Here it is, hot off the presses, your anti-depression mantra for today :

“How I feel does not change who I am. ”

Repeat until believed (RUB).

This mantra came to me during therapy today. I was pondering the question of staying positive even when I felt terrible, and that sentence emerged from the chaos.

And I think it’s one of the most powerful things that has come from this recovery process of mine. So much of depression depends on a link between your mood and your identity. You feel horrible, so you conclude you ARE horrible.

Note that this does not happen with other illnesses. If you have the flu, you feel gross, and odds are at the moment you ARE gross, but it doesn’t make you feel like you are inherently a gross, awful person who deserves to suffer.

At least, I hope it doesn’t.

So if this link between mood and self can be broken, it would devastate the depression. It could no longer tear your self worth apart based on how bad you feel.

You are not how you feel. You are who you are and the feelings change NOTHING.

This revelation is, I think, the culmination of years of my trying to separate my identity from my depression. To go all the way from “I am a depressed person” to “I am a person who happens to have a case of depression right now”.

Wow. Typing that last bit felt great. Good job, me!

It’s a tricky distinction to make because, in a sense, being depressed has been my full time job for my entire life.

But wait, no, that doesn’t scan either. That’s the exact kind of thinking that needs to stop. I do NOT spend all day being depressed.

I spend all day doing things to entertain myself. Some of those even involve other people who are happy to have me around and whose days I brighten. I also learn a lot of things from what I read and improve my already outstanding mind by reading books and playing stimulating video games.

Depression might currently be circumscribing my life by limiting what I can and cannot do and keeping me from the larger arenas of life, but it does not rule my life and it is not what I do all day. PERIOD.

Now that I have settled that imaginary argument, back to the subject.

It’s so vitally important to make the distinction between one’s illness and oneself because otherwise, all attempts to attack the illness run into all kinds of identity roadblocks because an attack on the illness is an attack on yourself.

Well fuck that. My depression is not me. It is, as my therapist says, “ego-alien”. ^[1], i.e., not part of who I am. I reject it utterly, as if it was a hostile foreign organism that my immune system can safely destroy. ^[2]

So goodbye, depression. Consider yourself evicted. I don’t care how long you have been here. You have no squatter’s rights. You are a temporary aberration which I will now very firmly correct.

The fever has broken. The virus has been defeated. All that is left now is for my body to clean the dead cells out of my bloodstream.

I can wait.

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Part 2 : the Partening

Now where was I? Oh, right. Die, depression, die!

If only there was the pschological equivalent of an antibiotic that would kill all the unhealthy parts of the psyche, leaving behind only the good, strong, healthy parts of the mind that now can use all the resources freed up by blasting out the deadwood to rebuild what was lost with good, clean timber.

Hmmm. That sounds uncomfortably like the sort of purity ethic thinking that leads to eugenics and ethnic cleansing and all that.

Well, you need both kind of thinking. The kind that grows and the kind that purifies. The kind that adds, and the kind that subtracts. The kind that adds to the total worth, and the kind that increases the average worth.

The kind that sews and the kind that reaps.

And if you are talking about personal health, then it is the reaping thinking that is needed. The diseased tissue must be excised. The infection must be killed. The poison cannot be allowed to spread.

I suppose the other half is there too, though, in that total health requires adding and strengthening  the good things as well as subtracting the bad.

I wonder about that myself. I feel like my latest bout of positivity is very much about strengthening the good parts of my mind. Increasing the power of my positive side in order to increase its ability to overcome the potent but static forces of depression.

One thing that came up in therapy today was my problems with not being able to go back and continue to work on a piece of writing after I have completed it.

In emerged that what I was really talking about was the fact that it took inspiration to push me forward enough to get something written and when that inspiration runs out, my happy little rocket crashes hard.

Being the determinedly thorough person I am, the usually does not happen until I have finished the damned thing. So I get the thing done. But after that, it dies. And for whatever reason, once that happens, I never want to see it again.

No more inspiration, I suppose. It’s the act of creation that inspires me. To return to a previous inspiration is the exact opposite of that.

But it’s more than that. To return to something after I have completed it is disgusting to me. It’s like using a used Kleenex. Totally gross.

But why? I think I know the answer.

It’s gross to be because it is now a part of me. It reminds me of me. It smells like me.

And I have self worth issues, so my own scent nauseates me.

And that’s why I need there to be someone else in the process to freshen things up.

Which means sharing my writing with someone who might edit it for/with me.

And that’s the one thing I just can’t seem to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.