If I wasn’t depressed… if somehow my entire mental illness evaporated overnight like morning fog burned away by the summer sun… then I would have to face the world without it.

And that prospect terrifies me on a level so deep and so primal that it makes me feel like I am going insane just to think about it, let alone do anything about it.

This is the real deep throbbing hard-edged truth of depression : you need it. It stays because you still want it around. You might think and say all kinds of things about how much being mentally ill sucks and how you would do all kinds of wonderful things if that darn depression wasn’t around, but the truth is, you couldn’t live without it.

I need mine. That deadly numbness acts as a filter for reality, one that mutes the intensity of sensation and throttles down the volume of life to something I can handle, and I can’t handle much.

For this service, depression demands a very heavy price. It has left me alone and isolated for a vast majority of my life. Even when I am not alone, the icy numbness to which I am addicted keeps me from feeling the love and respect of others, so I am still isolated where it counts.

And all so I can remain turned inward, away from reality, and hide my head in the sand. All so I can stay in my inner world and pretend the outer world does not exist to terrify and defeat me, and make me feel so small.

I might fool myself into thinking that because my mind is free, so am I. But if you have a chained and padlocked soul, like I do, the freedom of one’s mind is that of a bird on a chain who thinks it flies free because it can fly in circles.

And boy, do I know a think or two about going in the circles. It seems like that is all I do. I can never tell whether I am making any real progress because it seems like I just end up in the same places over and over again. Am I spiraling upward, or am I just wearing a groove into the circle of ground at the end of my leash?

Either way, I don’t feel like I have the power to stop. If I stopped, all the energy that I use in my mindless circling would start to build up and that would shatter my fragile strategy like a china cup under a giant’s heel.

So I wander and search, never stopping, always looking, always seeking, never finding that one thing that would make me happy. The one thing that would let me finally stop and rest. Because there is no such thing. I search because I have to, not because I actually think I will find a solution.

And so in my mind and in my dreams, I am always moving, looking, trying to get somewhere but the cross current always pulls me off course and I can never get back to where I began.

I guess that’s its job.

At least here, I can drag myself back to the beginning. So… if I wasn’t depressed….

I would be… exposed? I would have to take reality unfiltered. I would have to live in realtime and make my decisions on the fly without even the illusion of a delay. As an over-intellectual emotional refugee, I have grown extremely reliant on my rational mind for decision making, thus cutting the more gut-level, integrated, instinctual thinking out of the loop.

And cold rationality is simply not enough. We cannot live healthy lives if we are cut in half. Only with balance and integration do we have a hope of being stable and sane.

If I could truly decide to simply throw away my depression… to rip the cold cloak of clinical comfort that has kept me from growing up and being a real person for my entire adult life… would I do it? Would I have the strength to say “Fuck it. Kill that bullshit and let me deal with the consequences. ”

I don’t know. I feel like I have on just looked beyond the edge of my depression and seen what truly lies outside it, and what its true dimensions are. If it were possible (and it just might be) to just rip it all away, would I do it? Could I do it? Or would cowardice and weakness keep me forever trapped in maladaptation and depression, watching the days and years of my life pass me by as I roll, unresisting, towards an early grave?

I honestly don’t know. I have been experiencing so much emotional flux lately that it is hard for me to do much more than try to just let things sort themselves out somehow, with the occasional bit of light exercise to help bleed off some of the pressure and make some room for me to think.

I think I can let my depression go. Maybe not all at once, but in the biggest handfuls I can make. I have a deep dark rage against this cold and filthy monster that has kept me trapped for two decades and more, and it is that rage that has powered my recent recovery and led me to be willing to do whatever it takes to be free.

Even if it means cutting off my arm, metaphorically speaking.

And the more I understand what I am getting from my depression, the easier it will be to decide to give it up. I have to be willing to give up this cloak of intellect and detachment and swim naked in the pool of life for the first time, without my little submersible, before I can endure… and adapt.

If you don’t endure, you will never adapt. If you don’t stay, you won’t learn to play.

And there are worse things in life than being trapped.

That’s all for me today, folks. Tomorrow… I talk about my Dad.