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Things have been going just fine lately and that seems to be the problem. Life’s predictability has pulled me through my everyday routine, without any ups and downs, just a straight, unhindered course without many surprises. I have been forcing myself up every morning at precisely 5 a.m., though why I cannot exactly say. Maybe to give some purpose to getting out of bed in the first place. Then I write for several hours. By lunch time I am in a stupor. I would have to wait another 18 hours for my favorite time of day. When I am not checking the clock, I am distracting myself, to make the minute go by faster. As if the act of actually living through every moment is an exhausting task not fit for someone who already woke up at five. In reality, I am not so much excited for the mornings, as I am to tick yet another day off the list of days I have so far lived. All this is awfully paradoxical for someone as afraid of dying as I am.
Some days are, of course, better than others. But even during the best hours I find some seemingly insignificant way to self-sabotage my happiness. I postpone answering a friend’s message, upsetting them and worrying me (yet never enough to actually sit down and respond). I leave my clothes lying around my room. I put things in illogical places, only to spend an entire afternoon trying to find them back. At times I don’t wash my hair for days, giving me an excuse to both stay home, as well as feel bad about my appearance. Though this type of disregard can be seen as minor to most (someone close to me hardly ever washes his hair and he seems to be doing just fine), to me it represents something more cardinal: an excuse for stagnation, an unwillingness to live life fully, and a mental blockage against hope for better days.
It is hard to describe what depression is precisely or what triggers it. Usually it is an accumulation of events, as well as a predisposition, though it can also be set forth by a traumatic event. Often, however, it is an inconsistency between how our life is and how it could be, casting our day to day in a dark shadow. As humans we have an innate need to feel that our life on earth is valuable. That we aren’t merely taking up space and consuming its resources. What we do, the jobs we choose, how we showcase ourself to the rest of the world, are all instigated by our fundamental drive for not only acceptance, but that all of this is worth the while.
In my (very humble) opinion, depression is often the result of two factors: a strict reliance on the opinions of others above our own and the inability to actualize our life’s meaning/goal. The former believe they can’t insert meaning into their life, nor become a person worth the while, if not first accepted by others. Rather than believing they can give their own meaning to life and become a person of worth through self directed measures, they look outside themselves for reassurance and validation. They become the main character, or worse yet, a side character in the plot of another person’s life, without autonomy or direction.
In other circumstances people adopt grandiose life goals with the hope that in some distant future they will achieve them, basing their self-worth on something out of reach and entirely uncertain. This tactic can be resorted to by those who aren’t satisfied with their relationships, or who perhaps (though of course I am basing this entire hypothesis on my own self-analysis) were rejected by their peers early on or later in life. These kinds of people are likely to feel as though something is fundamentally wrong with them and so must do something extraordinary in order to be accepted. Believing that one day they will be greatly successful or well-known/liked imbues their life with hope and gives them a certain sense of worthiness. In this case, the problem does not lie in the dedication to their life goal. Contrarily, the problem appears to lie in the stakes they set for themselves to achieve this one, specific goal. For while some people achieve such grandiosity, most don’t. As the years pass by, and the very meaning of their life appears to be nothing but a fantasy, something else also dies alongside their goals. Hope. And a hopeless existence is the perfect breeding ground for depression.
While we can always learn valuable lessons from others, we simply cannot base our entire self-worth on their unprofessional opinions. Neither can we base our own worthiness on a goal somewhere removed from our presents moment. That is, if the core of our motivation is not so much one of passion, but one of ego.
Each of us faces a unique configuration of daily challenges. A sense of responsibility is an incredibly important factor in the battle against meaningless and depression. (Quick side note — in no way am I devaluing the absolute debilitating condition of major/manic depression, of which I know such daily steps are an impossibility).
That said, though I have suffered from depression at different points of my life, the symptoms I have now don’t feel quite as dire as the ones I had then. Without pretension, whenever I am in a depressive state a quote by John Keats plays in a loop in my head: “I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.” At this point I would kick, I would fight for my life. Yet I still feel down, some days I still feel like a heavy cloak clings to my body, weighing me down. Why? Is this a mild form of depression, or another thing entirely? Perhaps. Until I can put a name to how I feel (though I have an inkling it may be acedia, a topic I’ll write about soon), I will try to go about my day performing the following daily rituals, all of which have been extraordinarily beneficial:
Waking up at the same hour everyday.
Taking the time to show someone (mostly my dog) how much I absolutely love them.
Spending time outside.
Answer messages without postponing.
Washing my hair, or at least looking presentable / making myself feel slightly prettier than I do on a bad day.
Reading books for pleasure. Not only educational non-fiction types.
Putting aside time to cook wholesome meals.
And, last but not least, I actively try to base my self-worth on my own opinion, and not the opinion I think others have of me. I do this by:
Drastically minimizing my time on social media. This week, for example, I deleted the Instagram app from my phone.
Writing down a list of 3-5 things I am proud of myself for doing.
As I suffer from a mild form of body-dysmorphia, I try to focus on the things I do like about my face, instead of the things I don’t. You can start doing this by looking in the mirror for a short while everyday. I find that this, in the long run, helps more than ignoring the mirror all together.
Dear Shifra, thank you for sharing so openly and at depth about how things are right now for you. I know this set of feelings so intimately; for myself, this state has been associated with the protracted end of one way of being/existing day-to-day and the emergence of something new, unexpected, perhaps a little frightening, but ultimately more nourishing.
It was only partially a matter of will and intention to bring about that shift in my own life; when I settled into the feeling of deep malaise, succumbed to it for its season, life brought about a series of miraculous turns that ultimately shook me from my comfort zone (and the miseries I courted there) and delivered me into a space of deeper inspiration and insight (which was nonetheless somewhat uncomfortable, at times).
When I read, "A sense of responsibility is an incredibly important factor in the battle against meaningless and depression," I got little shivers running up and down my arms. Because life really does invite one, at certain times, to assume deeper responsibility for one's place in the world; my own recent experience of bereavement has shown me that as well. I suppose that we all receive that invitation in our own unique way; I have personally come to recognise despondency, malaise, and dissatisfaction with the way things seem as states from which miracles tend to arise.
I truly hope that this is the case for you. Thank you for your stories; I am a new to your list and blown away by your work. Thank you for sharing, and for maintaining your discipline to write in the midst of inner upheaval.
In peace,
Nicola.
Thank you for this. I too engage in small acts of self-sabotage and I struggle to understand why. I know I’m doing them even as it happens, but I can’t seem to stop doing them. One of the ones that drives me crazy is when I procrastinate on writing, even when I want to do it and feel inspired but just can’t get started. It’s not writers block or anxiety about the work so I don’t know why I do it.