It’s not just a rule of comedy.

Lately I have been pondering my own fight for positivity. I know that the negative pall depression puts me under is wrong on ever level and that sometimes I can fight it and sometimes I can’t, but I am in search of a more permanent solution.

One that does not require the depressive’s worst enemy, a continuous input of energy. Even for mentally healthy people, a constant input of energy is for emergencies only and never ever a good long term solution.

Because sooner or later you’re going to get too tired to keep it up.

But for us whose insanity is called depression the stakes are incredibly high. Our depression masks our energies, making us feel like we have almost none, because that’s a big part of how the damn thing controls us.

It keeps us in a constant austerity mindset.

But austerity doesn’t work.

It makes you act as if you are starving when you have a full belly, a full larder, and full wallet. Yet as hungry as it makes you, it won’t let you eat one crumb more than is absolutely necessary. It truly is a pernicious evil.

And you just know that when trying to fight uphill eventually fails because you run out of energy (or at least, depression makes you think you do), depression will be there to grease the downward path to make sure you fall ALL the way back down again if not even a fair bit further so it can punish you for trying to escape its grasp then hover over you like a choir of harpies shrieking about how stupid you were for trying and how you should just give up and never try anything ever again, etc.

God, do I hate my depression. It’s so goddamned evil!

So the solution to banishing those dark clouds from my personal sky cannot be to just keep fighting forever. Depression knows you can’t do that and is perfectly willing to let you fill your heart with hope and try to make it up that mountain by sheer force of will because it knows that you will fail and the pain of disappointment will be enough to keep you docile and obedient to it for a good long while.

And the solution can’t be to merely keep thinking and talking about it, either, because if that worked I would have cured myself decades ago.

It has to be that something far deeper than words or thoughts can reach has to change. I have to find that inner pilot light that relights my furnace when it goes out and thus keeps my metaphorical house warm even when the weather outside is bitterly cold.

At least, that’s how I assume it works for sane people. They have some kind of eternally renewing energy source that keeps their inner world from experiencing the sort of long term deathly chill that we depressives live with every day.

My best guess is that this pilot light of mine is fundamentally a manifestation of my primal id and it’s my deep and troubling alienation from my id, instincts, emotional core, and so on that keeps it from doing its job.

The word that comes to mind is “renewal”. I lack it. There is supposed to be some p[oint in the cycle where all dies, lies fallow, then bursts back into life, like the Phoenix burning up in its own flame them rising from the ashes.

But my neurotic and myopic interference with all natural processes stupidly slams on the brakes when things go bad, thus insuring that the badness goes on and on and on.

As I read in an astrology book : when we seek to stop the wheel in its spin, we only delay our own renewal.

Wise words. That is where my fear of trodding on unknown paths gets me. I don’t know for a fact that the future would bring my revival because I can’t see that far ahead, so I decide that going forward at all means total disaster.

Which is quite the jump, to assume that all unknown things are horrible. It’s really just the basic fear of the unknown transformed into something that smells a bit like common sense and caution.

It’s rooted in that deep down mistrust of everything that comes from early childhood trauma. My feeling that the world is hostile to me and out to GET me and will hurt me any chance it can get stems directly from being raped when I was only four years old, before I had even completed primary brain growth.

Of course, the later bullying didn’t exactly help either.

So while intellectually, I have stayed balanced and objective and have rejected both optimism and pessimism as unsupportable assumptions about all of reality, the truth is that deep down I am blackheartedly pessimistic and fully expect life to torture, torment, and traumatize me at every turn.

Even though, for the most part, it hasn’t. And doesn’t.

This is what happens when the tail wags the dog and you believe something because it reflects an emotion inside you and not because you have any reason to believe it.

I still have trouble escaping the gravitational pull of the feeling that everybody hates me and wishes I would just go away and die so they wouldn’t have to put up with my pathetic presence any more, which they only ever did out of pity in the first place.

The odd thing is, it felt good to write that down. Well, I have to let the negativity out sometimes. Penning it up is not any kind of long term solution.

The only long term solution I can think of is that there has to be some way of processing the negatives like a sewage treatment plant and then outputting the now clean waters of the soul back out into my waterways.

Or at the very least, some healthy way to release the nastiness into the world where it can not hurt me any more.

But how the heck do I do that?

Dunno. So that’s a discussion for another time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.