The question is what to do with that information.
It’s all well and good to stand atop a rugged ediface of Western thought and say “Then you should question everything!” but that’s a very hard thing to put into practice.
Because we need to act. Even those of us with depression. We need to act on our perceptions of the world and it doesn’t matter how suspect those perceptions are because they are all we have to go on.
So yeah. I know that my depression makes me interpret reality in some very crazy ways that make no sense if subjects to even cursory logical scrutiny.
But that’s not enough. Not enough to change what I believe – what I feel to be true.
And until belief changes, my reality remains the same.
On a good day, I can examine one of my delusions and feel the untruth of it, and on a very good day I can hold on to that feeling of falsity long enough for it to drive some of the bad belief out of my system.
Thus, progress is made.
But it’s just not possible to doubt everything all the time. The mere thought of it exausts me. The last thing I need is more mental bureaucracy.
What I wouldn’t give for ten minutes alone with the org chart of my brain. By the time I was done it would be half the size and SO much more efficient.
Surely, though, (Hi Shirley!)) there is no need to doubt everything. Depression doesn’t distort every single perception. It’s not psychosis.
So perhaps it would be helpful to narrow things down a tad.
What depression distorts is emotional perceptions. It creates emotional delusions about what people think of us, how they feel about us, what our status in society is, and pretty much every other emotional evaluation of which we are capable.
And we are emotional creatures, us humans. No matter how logical we might think we are, it is always emotion that is calling the shots and logic that serves to execute them.
For the most part, we feel our way through life.
So emotional delusions, while not as colorful or spectacular as the sensory kind, can have enormous long term implications for the individual with depression.
I often visualize my depression is being like an intense magnetic field that draws everything in my mind towards the negative. But because its pull is universal , constant, and even, it’s easy to lose sight of it and forget its there, like being in a fast moving airplane with no windows.
Sure, you can kind of feel the motion if you think of it. but for the most part the room could be completely stationary as far as you know.
Okay, so that analogy needs work.
My point is that depression’s distortions fade into the background most of the time, which is why it is so easy for the individual depression to conclude that how they feel about the world is how the world actually is, no matter how crazy that would seem to a theoretical outside observer.
I have only developing my own ability to tell the difference in the last month or two. And I would love to be able to simply impart that knowledge to my fellow depression sufferers and help them on their journey, but it is not quite that simple.
I know better than most that the wisest words in the world don’t help at all if you are not in the right place to hear them.
The jounrye out of the darkness is a long one and there is no way of knowing when you wil, at long last, l emerge into the light.
All you can do is keep moving in the direction of the light, and take the increasing warmth and understanding as your inspiration to continue.
My sleep’s been weird lately. Weirder than usual, that is.
I think I must have gotten way, way behind on my REM sleep because I was starting to get these periods where I found it very hard to think.
It was like my mind was full of some thick, heavy fluid that resisted all action. I honestly wonder if I accidentally experienced what it would be like to have a lower IQ. The usual high arcing electrical charge of my megnificent mind was absent and the best that I could hope for was to muddle through somehow.
It happened before and during FRED last night. That made life a lot more stressful than it really needed to me. I spent a lot of the time fairly bummed out because I just don’t know how to cope with life in that state.
Luckily, it cleared up some and I was able to enjoy myself more once I had eaten and had some time for the ol’ vaccuum tubes to warm up.
But it frightened me. I worried that I was having some kind of stroke and that I was going to end up with a fucked up brain that was bot even good for the few things I manage to get done any more.
It would be the ultimate cruelty for me to lose all this mental might right when I am on the verge of being able to make use of it.
And while that it is still possible, I am thinking sleep had a lot more to do with it. I managed to get some good sleep this afternoon and felt a million times better for it. And I am giving myself permission to sleep as much as I need to from now on – to gorge myself at an all you can sleep buffet, if that’s what it takes – until I catch up on the backlog ad can walk around feeling human again.
Because seriously. What all do I need to be awake for anyhow? Making “progress” in ESO? Like that means anything.
I wonder what I would do with my time if I couldn’t play video games.
I might actually be productive.
What a terrifying thought!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.