“Somehow I know that my heart will keep breaking / But may it stay open and soft / Till I am finally back to the source of it all.” – Gungor, “The End”
After spending a fair bit time in this hole called depression, I can say without a doubt that this shit is stupid and sucks.
I imagine that those who happen to die of exposure, starvation, or dehydration and are in situations in which these deaths occur often have some time to contemplate the reality of their situation. Its not like a war where you are constantly being gunned down and your heart is beating out of your chest or drowning where you have a couple minutes to look back on your life before your lungs run out of oxygen and you slip away. But those whose deaths are dragged out days or weeks probably think a few times “damn… this shit is boring.” At first, that thought is probably followed by “I wish someone would come and save me already.” But after some days without food or water, this thought probably evolves to “I just wish I had a gun so I could shoot myself.”
Right now, I’m still on the idea of wishing someone would come save me from my pit. Its not uncommon for me to evolve to wanting to be put out of my misery, but I’m spending all of my energy right now trying to not go there. That is one advantage of being in the middle of a journey with depression instead of the beginning. When you first have it, the feeling of never-ending emptiness is new and overbearing and it easily crushes your mind and body. Granted, when one is depressed, the feeling that the emptiness will never go away is present when one is depressed. But I think that my spirit has evolved from the exposure to these episodes to be able to endure a bit longer each time.
I’m going to go on a tangent about the psychology of hope for a bit. I promise there is a point to this. There are two stories I want to tell.
The first: I was listening to this speaker talk about hope and he began to tell a story about a case study that was done at some point before animal rights and cruelty was prevalent. This doctor took a group of rats and put them in a vat full of water one at a time to see how long they would tread water before they gave up and drowned. On average, these rats lasted about 15 minutes before accepting their fate. However, he collected a second group of rats, put them in the vat again one at time, and had them swim until they gave up. Just before they drowned, he picked them up out of the water and put them on dry land. After letting them fully rest, he put them back in the vat to see how long they would last. Because the rats now had hope that they would be saved, the average time they tread water went from 15 minutes to 60 hours! All because of their experience to being saved.
The second: I was talking with my therapist and telling him how I was doing -as one does with a therapist- and I was telling him that I don’t like telling people about the reality of my situation because I felt that telling them would just add more stress to them and not change the my reality. He then proceeded to tell me about a case study that also probably occurred before people cared about animals. The purpose of this experiment was to observe an idea called learned helplessness. In this study, a dog was placed in a box with two metal platforms under him, one on each side of this border the dog could jump across. The platform that was under the dog would then be sent an electric current and electrocute the dog. The dog, feeling the shock would jump across the border to the platform that was safe. After observing the dogs reactions to this, those running the experiment decided to send currents to both of the platforms simultaneously. They did this and the dog jumped across the border a couple of times before realizing the reality of his situation. The dog then proceeded to passively lie down in defeat of being shocked.
Now some people may be thinking “Life is not as simple as drowning rats and dogs presented with a dichotomy,” and my depressed mind tells me the same thing. But you would be missing my point!
I have a quote from Rocky Balboa (yes, I do know that he isn’t a real person, shut up) that hangs above the desk in my room that I never use. It goes, “The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”
The irony in this is that I have been reading it over and over again this week because it’s been a Herculean task to get out of my bed in the mornings, but it has a point to it. Life can be summarized as moving forward and falling down. Now, those who study game theory can argue that neutrality is an option, but I will put that in the same category of falling down. Going backwards and standing still is how one stops getting closer to that thing they are reaching for. While I have plenty of goals and dreams in my life, my goal is in the quote from the top of this article: The Source of It All. The thing about depression is that it makes going forward that much harder and excruciating. It puts me in the position of dog in the crate: what’s the point? Nothing will change.
That is stupid part about depression. Instead of being healthy and able to rationalize, my mind has to deal with a constant barrage of irrationality that comes my way and try to figure out which of these thoughts is truth.
Now, here we go onto the theological part of the article that I promise won’t be too preachy and also has a point. Whenever I talk about truth being evasive to my friends or getting out of a hard situation, I always ask them “Have you read 1 Kings 19?”
Now to my friends, it probably sounds more like “HaVe yOU rEad 1 kiNgS 19?” I always know the answer: They haven’t. No one reads 1 Kings 19. I’m not going to summarize it, here is the text:
3 Elijah was afraid[a] and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, 4 while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” 5 Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep. All at once an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.”6 He looked around, and there by his head was some bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again.7 The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.” 8 So he got up and ate and drank. Strengthened by that food, he traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. 9 There he went into a cave and spent the night. And the word of the Lord came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.” 11 The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake came a fire,but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. 13 When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.
Two ideas to pull from this text: the first is that rest and food does wonders for the soul. Elijah went from wanting to die to being ready for the next challenge. The good thing about depression is that it puts my into a place where I am resting, the problem is just being ready for the next challenge. The second is the elusive nature of truth which is personified by the presence of the Lord. All these great disasters happen around Elijah, but it is emphasized that none of these things carried truth with them. Instead, truth is carried on this small whisper that Elijah would have to be silent to hear. This scene is the perfect example of what a depressed/anxiety-ridden mind feels like. So much stuff is going on inside me and my mind is being treacherous and self-destructive and making it impossible to find truth with my own strength. This is where praying often comes in handy. God reveals truth to those who pursue him.
The most horrible advise I’ve ever heard for my condition is “Listen to your heart/guts.” As a depressed person, that is arguably the worst thing that I can do. If I did that, I would have been strung up on a tree a long time ago. But with depression I am currently faced with a choice: keep swimming and waiting for something to save me or lie down passively in defeat. I feel myself teetering to the edge of the former and don’t know what to do.
This is where the contradiction of depression comes in: wanting help but being too afraid to ask for it.
Whenever I get like this, there are always friends and family who reach out to me and let me know that they are here for me, they will be praying for me, they want to see the best for me, etc.. All of that is so amazingly appreciated and that is exactly what I need, the problem is the feeling of having a gun pointed to my heart. I want to ask for help, but I can’t. I feel scared of all the possibly irrational realities that go through my head.
Lets use an example of what this looks like:
I’m in my apartment alone and I feel scared being alone at the moment. I want to text my friend this to have support. Here are the following realities my mind might present to me.
A. No response.
B. I’m sorry, I’m busy doing blah blah blah with so and so
C. Nic, you need to figure this out yourself. You got it! *high five emoji*
D. No response, but they are doing something on social media.
E. Its game day, don’t bring anyone down right now.
F. Of course Nic, I’ll be right over.
Now, the healthy mind would be able to easily figure out which of these responses I would get from someone who cares about me. However, depression makes these choices go from logical to a lottery winner. It’s not a matter of which one is real, but which one reality happens to land on. Yes, there is a chance that it lands on F, but there is an equally likely chance that I would get A-E and be crushed in the process, making being alone with my thoughts even worse. Therefore, I choose not to ask for help and instead just sit alone, because that is better than being rejected in my solitude.
The step to getting out of my depression is taking the step forward and asking for help, I know. But it is scary. Especially in times like this with finals, the irrationality of everyone being too busy for me is incredibly prevalent. Even I make excuses to get out of getting help. I use the too busy excuse too because I don’t want to be put in a situation that may be terrifying or overwhelming for me. Hell, the scariest part of this entire article isn’t reflecting on my thoughts or pressing the publish button. The scariest part is putting the link out that pretty much says, “Hey, look at how broken I am today.” Thats never something someone wants others to know. It’s the idea that something broken never sells.
Understanding that people care about me is something I need to get through my head. I know one of the big things I think about when I’m alone: I think and pray on other people. This may sound like bullshit and that I’m doing “Look at me! Look at me! I care!” But my mind is constantly running through the names of people in my life, people I haven’t seen in a while, and people who I have had brief but memorable interactions with. The problem with me is that I don’t think that applies to other people for me. I believe that as soon as I am out of sight, I am out of mind. If I am not present for a certain period of time, I will then cease to exist to that person. In other words, I don’t feel important or worthy enough to be memorable.
In all honesty, I don’t know where that comes from or how to fix that. The easy answer is “dEppReSiOn,” but somewhere along the line, learned helplessness came into play. I think the step for me is to not just lie down passively, but lean on something stable that will support me.
I have several pages of Amish Education systems to write about, so I must go on with my finals season. Enjoy your day and stay busy.
-Nic
Dogs in Learned Helplessness: https://medium.com/thrice-removed/seligmans-the-hope-circuit-e7989178473f
Rats in Resilience and Hope: https://worldofwork.io/2019/07/drowning-rats-psychology-experiments/
My Journey to Satisfaction 