i.e. crash and burn learn
It’s been quite a long time.
Where have I been? What have I done? Am I ok?
Where is this blog going? What is its future? Does anyone care?
These are questions which, if I were in your position reading these very words, would all be bouncing around my head. I hope to answer at least some of them in this post.
As the title suggests, I have (metaphorically speaking) crashed; just when I thought my life was cruising along steadily I come suddenly and rapidly to a halt. But instead of weeping and burning as the meat of my life melts away, collapsing to crumbles of thoughtless ashes which fly high into the sky – a few specks of black dust carrying within them a lifetime’s worth of moments and misery, of miracles and memories – I hope to learn from the experience.
So let’s tackle the situation one step at a time.
The Crash
It’s hard to say what happened. Well, not exactly hard to say per se – I just got a bit down and couldn’t bring myself to write about it – but it’s hard to pinpoint precisely when and why it all began.
Perhaps I thought, having written over twenty (thoroughly excellent, if I do say so myself) posts, that if I ever did get down again in a hypothetical future, all I needed was to read the relevant blog post et voilà: it would give me the answers I needed and wanted in that moment, in that state of mind.
Perhaps I noticed myself slowly slipping from the baseline mood of ‘I’m generally ok’ deeper into the ditch of depression as it seemed my overall happiness was decreasing day by day, but since I wasn’t on the verge of doing something stupid, it was disregarded and I thought it was just a phase that I’d get through.
Perhaps I reasoned that I’ve already been through the worst, the very worst, that one can, and that if I was able to get through some of the rubbish I’ve had to endure, nothing – nothing – in the future could daunt me now.
Perhaps I didn’t want to say anything to anyone since I felt it would be a mere repetition of things already said before.
Perhaps I felt like I’d done all I could.
Perhaps I felt like it wasn’t worth doing anything anymore.
Or maybe, just maybe, perhaps all of those things are true to differing degrees. Whatever the case, I think it’s clear to see that my mood was slowly but surely getting worse over a number of days and weeks and eventually months, but I didn’t see any drastic changes so I assumed I was ok.
And I was, for the most part.
It was just…
…I dunno.
I felt empty. I felt void. I had entered le néant, as the French would say.
I felt like every hypothetical action I could and would take in the future would be purposeless. What was the point – practically everything I had to say or do or think had already been done and said and thought, if not in this lifetime then by someone living centuries ago.
What could I offer the world which no one else could?
Rien.
I gradually managed to convince myself that nothing that I could do would be of any original value to the world in which we live. That thought, when pulsing through your veins at eleven o’clock at night, when you’re already crying for feeling shit for the first time in weeks, when you’re scared to pick up the phone since everyone to whom you can talk has heard it all before, when you’re convinced that you’re meaningless, purposeless, nothing but nothingness – that thought brings your heart to standstill.
I was not only getting angry at myself for feeling this way over and over and over again, but I became reluctant to talk about my feelings to the people I usually told – my family and more so my friends – because I thought they couldn’t offer me anything new: all the advice they had given I had internalised and put into practice, what else could they say? What else was there to say? What good would it do?
I felt like I had hit the end of the road. People had tried their best to pull me to safety, dragging me left and right, this way and that, but there was no stopping me now. I was a runaway train accelerating towards that point, that place from where there is no return, that tunnel into which light cannot penetrate, that chasm into which the angels cannot fly, that rooftop from which there is but one way down.
If I were to summarise the state of mind I was in at that time, it would be this: I felt old. Not old in the conventional sense, but old in that I was unable to offer or experience anything new, it had all been said, done and dusted, there was nothing left to see.
And yet – here I am. Time for the positive part.
The burning learning
This wasn’t your conventional crash where the rate of change of momentum is high since you decelerate in a 2000 kg car from 60 ms-1 to standstill in 1.3 seconds meaning the average force F exerted on you by a hypothetical tree is (2000 × 60)/1.3 ≈ 90 kN. No, instead this was the same crash but over the period of days or weeks or months – less of a crash and more of a gradual progression to rest where to keep living you have to keep moving.
But I digress.
Time to break down the problem into its basic building blocks.
Why was I feeling down?
- Suppression of emotions – no longer talked that much about how I was feeling since…
- Lack of novelty – no longer felt like I was saying or doing anything new, which led to…
- Low self-esteem – couldn’t ‘be myself’ as I tried to make sure I didn’t repeat the same thoughts aloud again and again, which could only mean…
- Irrational thoughts – convinced myself that nobody would like me for me but only for the fake happy side of my character
Even when typing this list, it seems like same old same old: another set of grumbles and moans, gimme a minute to sort em out and you’ll be back on your happy way.
Well let me tell you something.
It’s not like that at all.
I needed to realise the following:-
Never think that life is just a mere repetition of ideas already captured, words already spoken, actions already taken. It is far beyond such simplicity.
Indeed, if it really were that simple, phrases such as history repeats itself would be true.
Let’s call this problem of feeling down X. If you experience X once and you get help for it and recover then that’s all hunky dory. If you experience X again – now what? Do you just give up because you’ve already received help?
Do you not turn to anyone since they already gave you help but it won’t work again?
There are limitless solutions to X – everyone is different and every situation is unique. What worked for tackling X for me three months ago may do nothing now, whereas something which I called balderdash before may work wonders today.
The fact that I feel like I’m saying the same things over and over again is not only completely incorrect, it’s completely irrelevant – if that’s what helps, that’s what helps and it should be done.
Moreover, the passive action of simply reading what I’ve already written before and thinking that it’ll neatly apply to my current situation is nuts. I can draw inspiration from it, sure, but life is constantly evolving with new news stories popping up all over the place, people growing older, new souls entering the land which we inhabit, and this collective creature we call life is never the same as it once was, much like how you yourself are never the same at two moments in your lifetime.
Think about it. Eating a chocolate ice cream will permanently change you – that memory of how it tasted will be stored in your brain and brought to the surface almost every time you see one again. Eating another chocolate ice cream in exactly the same spot at exactly the same time on exactly the same date a year from now is not exactly the same – the weather will be different, the temperature, the taste, the news on that day, your thoughts and feelings and so on.
What I’m trying to get at here is the fact that every moment is unique – this moment in time which you are choosing (very wisely, I must say) to read this blog will never return again in human history, and there is always something beyond the horizon which has never been done before.
Never think of the future as le néant, since it quite clearly isn’t. Unpredictable, yes, scary, maybe, full of highs and lows, most definitely, but empty? Void? Not worth exploring? Hell no.
A little experiment. If you have a deck of cards at home, go ahead and shuffle all 52 cards to your heart’s content and then lay them out in the random order you’ve achieved by your shuffling.
That order of those 52 cards has, most likely, never before been seen in human history.
How can I be so sure?
The number of ways of arranging the 52 cards is 52! (52 × 51 × … × 2 × 1). That’s a massively huge enormous gigantic number. If everyone on Earth, all 7 billion of us, were to create a new order of cards every second since the beginning of the universe, we would be nowhere near getting all the combinations.
It would take about 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to do so.
Ok, so it’s a big number, so what?
Just think about that. Every time you shuffle a deck of cards it’s extremely likely that’s the first time in the history of everything that order has been in existence. Wow.
And so it is with life – everything is new around the corner. Sure, certain things have patterns, like there’s something called a World Cup every four years, and the Olympics, and every year sees sporting seasons of different varieties come and go, but each season, each event, each spectacle is different and that’s what you’ve got to focus on.
With this fear of nothing being novel and me boring my friends to death gone, I could start trying to stop suppressing my emotions. I could stop worrying about having to keep up with the trends and being new in what I said so I wasn’t boring – I could be myself and if it so happened that I was having the same problems as before, my friends would always be there to help and it was bound to be a different issue, if not on the surface then underneath, than it was before.
We are made from our experiences. We are constantly evolving. Every second sees a different event in our lives.
Change is definite, whether we like it or not. We have no choice in change.
But we can choose to embrace it.
Perhaps I thought of the future as dark and void and empty since I was scared of the change that lay within it – in three or four years, will I have the same friends? Will everyone still care about me? Will I still be happy?
Will my interests be the same? Will I still be close to my family? Will Doctor Who still be on TV?
And it’s easy to convince yourself that the future, because of this change, is nothing to look forward to. You should run away from it, hide in today, because today holds all the joy you’re ever going to get.
But that’s bonkers, and you know it is. Maybe I won’t have the same friends – maybe they will be different. But different isn’t necessarily bad.
Stop worrying and catastrophizing about the future, and enjoy the present. Enjoy the family and friends you have now, the moments you’ll remember forever.
And if you keep enjoying the present, that frightful future will never come, and the present will never end.
Till next time 🙂
depressiondeconstructed 