Changing your Inner World Part 2
A wise man once told me that depression is often described as "anger turned against the self." I didn't really get the connection. I have always thought of myself as something of an angry person, though, so it wasn't too strange a concept to entertain. What he said clicked tonight. Here in this post I'd like to share a middle-of-the-night revelation.
I remember reading, or maybe watching, a story about this cat that lived in an old-folks home. The old people were dying, but the cat was the star of the show. This cat would go to one of the bed-ridden old people that was presumably close to death. The cat would jump up on the person’s bed and lay with them, affectionately. Seven minutes would pass and the person would die. It was exactly seven minutes, again and again. It got to the point where no one could die without first being visited by the cat precisely seven minutes before death. Doctors took interest in this and started trying to clock the cat. There was a case in which the doctor thought he had caught the cat in an error. The person was going to live longer or shorter than seven minutes. The person ended up, I think, having his or her heart stop and then restart for some odd reason. The cat had figured that out too which made it even more unbelievable, yet it was true.
Maybe the cat was the angel of death. Maybe the cat was an angel of mercy that knew the future and gave these people some sort of comfort before their passing. Maybe that cat was Charon, and served as the entity that guided their souls into the after life. Or maybe, the cat had spent so much time around the people that it had formed a bond of affection for them. Maybe the cat could simply sense that the person was about to die. Something in their bodies, that only a cat’s acute senses could detect, served as a seven-minute alarm.
I remember watching the discovery channel. It might have been animal planet, but I don’t think so. There was a lioness. Its jaw was hanging slack and its eyes were squinting. There were other lions and lionesses in front of it, all gorging themselves on dead prey of some kind. All were eating except the slack-jawed lioness. A wildebeest or zebra or buffalo or something had kicked the lioness and broken its jaw. The lioness was said to be doomed to starve to death. I remember being shocked by this information. If a person broke his jaw, or leg, or entire body, he’d still have a good chance of survival. And if he or she didn’t, the odds of starving to death were not likely. Of course, in Africa, there’s no lion doctors. The other thing that shocked me, but shouldn’t have, was that the lion wasn’t even trying. “Can’t it lick the blood or try to swallow something whole?” I also remember thinking “what a brutal and cruel world we live in.” For something to die in such a way, at the time, served as evidence in my mind that there is no all-powerful loving god. A lion is just a lion, it behaves only on instinct, how could a god that loves its creation allow such suffering? It was depressing. The lion knew it couldn’t eat. It may not have known it was going to starve, but it knew it was going to die. It sensed it’s own demise, in one way or another.
I remember when I was very depressed. I was on a google-search-hunt for something inspirational to make me feel better. I wanted to find some way to beat this depression, but mostly, I wanted something that talked me out of suicidal thoughts. One of the most profound things I came across, and remember after all these years, was not something written by any psychologist or scientist or doctor. It was a blog by a man who stated clearly that he was NOT a psychologist, or even a counselor, and had no kind of training. He was the father of a son who had committed suicide. One thing that depression brings with it is shame. In addition to the depression telling you that you are worthless and that life is hopeless, you also feel shame for having these thoughts in the first place. The mental dialogue goes something like this: “Why try, just stop, just stop it all. End it. You’re too sensitive. You’re too weird. You’re too different. You’re too unacceptable. You’re too you. Why are you allowing yourself to go on? You bring everyone pain. You bring yourself pain for bringing everyone pain. And none of it helps. You are suffering for nothing and causing others to suffer too. If you kill yourself you hurt them. If you don’t then you’ll just stay like you are, a lousy person, hurting them. You are awful. You just lay here feeling sorry for yourself. Then you feel sorry for yourself for feeling sorry for yourself. On and on. Useless and meaningless.”
Most people who have depression are very cautious about mentioning it in public. They usually only do so to people they trust. There are lots of stigmas out there. Most people don’t understand the first thing about it.
Getting back to the father. He was destroyed by the loss of his son but he meant to do something good with his experience. He wrote his blog in an attempt to reach out to people who may be in a similar situation that his son was in. He stated that he was not angry at his son. He also said that he did not blame his son. He did not even think his son made the wrong decision. He said that he believed that suicide happens when an individual’s resources for coping are outweighed by the shit life has piled upon them. Things like friends, family, reputation, income, acceptance are all things that allow us to cope. He admitted that having children was one of those coping resources as well. He believed that his son was simply following some mathematical rule. He was putting this sentiment out there because he wanted anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts to bypass the shame of it. It worked. I was not 100% better, by any means. I had later moments where I struggled, but I remembered this. It helped to anchor me.
I still get depressed, I still have moments. But I have learned coping mechanisms too. Being able to tell myself that suicide happen because of a lack of resources is a resource in itself. The depression is separated from “me that is depressed” to “my depression” and then further to “depression” a.k.a. “my mind is lying to me again.”
This is one of my coping mechanisms that has evolved from many others. Depression is a liar.
Tonight I became depressed. Lately it’s been hitting me more than usual. I can easily figure it’s from major changes in my life, and the stress that comes with. Even a wholly positive change in life-style, if it’s major enough, brings fear, which in turn can trigger stress and depression. I was feeling depressed, trying to push myself to cry to have a moment and be done with it(another coping mechanism) when an idea sprung into my mind and the entire feeling vanished. I was too intrigued with my new thought that I didn’t have room in my head to focus on being depressed. Which, strangely, is the whole thought. It’s like the Grim Reaper walking up to you and saying, "you’re going to die, you’re going to die." You know he does this all the time, and you’re still alive. Every time he walks up, you know you’re finally going to die. So he stands there saying “you’re going to die,” over and over while you cower and cry at his feet. Then he walks away and you feel elation, you feel very alive. This time it was like he walked up, said his normal piece, and while I began to cower and cry, I noticed something shiny. “Ooh what’s that? It’s so shiny!” I had become a cat that couldn’t be bothered to fear death, there was something shiny. I approached the shiny object and it disappeared. Maybe light was just reflecting funny. I turn around and the Grim Reaper was nowhere in sight.
The cat could sense death in people and it showed them empathy. It did this day in and day out. It’s not hard to recognize empathy because empathy is empathy. It’s an invisible bond, almost like a language of strict feeling. The cat didn’t get depressed at seeing everyone it felt connected to die. It was like a robot or broken record, each person was treated with the same empathy as the last.
The lion knew it couldn’t eat. It sat there watching the other’s eat, feeling hungry, looking at the food. It could sense it’s own death. Why didn’t it jump off of a cliff? Starvation is a terrible way to die. Clearly a lion is not intelligent enough to know that starvation is just going to get worse and worse. Do you think the lion ever thought, in its an entire life, about suicide?
The father who lost his son, I think he was only partly right. The son did run out of coping mechanisms but running out doesn’t mean that the kid was going to die. Running out of coping mechanisms, I don’t think, made the son want to die, either. The son had been so indoctrinated, so brainwashed, so lied to by the world around him and by his own mind that, in the face of so much stress, his will to survive short-circuited and turned against him. It’s not hard to see that someone in dire straits such as the son is, emotionally speaking, a mess. These people are a train wreck. I'm not criticizing them, but pointing out an important point. It's not their emotions and decisions going hay-wire that is causing them to feel bad, it's trauma and stress and shit that's causing them to go hay-wire and make life-threatening decisions.
We have built up idiotic habits that we don’t think we can break. We are full of shit. We are enslaved by bullshit. The self-lies are clever, extremely so, make no mistake about that. But collective intelligence always trumps individual intelligence. Even if you are the smartest person in the world, it's not hopeless, and you know it!
Don’t get me wrong, life can be tough, it can crush you flat. However. If you find yourself staring around the room or at the world saying, “what a shit show, I’m ready to blow this popsicle stand.” It’s OK to think that, just make sure you take a moment and realize that you aren't really the one talking. The liar, at that moment, is alive and well. The liar is a result of implanted foreign notions.
As long as you point your finger at him and call him a liar over and over until you believe it, the liar can only sit back, shut up, and hope to try again later, when you aren’t so coherent.