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.