I can’t give legitimate advise because I haven’t quite figured this whole thing out myself. I just want to talk about it. Not really for anyone else’s sake but my own. I’m not under the impression that my thoughts and feelings are going to be read, or that they will interest anyone; but writing them down and sending them out into the swirling mass of ears and voices harbors far more relief for me than scribbling them in a journal.
I’m depressed, and I have been depressed for a long time. For me, depression is fickle, and it’s spiteful. It retreats into me for days, or even weeks at a time, so that when it strikes out of nowhere in the middle of the night, it’s that much more devastating. It can make me forget that it’s even there, or can render me unable to leave my bed.
But the worst thing that depression has done to me by far, is make me think of myself as weak. It will keep me up all night, dragging me through a house of horrors, where I am besieged not by ghosts and ghouls. No, what I am exposed on those nights are the thoughts I expend tremendous effort to keep at bay, and to me they’re far more frightening. Caught in those self-inflicted waking nightmares, I drop like an anchor into the depths of suffocating self-doubt, and wade through its viciousness.
At some point, evolution must have decided it advantageous for the human brain to keep a special file dedicated to saving, with tangible clarity, every embarrassing or painful moment in your personal history. Not the kind of moments in which you considered yourself just the victim of unfortunate circumstances, but the ones you found a way to blame yourself for, whether or not you were truly at fault. This probably helped to keep us from repeating our mistakes, but living in an entirely social world, those memories no longer serve to remind us why it’s bad to touch poison ivy or eat raw meat. Instead, we are haunted by memories like getting made fun of at in school for wearing a certain outfit, or getting laughed at for messing up a speech because we were nervous. By recording in sharpest detail, those memories in which we risk and fail, our brains inadvertently and subconsciously teach us to doubt ourselves. When this process gets repeated over years, it is mental, not physical pain that we learn to avoid. Everyone carries emotional scars, and so we’ve adapted by splitting ourselves in two. On the inside we are raw. So much time and effort is put into the identity of our character, that anxieties and fears are free to simmer underneath, embedding themselves in our psyches. Fear, anger, sorrow and despair all torment the soul, and if you ignore the things that torment you for long enough, some day you won’t be able to recognize the things that make you hesitate.
On those nights when I walk the corridors of self-deprecation and fear, I inevitably find myself at the stoop of the place in my mind these memories call home. It’s like an ambush impossible to prepare for, because the instant any thought of it arises, I find myself on that stoop, strapped down like Alex DeLarge, my eyes forced open. And so, as I relive every dreaded detail, from the sweat on my palms to the heat in my face, I am forced to relive as well the holding back of tears, the desire to run and never stop, the shame and the pain; all of it just as sharp as if I were experiencing it for the first time. And when, at last, my mind gets tired of that game, the night is far from over.
From there, I reflect on all those memories, asking myself why I make decisions that end up embarrassing and hurting me. I ask myself this, despite the fact that these memories constitute such a minuscule sliver of my life. They are far outnumbered by how many times I’ve succeeded. Regardless, the memories involving pain remain far more prominent in my mind.
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