Suffering on the Margin

Epistemic status: stream-of-consciousness neurotic blathering masquerading as a quick take.

The astute among you will have noticed that my start-of-year posting glut has slowed significantly. Probably you won’t have noticed, and even if you have, you probably won’t care, but I’m going to explain to you why this is anyway. I’ve been depressed.¹

I get depressed a lot, and commensurately have written about it a lot. Depression is a particularly insidious attractor state; when one is depressed, it is very hard to think about much else other than one’s depressedness, and accordingly there’s little else one feels compelled to write about either.

But, having written a lot about my experiences with la grande tristesse before, I am unsure whether to continue doing so. There are pros and cons to be weighed.

Pros

• It’s cathartic, and I often feel (at least slightly, temporarily) better for having published something which feels authentic and vulnerable. Casting off some amount of shame by writing publicly about depression goes some way to lessening it.
• It saves me the trouble of having to have many repetitive and emotionally-charged conversations in 1:1 settings. It also means that I can let people in my life know that I’m having a bad time, without creating any particular obligations to try and help me.
• It helps me clarify my own thoughts/feelings, hopefully getting closer to their root. Similarly it is somewhat creative and can prompt new framings, interventions etc.
• It offers some accountability for actively working on improving my situation, rather than wallowing/feeling like a victim (see below).
• Sometimes people say they’ve read something on here and then say nice things to me about it. The comment-worthy posts tend to be the candid ones about my mental health. This doesn’t happen especially often, but when it does, it feels validating and makes me feel like continuing to post about my mental health is a good use of my time, social capital etc.

Cons

• It’s cringe. It’s very hard to find the line between “providing a public good by talking about an oft-tabooed type of suffering” and “loudly proclaiming myself a victim”. Sometimes it is a way of defending against my insecurities and getting ahead of potential criticisms. I often fear that the message I send is actually “I’m sad so you’re not allowed to be mean to me”.
  • And, y’know, on some level if that were what I was broadcasting, that’d be fine. There’s an adaptive reason I have that impulse, and I want to honour that there were times in my life where my sense of self was so fragile that I really did need the love and affection of anyone and everyone around me, at any and all cost. But, equally, while I must hold my wounded child self lightly and lovingly, I am now fortunate enough to have enough love and affection in my life that my sense of self is more robust, and can indeed handle criticism and conflict.
• It’s unclear whether it’s contributing meaningfully to the conversation. People already know depression exists. Most readers of the blog already know that I suffer from it. There is a lot of negativity online already, and perhaps I am only contributing to that, rather than doing anything useful for the discourse by penning the marginal personal account of my suffering. Perhaps I would be better served by directing my readers’ attention to something joyous.
• Relatedly, perhaps it focuses my own attention on the wrong thing (which might be particularly exacerbated by receiving positive feedback and then continuing to make the same mistakes). Perhaps telling myself “I am depressed” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The way I write about my mental health is very cerebral/analytical/rational, not very embodied. To borrow from the AOA framework, it is all head and no heart or gut - possibly I am a man with a hammer of intellect repeatedly smashing something that isn’t a nail. Perhaps the very problem is that I am not pursuing these more embodied strategies with my heart and gut as equal partners.
• It will be indelibly associated with my name, not only in search engine rankings but in datasets for language models. Future employers/investors/wives will be able to find this out about me for the cost of a trivial search, and might have reservations about working with me (whether rightly or wrongly).
• I guess the counterpoint here is that I would be doing myself a disservice by working with these people if it were the case that they would not be interested in pursuing the collaboration were they aware of my mental health issues.
• I think there is some non-trivial risk of social contagion, although I don’t really know how to model this. I am acutely aware that it had never occurred to me that suicide was an option until someone I knew confided in me that it was something they had considered - at which point it immediately appealed to me. I also wonder if, for example, someone might read something I write, it having not occurred to them that disordered eating might provide a coping mechanism for their emotional difficulties (e.g. if they are a man who would consider eating disorders a strictly female pathology), and then find the idea somewhat legitimised by what I’ve said.

Unfortunately, there is no real conclusion to this post. I cannot decide whether the pros outweigh the cons, not least because I do not feel like I’ve managed to elucidate an exhaustive list thereof. Clearly I have just managed to write a post that is, on some level, about depression, seemingly giving me my answer. If you have thoughts either way on this I’d like to hear them - including anonymously, if you’d prefer.