There are different kinds of depression, and one person can have multiple kinds of depression. There is also a plethora of ways that one person can experience and feel depression because people are full of moods and thoughts and feelings. What makes depression depression, though, is the sadness and negative thoughts and impulses that drag out for longer than a person can really stand alone. Or at least longer than a person should stand alone. This is my definition, at least. If you want something more official feel free to check out NIMH or APA or the dictionary.
Sometimes having depression is like a one person fight club where the fight club is your own brain kicking the shit out of itself. People close to you can see the bruises of you being so damn sad and when people ask “what happened?” you are not entirely sure because you just got the crap knocked out of you in your emotion and thinking space.
A difference between fight club as written by Chuck Palahniuk and depression is this club is exclusive and you are the only member. There’s still a whole damn cult that wants to burn the place down, except the cult are these angry, sad, painful feelings and impulses that are brain chemicals and the place they want to burn down is you.
Do these cultists want a classless society, motivated by the ennui of being a middle class office worker? Do they want to destroy social security numbers and information gathered by companies to go back to a more aggressive and primitive existence? I have no fucking idea. I think these rogue agents are super confused because besides the fact that I am not a white lower-middle class male in the 90s, I don’t even know how social security numbers work.
Regardless, these rogue agents keep speaking in (mental, metaphorical) violence and shitty feelings, which makes it really hard to accept them or give them space. Why would anyone want to accept these feelings, anyway? The answer I have is because one of the best counselors I’ve seen, as well as a lot of self-help literature and other self-bettering stuff have said in different ways that in order to get through feelings you have to understand them, and the beginning of understanding is acceptance.
If acceptance sounds nice and easy then you are not thinking of the same depression that I am. It is really fucking hard to accept emotions that want to punch you in the face as hard as they can. I was reminded, and remind myself when this sort of abstract rabid depression shows up, that acceptance means acknowledging it. At minimum, acknowledge that the emotion exists instead of trying to throw a thick woolly rug over it to stifle its gibbering and pretend that it’s not there. Ignorance is bliss, but even if you persuade yourself that the depression is not there through avoidance or escapism, the angry depression will throw the rug aside eventually and sucker punch you right in the kidneys.
That being said, acceptance does not mean welcoming. If bitey depression shows up in your life, you do not– and I recommend do not– open the door to your cozy happy place, dust off the welcome mat and offer it a comfy chair. This bitch will try and destroy your furniture.
So then what do you do if your depression is one step away from looking for pitchforks and torches to wave? The answer is different for everyone. My go-to strategy is to try and calm the fuck down. Even if I was calm before, bitey depression will cause anxiety by being ferocious. I use meditation to start because it slows down all the thoughts and decreases the intensity of most emotions. I learned meditation when I was 20 by a Buddhist psychology PhD student in California on the beach. I am not even kidding. He was boarding at my grandmother’s place and I had gone with him and his girlfriend to the beach while my mom and grandmother did stuff they liked to do. We sat cross-legged in the sand and listened to the waves during his instruction. I was good at it, and meditation scared the crap out of me.
Despite my intelligence and the quickness and number of my thoughts, or maybe because of it (who knows), I was able to clear my mind with relative ease. This scared me. The calm and revelation that I felt in meditation was strange and alien. I was not used to such stillness and calm and it was completely alarming. I was afraid that if I kept meditating that I would think slower, I would be slower on the uptake of new information, my creativity would become lackluster, and I would be less me. After I came back to Alaska from the trip I dropped meditation like a hot potato.
Before I met Buddhist dude I had read some of the Dalai Llama’s writing and found a sense of comfort in it, probably part of what had started the impromptu lessons, and I continued to enjoy more diverse Buddhist writings recommended by Buddhist dude after, picking up a book or essay every few years. Reading about how important it was to get meditation right, the posture, the sitting, the foundational thinking had to be just so according to some writers, the idea of starting meditation again morphed from jittery about personal change to afraid of doing meditation wrong and fucking myself up.
Nine years later I was depressed with enthusiastic mood swings that didn’t want to quit. A year earlier my best friend had recommended an app called Headspace, and I was tentatively interested. My relationship with my girlfriend at the time was in tatters, I was going to start a rigorous job soon, and on top of that was all this mental stuff. So I started meditating, and I used Headspace. I still do every night. In the beginning guided meditation was a break from my life. When I do other things that I enjoy such as reading, playing video games, sports, I am still in my head and using my mental faculties to do the things. In meditation it started with me following the meditation guide, Andy, word-by-word. In meditating I count breaths, if my mind wanders I acknowledge that it wanders and then return to sensations of the body and find this balance of quiet. At the least meditation is a daily 3 minute vacation from all of my responsibilities, from having to talk or write or otherwise communicate with people, from having to problem solve, and if I am utterly, thoroughly exhausted from even having to imagine as one does when reading. The silence in meditation is welcoming.
I stubbornly practiced meditation and use it as a break from myself, regardless of my mood, to settle. Even on days when I feel good, when I’m distracted, if I am afraid that I will meditate wrong or I am enjoying myself, the least I can do is take 3 minutes to sit in a guided meditation. Thanks to this discipline I’ve put on myself, it makes dealing with bitey depression more manageable. Bitey depression still shows up wanting to head-butt and flip tables, but since I’ve practiced the steps of meditation as much as I have I can use meditation as a buffer so the angry depression, my defenses, and knee-jerk reactions will all slow the fuck down. This usually gives me the space to acknowledge and recognize that bitey depression has shown up and remind myself that I have gotten through it before without it burning the place down, and sometimes it helps me see what, exactly, is motivating bitey depression to show up.
Unrelated to anything. On my wordpress reading feed the first thing that popped up today was: “Suggestions: DIY, Life, Chickens. ” DIY, yes that sounds like me, I like doing things. Life, ehhh, if I am in the mood I read other peoples’ life stuff. Chickens …?! I do not have chickens, I have seen chickens a handful of times in my life. Then again, Knock-knock, motherfucker.
Pockets Full of Foxes 