Some thoughts I had over the weekend on living with persistent depressive disorder, which used to be called dysthymia:
One of the things that's aggravating about persistent depressive disorder is the unpredictability of it. Part of the experience is that mood can just crash, with no warning and no apparent or indentifiable external or internal cause. This makes life somewhat fraught. It has especially impinged on my confidence in making plans to meet up with people or talk on the phone. Me canceling and or disappearing is very frequent in my relationships.
Of course, here in America, we have a solution for everything. Have you tried changing your diet? Have you tried counseling? Have you tried this or that med? Have you tried meditation? Sleep? Travel? Positive thinking? Religion? Weed? Meth? Love?
It's interesting being relatively high-functioning and having a teaching job, for example, where I show up very reliably. But the side effect of that is a lack of spoons to show up elsewhere. The zero sum experience of wellness/energy/functionality. One of the experiences that is distorted in the extreme, after activities that have required presence, is the sense that very simple things, such as replacing a set of shoelaces or cleaning the bottom shelf of the fridge, or vacuuming or whatever, are impossible. Like, not just difficult. But impossible to do. And it can be alarming how quickly the bottom drops out. I can be on a roll, with plenty of momentum, feeling okay at about 4 pm, but by 4:30, I'm done for the day. I'm just done. You all get the side benefit of a string of funny memes or other posts. 🙂
I may have wanted to work out, or go shopping, or work on a project, but yeah, no. There's times, unpredictable and not seemingly connected to any reason or explanation, where I simply can't do anything. And this creates some requirements for self compassion that are sometimes far beyond my capability also. In recovery there's a saying: expectations are resentments under construction. Much more true living with persistent depressive disorder. "Let's work out at least an hour, the next three days." Three days later: Fail. Or, what can be baffling, one does follow through on the plan, and one feels like all the problems have been solved forever, only to be bewildered by the return of chronic pain and a sense of unremediable loss.
The general landscape is one of a *finite* resource, which I'll call functional well being (Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia is similar). It is not reliable, and there can be a lot more or a lot less of it than I realize at any given time. In order to accomplish things in my life, I have had to sacrifice a great many other things. Because it really ends up being a zero sum game. Wherever I exert any of the energies toward being well, and being functional, a great many other areas go neglected. I can easily inventory the myriad areas of my life that fell completely to pieces while I worked toward the PhD, for example. In many ways, I am currently redirecting all of those energies. This too is a very slow process, like trying to make a 90 degree turn in an oil tanker.
I think a lot of people who do not have disordered affectivity don't really understand what it is like. There's always these very well meaning suggestions, ideas, strategies, and many of them are perfectly logical and do in fact work, both for people who live with depression sometimes (unpredictably) and for people who do not. But usually when I am talking about my experience with persistent depressive disorder, I am not even about ideas, strategies, suggestions. I barely even take the advice of professionals.
It's interesting too how antsy the topic seems to make Americans in particular. Our culture places a supreme value on functioning over feeling. To have an emotional life, whether regulated or not, is to be a traitor to a large swath of the American value system. One of the alarming side effects of our recent years has been a visible increase in cruelty, meanness, a culture of ridicule and mockery of suffering, a culture of contempt. Kicking and punching down. Our leadership has gained much power from this culture of contempt for those who are or who appear to be weaker. But it runs on the general American fear of feeling, where emotions are problems to be solved. Tenderness is for suckers. Compassion is a joke. And given that default, it's no wonder that disregulation of emotions and an out of control emotional landscape with unpredictable lows is stigmatized, and that even well meaning people rush to "fix" it.
I get perversely stubborn about this and even angry sometimes. Look, I want to say to the problem solving American, some realities do not have a solution. Some things are absolutely the way things are and cannot be solved, because reality is not a problem. Reality is just the way life is. No, my thoughts have not "created this reality." No, I have not invited this suffering as a karmic lesson. No, everything does not happen for a reason. No, it is not possible to eat avocado and suddenly have manageable moods. No, crystals or essential oils are not helpful. No, I am not going to take SSRI's at this time. Yes, sometimes one lives with a bewildering loss on a daily basis whether one wants to or not. No, counseling is not a remedy for grief.
No.
Even without persistent depressive disorder, it seems to me that life involves loss, risk, disappointment, pain, dashed hopes, trauma, loneliness, boredom, restlessness. It would only be an infantilized and laughably flattened version of a human who would even try to "solve" all of these problems. Someone also probably so wrapped in terror of a real experience that they would essentially live in a prison. I think it is an essentially narcissistic style. I believe American culture is, write large, the psychology of the narcissistic alcoholic addict.
My stubborn insistence on reality as it is aggravates people who have a solution for everything. What I often witness however is that many of those solutions involve trading a heart for steel. The solutions involve denial, lies, illusions, bullshit. The solutions involve killing the suffering soul in order to live a shallow, unconnected, zoned out zombie existence that also has little joy or creativity. The solutions involve strategies to function within an utterly desolate, completely deranged context. These are "solutions" in which I am not interested. In fact, it often seems like these strategies substitute a serious and sick problem (what Jung called "neurosis") when there was no problem to begin with, there was simply: Reality.
I think a connected grand delusion of American life is that we are supposed to be happy. I think one of the most toxic and fiercely sick elements of the human potential movement from the mid-20th Century on has been this ditzy, clueless, vapid, toxic positivity. The dialectic of the pursuit of happiness involves too much of a constant awareness of being unhappy, as if that unhappiness is a problem to be solved. It's just the reality of consciousness. To be conscious is to be unhappy.
Anyway, hope you have a great Saturday! 🙂
I've been feeling super drawn to complete and total isolation and a break from social media the past couple of days. A lot of the emotional experiences I have been having have not exactly been on the manageable side of the scale. I'll be trying to inventory and make sense out of what is happening with me over the next couple of days. I think some of the triggers and cascades are tied to the season, as happens for me every year.
💕