reviewing my life and the most consistent thread through all of it is the weight of depression and anxiety. i want to tell myself a different story but i can't escape the truth help me find my wings
I often think about death. Something rivets me when I imagine my body falling through space. I am riveted when I imagine my mind clacking away like a knitting machine in those last few seconds. I wonder what my last thought would be. Or, if I do not die from a great height I wonder if the loss of blood or consciousness bears a characteristic moment of realization. “This is the horizon of life,” it would say, “stepping beyond this means you have left the world of others, the world where experience can be shared. Beyond this point there is only you, until there isn’t even that.” That feeling makes me think of the moment on a roller coaster or a hilly road when you crest a rise and your stomach drops out from under you. And you are suddenly face to face with the sole feature of human life that is not subject to argument. Because its experience can never be shared.
In my experience even ordinary people, people whose desires and movements through life never came into anything like a blinding focus, even these people become contemplative to the point of silence as they approach death. I envy this focus. I wish that the baited hooks surrounding me in daily life were less tempting. I wish that death could more strongly broadcast itself from the moment in my future when it snips away all my possibilities. The ways that I imagine my own death do no justice to the unbearable radiance in which the real event would envelop me. My fantasies of death are fundamentally idle, and only the shiniest of the several baited hooks that I fall for.
Depression is simply this hook when it is seated in your cheek. The line trails out of your mouth and up into the sky. Where it lays in the hand that holds the several neurochemical strings animating flesh.
As with many things, depression is the inversion of a proper relationship. Karl Marx wrote of most of Capital feeling, as he did for most of his creative life, a pain in his side that constantly reminded him of his father’s early death from liver cancer. We are tethered to our deaths just as surely as the hooked fish is bound to the fisherman or the marionette to the puppeteer. But we are kites. And kites do not work without the string.
Anxiety is several octaves up from depression but the note it strikes sounds familiar. Where depression prostitutes the absolute and undivided truth of death, anxiety trades in failure, disgrace, shame and destitution. The several social deaths it is possible to live.
Whenever I get anxious, whenever I worry that I am being taunted, or worse, being ignored with justification I try and get outside of myself. I ‘know’ that I am not repellant or embarrassing, but the objectivity of this knowledge cuts no ice in the court where I am tried. When the prosecutor is winning and the judge is his friend I appeal to a power above theirs: chance.
When I feel anxious or when I hate myself I take an oracle. The best oracle I ever received was from Google. I fed a poem by Aleksandr Pushkin called ‘The Prophet’ into GoogleTranslate. I re-read the last few lines of this machine translation when I need my case dismissed:
And He cut my chest with the sword, and took heart quivering, and a coal burning fire into the chest hole pushed. Like a corpse in the desert I lay, And the voice of God called to me: ‘Arise, O Prophet, and see, and give ear, Be filled with the will of My, And, bypassing the sea and land, Verb-burn the hearts of men.’
I try to do what it says.
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