On 32

Two years ago I wrote about turning 30 and what it meant to me. It felt cathartic; having left dark chapters of my life behind, I could finally be honest about them. I felt like I had grown, had changed, had overcome something. I could finally get on with my life. It was a post about triumph.

Today is my 32nd birthday and, alas, I can’t write about triumph. I have to write about attrition and relentlessness and loneliness.

I never want my posts to be a cry for help. It seems undignified and slightly cowardly to me to broadcast my feelings publicly rather than just ask those around me if assistance was really what I wanted. I have a lot of people around me who would materially help me if I asked them. I suspect some of them would go really very far to do so if they thought I was in dire need.

Having said that, I’m not sure what else I could characterise this post as, in good faith. There is catharsis in writing and publishing this kind of thing, but is that really it? Am I deluding myself about my motivations for these kinds of posts? Quite probably.

This kind of doubt is the first thing I want to talk about. It’s been 15 years of therapy, meditation, self-help, etc. These all draw particular awareness to my thoughts and feelings, such that I maintain a meta-level awareness of them approximately constantly. They also offer some judgment about these thoughts and feelings; often, therapeutic models tell a patient that their feelings are disproportionate to the reality of their situation, whether implicitly or explicitly. There is now a constant loop in my head of noticing a feeling and then questioning whether it’s proportionate. I am always doubtful; I have no sense of what proportionate is any longer. Whenever I express the thought “this hurts so badly I would rather be dead than continue suffering”, everyone around me expresses that I should not kill myself, implying that I should keep suffering and/or that my feelings are disproportionate to the reality of my situation and perhaps suggesting that there will be some kind of regression to reality.¹ It’s been years and years and years of this. I don’t trust my own feelings anymore.

I hope it is self-evident why this might have a fraying, attritional effect on me, but it can be acutely painful in more salient ways. I recently had a huge blow-up with a once-close friend. We had had a series of conversations, over almost two years, where they had suggested that I ought to make quite radical changes in my personal life. On some level, I had been hurt that they doubted my judgment so much, but because they made these assertions with such confidence and I doubted the legitimacy of my own thoughts and feelings, I assumed they were right. I even expressed my gratitude to them for these suggestions, believing they had my best interests at heart. At some point, I realised all these suggestions were, in fact, controlling and totally ludicrous, and much more about fulfilling their offerer’s psychological needs than meeting my own. I deeply regretted not pushing back sooner, as perhaps our relationship might have been salvageable if I had done so.

There are many other ways that doubt weighs on me. It is clear that I should try to do something about my suffering, that it is pathological, etc., but it is much less clear what. Should I keep doing more therapy? If so, should I try a different therapist, one from a different school perhaps? Should I go back on medication? If so, which type? Should I try meditating “seriously”, as in for >1 hour/day, should I practice mettā until I love myself? Should I restrict my screen time, should I go outside more, should I learn to be more vulnerable with the people around me? Should I experiment with psychedelics, and if so, which ones, in which settings? Should I spend less time in my head and more time in my body (the first step here being to figure out what this actually means), should I take up ecstatic dance? Should I change my life entirely, should I move to a new city, get a different career that doesn’t involve being sat behind a laptop? Clearly it is unproductive to spend too much time contemplating these questions. But I have tried all of them, at least to some extent, and it’s never been obvious that any have had a positive effect that would be sustainable in the long term. The current situation isn’t sustainable either. So what do I do? What do I try? How could I not be wrapped up in these thoughts, over and over and over?

I am so afraid of becoming the titular Depressed Person from David Foster Wallace’s essay. She seems like a caricature; from the outside, it is painfully obvious that her spirals are self-reinforcing, and that she is inventing the majority of her suffering. She seems blinkered by her mind. Are my problems the same? Is it “obvious” to an external observer that I can simply opt-out of these patterns and be magically fixed? Am I indulging them too much by even writing this blog post? From the inside, even with the knowledge that everything might be self-inflicted and self-reinforcing, it isn’t obvious to me at all how to avoid this. Therapeutic models talk a lot about our maladaptive patterns serving us in some way; they allow us to incur some smaller suffering now to prevent the risk of their being greater suffering later, like being abandoned. But then how is it better to spend so much time wishing I was dead than to be abandoned? My brain is really that implastic, and this fear of abandonment really that ingrained from when I was young?

I can’t tell you why I’m depressed. Not just in the macro sense, but in the micro sense too; if you ask me on any given day why I feel like shit, I might not have an answer, it’s just some innate sense I have. Even if I do have an answer, it’s possible it’s a rationalization and not a legitimate cause. I’ve thought about causality for 15 years and I’m not sure if I’ve made any progress during that time. It might be habitual rumination that leads to the depression. It might be that the electrochemistry of my brain is off-kilter, and that the rumination is a symptom of that. Different interventions target different potential causes, but, as I said, it’s not clear that any of them work. It’s easier and easier to conclude that I am just fundamentally broken on some spiritual or metaphysical level. Perhaps this is karma and I did awful things in my past life, perhaps I am cursed, perhaps I am simply being taunted by a sadistic God.

The chronic nature of my depression is taking its toll. The first bad day after a spell of good ones is met with a feeling of “oh no, not again. I know how this feeling goes. It lasts for weeks, months, not just a day or two. I don’t have the strength to endure this any longer”. There is no longer a gradual decline, and instead I hurtle straight to the bottom. It is so easy, so conditioned at this point, to mentally reach for the idea of suicide. My long-term resilience feels as though it has reached close to empty.

I do not want to constantly talk about these feelings. I’m worried that by giving them airtime, I will legitimise and perpetuate them. I’m worried that I will allow myself to see myself as a victim; someone to whom bad things happen, rather than someone capable of changing their situation. I worry that friends and acquaintances will get sick of me, à la the Depressed Person, or common advice that an easy way to be happier is to spend less time with unhappy people. There is a part of me that I think is fundamentally unlovable, and it is agony to co-exist with this part. My therapist would say that the only way I could free myself of this would be to show the unlovable part and to let it be loved, or to love that part myself, to see it as protecting me from some greater evil. It sounds compelling whenever I’m in the therapy chair, but in real life, I seem unable to do this in practice.

There is a brutal loneliness to the whole thing. Last year I was in a corner store with a friend, and the person in front of us in line appeared to be homeless. They were buying a beer and paying with coins. Afterwards, my friend commented that they were sad that the homeless person couldn’t see that buying the beer was a bad choice for them. The friend “wished [the homeless person] would have made a better choice” and had considered saying this to them in the store. It was clear that the friend did not understand something that, to me, seemed fundamental about the homeless person’s experience.² They could not understand the trade-off that was being made, or at least didn’t make the effort to, and weren’t in the habit of doing so by default. I realised that they would not understand aspects of my experience either; in some fundamental sense, they weren’t going to “get it”. Complaining about feeling misunderstood feels very cringe and teenage-angsty, but here we are. Probably nobody understands anybody, not really, and others simply don’t have this desperation for recognition in the way that I do.

I’ve spent much of the past two years (including now) feeling tormented by grief for the person I was on my 30th birthday. He thought things were going to be different. He thought he was free. He thought he could finally be happy. Instead, it seems like I have regressed; my health has worsened significantly, my career has stalled, and I’m in debt. I’ve worked so hard for the past decade, and what do I have to show for it? I don’t know how to handle this grief. My therapist would likely say something about actively processing it, perhaps by sharing it with others. So here you go.

I’m always worried these kinds of posts read a little bit like a suicide note. It seems pretty unlikely that I will kill myself at any point; I have felt suicidal a lot and have still yet to actually do it. It turns out there is a lot of inertia in simply living. On some level, I am still hopeful that I will find some silver bullet, or figure out the right cocktail of interventions to make progress. I might learn to stop suppressing my feelings, even though all of the prompts I come across for improving this are things that feel approximately impossible to me.³ Perhaps this whole piece is merely a narrative I have about my life, and I can indeed manage to start telling a different one, and this difference will manifest as me feeling better. Perhaps I’ll get a job and pay off my debt and everything will just get magically better, and I’ll be able to blissfully forget the fragility of the whole thing. Perhaps I will find some way of altering my brain chemistry such that I won’t be so predisposed to all this shit.

I usually try to end my posts on a positive note, even if I don’t feel that positive myself. Alas, I think this is the best I can do today.