Some of my favourite books are of people who experience the same manifestation of depression/anxiety as I do.
Take the book I finished reading today for instance: Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened.
There was a section in the book where she talked about the onset of her depression. She talked about how at some point, she developed an inexplicable sadness. Every day and everywhere she went, she was sad and she did not know why. And she would cry for no reason. And it was a very confusing way to feel. It was confusing because
- How do you stop a sadness that causes itself?
- How do you justify it in comparison to other people who have real reasons to be sad?
“Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling arbitrarily sad and helpless. It’s disappointing to feel sad for no reason”- Allie Brosh
If you read enough, you will eventually read a book or passage or article that feels like someone spoke your heart in the most exact way in your most exact words. If you read often, you might feel this way a few times a year.
For the longest time, this particular brand of depression, this self serving sadness, was a scary part of my life that I hated. Because you tire of it quickly. Like what is the point of sadness that has no cause? It doesn’t even give you the one comfort of most sadnesses, a reason to pity yourself. You can’t pity yourself when there is no reason for your tears. If something tragically bad happened to you, then at least you can look at yourself and speak of how sad it is that this thing happened to you and caused you so much sadness. But without that, your sadness becomes disgusting to you. Worst still, it becomes disgusting to the people around you.
My most annoying character trait is that I don’t speak about myself. I avoid personal questions, especially about my wellbeing. I divert them. I do not volunteer information about myself. When people ask what is wrong I say ‘nothing’. People have a hard time believing this, especially if I have recently been tweeting about being sad or lonely or some other negative emotion. Surely something must be wrong. Something must have happened to make me feel this way.
Allie Brosh (the author) spoke of how difficult it is to speak to people about how she feels when she feels this way. There are many reasons why this is a hard topic to share with friends. For one it feels heavy but not heavy enough; because you are sad and you don’t want to alarm people but also you are sad and therefore that’s a little alarming. There’s also the case of people knowing that you are sad and making efforts to make you less sad but none of that effort takes into consideration the fact that your sadness is not being caused by anything. You feel pretty stupid when people ask you why you are sad and you can’t produce an answer; mostly because there is no answer.
your sadness becomes disgusting to you. Worst still, it becomes disgusting to the people around you.
I didn’t like that. I didn’t that when I said I was sad I couldn't say why I was sad. Why was I acting so pitiful when there was nothing wrong with me or my life. At the time I did not have the skill to manoeuvre talking about something so confusing. I know that speaking demeaningly about one’s self is quite an offputting image. Like if you go around talking about how unimportant and how unskillful and how untalented you are, people will look at you with — they won’t look at you well. Speaking in ways that demean you as a person is not a good look. Being sad for no reason at all is very similar to this. Being sad in a way that people can’t tell you things like ‘sorry for your loss’ feels like such a bad image. Because people don’t know what to say. So they tell you to get over it and other unhelpful things.
At the time when I felt most intensely sad, some of the people who I loved the most in the world made me feel worse. Made me feel like my sadness was a bad look. I know it wasn’t their intention to do that. I know they didn’t mean ‘get over it.’ But I don’t think they knew what else to say. Hearing someone be sad all the time for sadness sakes gets tiring. I know because being sad for sadness sake gets tiring too.
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I think procrastination is so interesting. For instance, procrastination seems like something you do because you are lazy right? But have you ever noticed that a lot of the time, the things you do instead of the thing you are supposed to be doing are kind of hard? Which means you are not lazy at all. Writing this article right now, I am procrastinating on the work I should be doing. More times than not, I am procrastinating because I am scared. The higher the stakes of the thing, the more likely I am to procrastinate doing it for too long. That is perhaps the most stupid thing about procrastination.
Worst still is that procrastination begets more procrastination.
The longer you procrastinate on doing something that you need to do, something that has stakes, the more embarrassed you feel about not having done it which leads to you procrastinating so more because you are disgusted by yourself. And you keep not doing it even though in your head you can hear a voice telling you to do it.
My procrastination always starts with the newest, less lethal form of my sadness for sadness sake. The new and improved apathy. With apathy, at least I don’t spend the whole day crying for no reason. Instead, I spend the whole day not doing anything and feeling bad for not doing any of the things I know I need to be doing. With apathy, I can function a little better. I get to avoid conversations about my sadness. The only problem is apathy makes me a really really awful employee. I know I need to do something and I know someone else thinks it’s important for me to have done it and that importance kick starts my fear which kicks starts my procrastination which kicks starts my self-disgust which fuels the procrastination and eventually I have to have a really difficult conversation. I lost a gig not too long ago because of this. Not specifically because I didn't do the work, I actually eventually got the work done, just not at the quality I could have. I was actually sort of relieved when it happened.
Every time I get a new opportunity, my happiness lasts 5 seconds before the realisation that I will eventually fuck it up with my apathy kicks in. People always tweet about how happy they are when they get new opportunities. All I can think about is how I am scared the person is making a mistake.
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Importance is manufactured. This isn’t to say nothing is important, although that is the case, nothing is important. Nothing is important past the importance we ascribe to it. Importance is only as real as we think it is. So I think about this in terms of situations where the importance of something is based on someone creating stakes for it. A lot of the things I have done this year have been based on timelines and deadlines I have created for myself. My apathy has affected me personally more than it has affected my ability to work.
I think this is the thing yea, the struggle I have is switching in and out of holding anything as important in a reality where nothing really is important. The realisation that nothing is important isn’t what first made me sad though. It isn’t even why I am often apathetic. It’s a separate matter of its own. But I often think about it. I think about how immediately I die, I will never ever ever do anything that mattered again in my life. And at some point in time, my existence will consequentially be erased forever. This doesn’t make me feel like my life is unimportant. It just makes me realise that the things that are important to me should be things that are important to me.
When I work with people, my goal is to share importance with them. I will never pressure someone into importance by giving them deadlines and stakes.
Depression is really really difficult to navigate. It’s especially difficult to navigate talking to someone that’s depressed about their own depression.
Telling them that things will be okay is not the way to do it.
Telling them to get over it is also not the way to do it.
Telling them what worked for you is also probably not the way too especially if they didn't ask you for tips and tricks.
I don’t know if there’s any way, to be honest.
But here’s the thought I have about why we should keep living. It’s the exact same thought I have when someone asks me why I do something that’s entirely pointless.
Why do we do anything?
This essay has three parts and all three parts felt connected to how I was feeling but I had a really time connecting them especially the last part
