I have not been posting much writing lately.

I was hospitalized (for the second time) on a psychiatric unit from May 9 to August 12, 2016. As I alluded to in previous posts, my time on the psychiatric unit was incredibly valuable with so many radical improvements physically and psychologically. I was allowed to use my laptop during off-unit privileges and I wrote extensively – in notes to myself and messages to friends – about the changes and insights that developed during my hospitalization. I occasionally posted on this blog during that time, but most of my writing remained unposted because there was simply too much to process so quickly. I had expected to maintain my positive trajectory following discharge so I had planned to revise and post my writing here shortly after leaving the hospital.

But now, trying to retrospectively capture the enthusiasm and excitement in my old writing feels forced and hollow. Over the past few months, most of the major improvements have deteriorated as rapidly and radically as they arose, and I have been left to watch my mind disintegrate once again. As this decline has progressed, my despair has been considerably amplified by the knife-sharp awareness of just how much I had gained in hospital and how much I am in the process of losing.

So I have avoided writing altogether, instead posting my drawings and my poems and my photos which have taken on much darker undertones in recent weeks. It would, perhaps, be something of a delusion to think that anyone has noticed the change in the nature of my posts. Very few people visit this blog, and of those that do, I doubt that most of them have the patience or interest to read my writing in its entirety. My closest friends have often criticized my writing in my correspondence to them as being too lengthy, too distressing, or too rigorously academic. I have no reason to believe that my writing here would be perceived any differently by an online audience.

Is sharing these thoughts a desperate self-pitying bid for attention? No. Because any attention granted in response to such a plea would be quite superficial and quite meaningless, so it would be illogical to seek that kind of attention. No. This is simply an honest account of my current experience. I value authenticity above most other personal attributes. To me, authenticity – and her sister trait, vulnerability – represent extraordinary courage: the courage to “endure the sharp pains of self-discovery” in the process of understanding one’s own experience, and the courage to share this experience with others despite the risk of invalidation and rejection that plague every potential human interaction.

One of the most confusing patterns that I’ve noticed as my depression has worsened during recent months has been the withdrawal of many of my closest friends. Formerly close relationships have become strained, distant, and detached. I have been trying very hard to understand what has contributed to this widespread withdrawal. At first I believed that I was the common denominator, and I spent many sleepless nights trying to figure out what is so wrong with me that my friends are no longer willing to engage with me in ways that feel genuine. But now I wonder if it is less a problem with me, and more a problem with them. Perhaps the common denominator is their inability or unwillingness to tolerate the excruciating intensity of the sadness, loneliness, hopelessness, and meaninglessness that dominate my psychological landscape.

Unlike previous episodes of depression, my current experience is also dominated by anger, a towering and terrifying RAGE. Often this rage is directed at myself, rage like drops of blood attracting a predatory frenzy of depressive sharks. Sometimes this rage is directed at the world, rage like hand grenades exploding in the face of societal adherence to oppressive conventions that marginalize so many broken people. And sometimes this rage has no target, rage like a forest fire burning at the whim of wind and weather, the crackling searing heat omnivorous and destructive. But fires are essential for regeneration of forest vegetation. Maybe my rage is the first step towards some kind of psychological reintegration.

Direct feedback from my friends and my own observations during interactions with them suggests that humans are fundamentally distressed by intense emotions, especially anger, in themselves or in others. I am not sure why emotional intensity is so uncomfortable for them, and they have all been unable to coherently articulate the reasons behind their discomfort. But I wonder about several possible contributing factors.

1. I think many people retain a false and judgmental belief that intense emotion is necessarily the result of some kind of distortion or magnification on the part of the person expressing it. This belief may be the internalized result of an affect-phobic culture. This belief may also reflect the fragility of human egos finding comfort in a comparative notion that the absence of such painful intensity in themselves represents their own superior emotional regulation.

2. I think many people also believe that the expression of intense emotion necessarily implies a desire or expectation to reduce that intensity. Almost without exception, people automatically respond to someone else’s pain with advice and suggestions intended to help fix the problem or suppress the emotional intensity. I think this tendency reflects an unwillingness to accept their own powerlesssness. People seem largely unable to understand how their aggressive attempts to be helpful actually eclipse their capacity to empathize.

3. And I think that most people are afraid of truly empathizing with intense pain because doing so would require acknowledging their own innate potential to experience pain beyond their control. Such an acknowledgment would shatter illusions of personal agency. When somebody like me calmly and rationally outlines the meaninglessness and futility of life when all sense of purpose, satisfaction, and self-worth have been stripped away, people are forced to re-evaluate the framework they use to justify their own worth and purpose – they must then confront the threatening truth that these ideas are often built around tenuous and artificial self-delusions.

I have always tried very hard to avoid overwhelming my friends with the negative aspects of my experience. I have shared the fact of my depression with them, but I have intentionally minimized the severity of it, I have openly and deliberately invalidated myself in conversation with them, and I have often completely avoided mentioning my most distressing experiences. These behaviors represent my conflicted and evidently unsuccessful attempts to be authentic yet avoid provoking their discomfort. But as my depression becomes more debilitating and more painful, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to hide it. And as the intensity of my pain becomes more evident to them, the more uncomfortable they become and the more they withdraw from me. I have seen their faces fall, I have felt the cooling of the air between us, I have heard their static silence oozing through the speaker on my phone whenever I allow them to see a fraction of my truth. They cannot face my reality, so they retreat and withdraw. Their silence becomes deafening, and their absence suffocating.

“Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche (Aphorism 146, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886)

[Translation: He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.
And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you].

Depression is a monster. And I feel like an abyss. My existence is intensely painful. This pain is all-consuming, inescapable, and terrifyingly rational. I move from day to day accompanied by more distress than most people have ever known or even have the capacity to imagine. When I stop protecting them from me and allow them to glimpse the true extent of my hopelessness, they are horrified to find themselves gazing into the abyss. And they are even more horrified to find the abyss gazing back at them with a familiar face.

I never knew
I never knew that everything was falling through
That everyone I knew was waiting on a cue
To turn and run when all I needed was the truth
But that’s how it’s got to be
It’s coming down to nothing more than apathy
I’d rather run the other way than stay and see
The smoke and who’s still standing when it clears
Everyone knows I’m in
Over my head
Over my head
– Over My Head (Cable Car) (The Fray, 2005)