There is nothing depression loves more than excuses.

Excuses are its armor. It collects excuses like a hunter collects knives, because it never knows which one it will need when a time of crisis occurs.

What’s a crisis to depression? Anything that threatens its grip on you. Things like hope, happiness, ambition, positive emotions, and the realization that there are people out there who love you.

An excuse is the perfect thing for defusing potential hope. Hope equals stress to a depressed person, and their depression has taught them that the only way to deal with stress is to flee it, and the connecting link is the excuse.

Maybe I could get a date… but I’m too fat. I should start drawing again…. but I don’t have the energy. I need to get out of the house more…. but I’m too scared.

These excuses form a cozy nest for your depression right smack dab in the middle of your comfort zone. Your depression can rest easy knowing that it has you trained to look for the very first exit out of the tension and that will always be an excuse.

And if someone dares to try to dislodge one of your excuses, your depression will fight back hard. Any counterargument to one of your excuses will be met with a level of vehemence and even anger that is usually only found in religion, and other forms of irrational but emotionally necessary belief systems like racism or religious intolerance.

If I wasn’t too fat to date anyone, then I would have to go out there and look for dates, and I am too scared to do that, therefore I MUST BE TOO FAT.

People can tell you that you are not even that fat and that fat people get married all the time and it won’t matter because the depression has convinced you that it is vitally important to maintain all your excuses or you will have to leave the “safe” haven of depression and go out there and deal with the world without its protection.

That comes dangerously close to making you fully awake and exposed to a world with a high level of stimulation that happens in realtime. That is the worst thing possible for a depressed person, or at least, that’s what their depression tells them.

And we all know that depression lies.

Ask a dozen depressives if they would take a pill that would make their depression disappear forever, and most will say yes, because anything else would be logically inconsistent with their time-honed negative belief system. The last thing they would ever admit to themselves is that they actually want to be depressed and that many of their beliefs and activities are purpose designed by their depression to perpetuate itself.

When all is said and done, even your worst demons are also your employees.

The curious thing about their answers, however, is that for most of them, there will be a certain hesitancy to their answers to what one would think would be the easiest question in the world. It will be like a shadow flit across their face as their depression reacts to the notion of its own destruction by filling its host mind with fear and doubt… its usual defense.

You can watch the unexpected conflict play out over their faces. Some will even retract their answer or modify it with something akin to “I guess…. I don’t know. ”

Curious, isn’t it? You would think that if you ask a prisoner “Would you like to leave right now and never come back?”, they wouldn’t hesitate to jump up and holler HELL YEAH. But if you stay in prison long enough, whether you like it or not, it becomes your home, and the outside world becomes frightening in its intensity and complexity.

And the ones who answer no to the cure will give reasons like “I don’t want some pill to change who I am”, even though who they are is a depressed person who at least in theory does not want to be depressed any more. That kind of implies change, doesn’t it?

It’s like turning down a lotto win because you didn’t want the money to change you.

That’s why all the problem-solving advice in the world falls on deaf ears with a depressive. The problem is not a practical one. Often the depressive has thought of anything you say already, and already dismissed it. That’s part of how depression works in the background of the mind. It brings up possibilities just to practice destroying them to further its hold on you, to secretly reassure you that no progress is ever going to be possible so you can relax and stop trying forever.

There is a peacefulness to despair. Despair frees you from all responsibility to help yourself. When no progress is possible, you are entirely safe from any impetus to go out there and deal with the real world. You can retreat to the tiniest corner of your panic room and when you get there, curl up and have a nice nap.

The only thing that can disturb your slumber is when well-meaning idiots who are not in on the scam (and you can be one of those idiots too) try to convince you that there might actually be hope for improvement after all.

Then, out come the excuses, and no amount of reason will dislodge them. You can never talk someone out of something they have to believe or their whole psychological system crumbles to dust. They will hold fast to that belief for however long it takes them to think up another justification for it, even if it’s exactly the same as the one that was disproven.

In times of such existential crisis, people are completely capable of simply freezing their mind in place until the damning data simply fades away.

So ask yourself, what’s your excuse? What is your defense against progress? What do you use to deflect hope?

And where would you be without it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.