAT their excuse for turning it down.

Or they would just run away from it all. And make up the excuse for why they did it later.

The real reason, of course, would be that the excuse they gave for why they couldn’t do their thing was total bullshit and the real reason for not doing their thing is a blank and unreasoning fear of change and the unknown. With just a hint of being overly attached to a view of themselves based on exactly who they are at that moment.

And if you are exactly who you are right now, any change would destroy your current identity, and to the human mind, destruction of identity equals death.

And the thing is, there’s no rational way to express what it is within you that remains the same even after fairly radical changes. You can call it The Real You, but that doesn’t get you very far.

But I will say this : it’s only when you change that you find out who you really are.

And that makes it worth the cost even if everything else goes wrong.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am not fictional

And it’s time I learned to live with it.

I was raised, by and large, by television. [1] And as I have mentioned before, rather flippantly, to me the sitcom world was ideal life. A world where everyone was witty, good always on over evil, and everything was always fine by the end of the 22 minutes.

But I think the problem goes much deeper than that. I think that, in a deep subconscious way, I have been trying to turn myself into a sitcom character for a very long time. And I think that’s possibly part of my problem relating to people. Normal people don’t go around trying to be as witty as a sitcom character, so right away I am behaving in a strange way.

On some deep level, I think I feel like if I could only become that sitcom version of myself, my life would become a sitcom and everything would be all right from then on. And when that doesn’t work, I blame myself instead of blaming the flat out impossibility of what I am trying to achieve.

It’s my fault for not being sitcom enough! Maybe my life needs a laugh track.

This what happens when you are raised by television. All my role models were TV people. All my life modeling came from TV lives. All my moral training came from the morals taught on TV. I never had anyone to teach me right from wrong, or what is safe and what is not, or what I should be doing with my life…. nothing. I had extraordinarily little input from adults about whatsoever.

All I had was television, and it makes for a very poor substitute indeed.

So in some ways, I am made of television. No wonder I want to be a part of the television industry so badly. It’s the closest I can get not just to going home to my parents, but to crawling inside the TV and living there for the rest of my life.

Just let me in…. I promise I’ll be good! This is the only place where I feel like I belong! Like I am welcome!

It’s a rather bracing and profound thing to realize about oneself – that you have been pursuing a literally impossible ideal for a great deal of your life. No matter how hard I try, I will always live in the real world, not TV land, and that means making peace with being merely human and nonfictional and hence governed by all the rules and restrictions of a drearily mundane existence.

Right now, this piece of my interminable inner puzzle is still too freshly detached for me to have a clue what its long term effects will be once it had disappeared over yonder horizon. But it’s such a huge piece that it can’t help but shake me to my very core.

Obviously, if before now you had asked me if I thought I was living in a TV universe or if I was trying to become a sitcom character, I would have said no. These things work on levels much deeper than that bit of ourselves that is known to us and that we cannot help but think is, on some level, our entire selves.

After all, knowing you have a subconscious mind does not you cease to have it. Drag all the demons into the light you want. The darkness outside the circle of light will remain.

I am curious to see who I am once I have really processed this revelation. I am hoping it leads to a revolution in self-forgiveness. My world will never be like the TV world because I am a real person. And the sooner I accept that, the better off I will be and the sooner I can get on with my oh so real life.

This television model of life also explains some of my feeling of unreality. Not all of it – the bulk of it comes from spending too much time in a very low stimulus environment causing my nervous system to tune out my environment so completely that I don’t even perceive it on an emotional level any more.

But the remainder, I think, comes from some deep feeling that the world inside the TV is the “real world”. When I was a lonely little kid, I often felt like life was this annoying thing that kept interrupting my TV watching. This was especially true in the summer. To the weak, fictional worlds are always better because fictional worlds are safe.

It takes a feeling of strength and competence (and above all, safety) to prefer the real world. Only then can the real world truly be more rewarding that our well developed inner lives. And the thing is, that feeling of strength and competence cannot be found within the confines of said inner lives.

Only by going out into the real world and surviving can you build up the confidence in your own ability to cope that leads to the strength and the courage you need. That’s the catch. There is no safe road there. You will have to venture at least a little ways outside of your comfort zone.

And what do you know – if you do, your comfort zone grows. And then you go a little further, and a little further, and slowly you become healthier.

For now, all I can do is repeat to myself that I will never be a sitcom kid who is precocious and witty and funny and whom everyone loves. That’s not a real thing. No matter how hard I love all the TV families I have joined in my life, they can never loved me back, and if I want to get the connection and belonging I crave, it will have to be in the real world.

And it starts with tearing down the walls inside me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. for those of you keeping score at home, please tick off the “lonely TV childhood” box on your Perennial Fruvous Topics card. If this means you now have a BINGO, please adjust your medications accordingly, as it’s not that kind of game.