You know that well worn old saying “some days are diamonds, and some days are worm-eaten explosive musk ox turds with AIDS”?

Today ain’t been a diamond.

Mostly, it has been the usual business when, for whatever reason, the universe dumps a whole twelve gallon bucket of the Sandman’s magic dust into my brain all at once, and I spend the whole day either asleep or blearily stumbling about, barely able to feed myself and empty my bladder before Morpheus reclaims me.

Today was so bad, it melted my fragile reality circuit entirely. At various moments of “consciousness” today, I have forgotten what day of the week it was, what season it was, whether or not I had done various tasks, what meal it was I was having, and even how to do a crossword puzzle properly.

I don’t think I forgot my own name, but then again, nobody asked.

It really highlights something I have been musing about lately, which is just how chaotic my life is, in a subjective sense. I never know what sort of bizarre mind altering chemical chaos this strange organic stewpot of a brain of mine will cook up next. My feeling of connectedness to reality, my ability to concentrate and focus, my state of wakefulness, my emotional polarity (positive or negative, expanding or contracting, outward or inward), my feeling of physical comfort and ease…. all of these vary wildly and unpredictably from moment to moment. Outwardly, very little happens in my life.

But on the inside, it’s a tornado ripping through a line of very full port-a-potties in here.

And I think these two things might be related. I suspect that the radical unbalance between my outer and inner lives might be either a major or THE major cause of this internal chaos. I get so little input from the outside world, and do so much to isolate myself from it and hence leave myself almost entirely at the mercy of my inner life, that I think my mind and my body generate a great deal of internal chaos just as a way to balance the equation.

It’s like a minor subset of the much larger phenomenon of sensory deprivation. In sensory deprivation, the subject’s senses are completely blocked in what is known as an isolation tank. The person in the tank can’t hear, see, smell, taste, feel, or otherwise sense anything.

Deprived of all input, the person rapidly begins to hallucinate quite vividly as their brains generate false input in order to try to compensate for the sudden deficit. They enter a total “waking dream” state, and unsurprisingly, lose all contact with reality.

As a result, isolation tanks and the experiments using them are considered ethically extremely dodgy to put it mildly. The risk to the person’s sanity is extremely high. Living beings are simply not designed to handle such catastrophically low input levels.

In my case, of course, my senses are functioning just fine. They do not literally get low levels of input. My eyes stay open, I can hear, I can smell, I can touch, I can taste.

But the longer one is exposed to the same stimuli, the more one’s senses screen out said stimuli, so in effect, it is as though, from a perceptual basis, said stimuli is not really there any more.

Now apply that to someone who spends most of their life in the same few rooms, in which very little changes from moment to moment, day after day.

This describes both the lives of a person in a high security prison…. and a person like me, with crippling depression that keeps them home most of the time.

It is not the kind of radical brain scrambling psychedelic experience as sensory deprivation, but it is, I think, a milder but chronic version of the larger and more acute phenomenon.

And the unpleasant equation, the deadly Catch-22 of it all, is that it is the depression which drives an introverted person like myself to isolate myself, and then said isolation makes the polluted inner life all the more brutal and chaotic, and hence makes the depression worse, leading to further isolation.

Thus, the disease reinforces itself, potentially infinitely, with the victim living in a ever tinier box of their own creating. And all because of a faulty survival instinct that says, basically, “hide and be still until the big bad monster goes away”.

And that just plain does not work when the monster is a pain deep down inside you.