from a gardener & a psychologist
1. people associate depression with abjection, a kind of mental shapelessness. in truth, at its most dysphoric, depression is seismic, surprisingly precise in its violence.
2. someone on the outside of this shattering can’t perceive the full velocity of its push. what is accessible to them is mostly an aftermath.
3. it is often not about the presence of sadness as much as it is the inability to enter the psychological/emotional spectra without guilt.
4. that is what goes unspoken in therapy : guilt. depression is powered by some infinite fount of guilt around and about basics of sustenance.
5. during the worst of my phases, i feel guilty about eating, speaking, sleeping, staying awake. everything. my whole presence disintegrates.
6. you are trying - flailing, failing - to establish contact with something inside of you that is disembodied, essential and impervious.
7. you can’t commit to which time you can best belong to while you are completely drowning in the vastness of hours. the past reoccurs, seems too colossal to surmount. the future is a prolonged blur. a depressive state erases the possibility of any present tense.
8. following up on what gayatri c. spivak says - at the bottom is the right to refuse. if we were to consider that any autonomy is indirectly linked to choose through refusal of certain states, actions, ideas then depression takes hostage this ability to refuse. (also : inter-generational trauma, choice v/s will, determinism etc)
9. you can’t get out of the bed, out of the relentless need for dark, withered spaces because the exteriority becomes a wide mirror for translating the feint of learned helplessness, the inward slant of “ i shouldn’t be here or anywhere else.” my head in the dark drowning reinvents the world outside as an inevitable flood.
10. thus : presence, bodywork, introduction to fresher energies, voices, touch, hands, offerings of other, better mirrors.
