4/7/06 - A Rant About Living With Misery, And The Madmen Who Try To Help

A guest rant from Angela Scanes

One of the reasons I have always wanted to be a writer was that I have almost always been told I "suffered from depression", and whatever it reallyis, the writing helps - which when so few things really do, means a lot to me. The writing helps me express, if only to myself, my unsociable grumbles about how maddeningly frustrating life can be. Some phases of my adolescence (I won't say my teens as like most it lasted longer) gave me high strung motives for my creativity: who, when in the pits of poverty and struck with that sense of possibility only the young and ignorant can feel, doesn't want to change the world? But then I grew up (each year thinking I had done so until the following one, and that's still happening) and found that things do change in the world, almost invariably for the worse, and that there is little left to say on the matter in any typeface. 'Human nature' - that loathsome phrase, tossed into discussion to pardon or trifle the limitless cruelties and selfishness of our kind - rings to me as sourly as God moving in a mysterious way. How clever we are to have all the answers; how evolved we are to know that preparation of a snappy comeback is worth twice as much to the general populace as a sincere or reasonable response.

When I was younger I hid and destroyed a lot of thoughts I committed to paper about my feelings on the world: it all seemed so bitter and despondent; I worried people might have thought me dark beyond the allowances of angst. Now as an adult I strive - and fail - to find others who understand the difficulty I have with this place; the world we have made. The majority of the western world has - so far as one can tell - stuckto the trick of focusing small: my job, my life, my satellite dish, my microwave dinner. I myself am tremendously unbalanced a lot of the time, andtherefore split it between doing what everyone else seems to be doing, and hating us all for it. I get flashes of truth: the fork will be halfway to mymouth and I remember half the world is starving; self pity sets in because of illness and I remember how much of the world is dying for want of simple medicines in my bathroom cabinet. I have a bathroom cabinet - and there are places in the world where people live out their short malnourished lives without shitting indoors until they're too sick to go outside. My governmentgoes into an unjust war and I still pay my taxes: I will spend most of my days in unhappy and unfulfilling employment so that I can hand over a significant proportion of it to pay for weapons - occasionally weapons sold to those we will be confronting next year. I could do more to support the few things I believe in and bring down the things I believe are evil; I should do more, but who has the time? - if they're working and holding down a relationship and a mortgage and basically too busy with all the crap that doesn't really matter in the long term to focus on the things that do. Somehow locked in the soulless space between consumerism and environmentalism, just another self absorbed twat who sometimes feels bad about it. People talk about shoes, and brag about their alcohol consumption,and discuss television sitcoms, and I think about all the people who just want to eat again before they die. And I think about how if those people andthese people were in each other's positions, how it'd all still probably be the same. It's crazy - and being aware of it makes me crazy. Apparently in the literal sense.

I am depressed. This is what they tell me. This is what they have always told me. The hormonal imbalances I grew into that fling my tired body in theopposite direction to fertility, normality and stability cause my thoughts to become negative. Go figure. Sometimes - not often, but too often - I growvery upset in unsuitable places, like work, and have to tell people lies. I choose to tell them vague and uncomplicated lies because if I told them the truth they would think me unhinged; I prefer the guiltily accepted sympathy to the confused and ostracizing understanding. Everyone knows someone who 'suffers depression', and that's even worse. I can't take that phoney comprehension, the knowing nod, the incongruous and woodenly compassionate smile before they head off to discuss you unkindly by the water cooler. Because I may be depressed, but the majority of what I see wrong with everything, is.

Over the years I've taken followed most routes toward 'healing thyself'; natural 'remedies', prescribed medications, councillors, yoga, dietary changes. Because the problem, evidently, is not emotional (who'd have thought it, listening to this) but hormonal, there is apparently little to be done other than try to combat my 'negative thought processes'. I was given a truly - pardon me - fucking stupid leaflet by a doctor, with easy-to-complete tables and dumbed down instructions. There was one section where you catalogue your negative thoughts, reason with them by instructed routes, and supposedly end up with a different conclusion. Having studied itthoroughly I find that the catalysing element in this equation is - unless you are actually delusional or prone to dramatic but easily soothed temper tantrums - irrational quantities of optimism: something it seems hardly sensible to suggest to a depressive character.

For example (their example); "my friend has not called me lately, therefore they must not like me anymore and I must be an unpleasant person". Hmmm. Tricky.The table instructs me to be reasonable, and to consider that they may be busy with their own affairs, or that I might have missed the call unknowingly, or that it might be my turn to call them. The scripted conclusion to this being that it is silly to jump to the first conclusion. OK. My friends, though dear to my heart, are like all creative types unreliable as hell. If I haven't heard from one in a while, unless I have had a disagreement with them, I see no reason to leap to the conclusion thatthey now dislike me. Rather I see it more reasonable to suggest that most mature friendships are transient and fleeting due to the complicated and self absorbed nature of the modern society we have fashioned for ourselves. Life tends to separate people in the long term if one is living it fully, and whilst it is noble and satisfying to stay in regular contact with friends and acquaintances it is often impracticable, and through geographical or spiritual distance can be impossible to maintain. We all move ceaselessly throughout the lives of others, adventurous souls especially so, and our eventual disconnection is inevitable. While it might sound negative to some, I do not see anything wrong with my logic: it is based, as it must be, on personal experience and observation. It is sad, but it is true, and the latter is weightier. [This actually cropped up in conversation with a 'mature' councillor once, who looked at meforlornly from behind her bi-focals and told me I must be very lonely, and that she was still in touch - on paper - with friends she went to school with. It's noble, and I don't mean to be cruel, but how very dull.]

Another table referenced negative thoughts about the self, stating that people who are depressed may be unreasonably self critical about their body and personality, and that you should make an ACCURATE and reasonable list ofyour dislikes and issues with yourself. Speaking as someone whose condition makes them hirsute all over (please note I control this exhaustively), 96% infertile, regularly emotionally unbalanced, over-anxious, self-loathing andincorrigibly defensive, there is nothing like making that list to deepen thegloom. It may be correct to state that people's appearances should not matter, but it is foolish to state that they do not matter, as anyone femalewho has unknowingly sprouted a moustache in the space of three hours whilst working a reception point can tell you - though I have yet to meet anyone else it has happened to.I have deliberately not added my weight to the list as I am perfectly healthy in that regard, though naturally spend a great deal of time feeling otherwise due to the influences of media and style-led consumerism. The whole leaflet was in the same vein, and I picked this one to rant about,but I've seen many - picked up and shoved into a coat pocket on the way out of the doctor's surgery in an embarrassed fashion, year after year, still waiting for one that will make some sense and still ashamed of hoping - and they're all pretty similar. I'm not saying they can't help some people, I'm just saying they can't help me. And I also say fuck that - if becoming Happymeans pretending not to see things that are wrong in this country and with me; overlooking the dismal moral, ethical and environmental ramifications ofalmost everything involved in the daily grind that swallows us all whole; and ignoring situations which are life and death to other people and creatures because those thoughts make me unhappy - if that's what Happy needs, then I'll happily live with the misery.

So here - at last - is the point of my rant; if your symptoms point to a thought disorder, and your cure depends on changing your thoughts, but thosethoughts are logical and reasonable, do you stay sad, go mad, or just relinquish your grip on reality like 'the solution' would seem to demand? And what heading does one give oneself then?

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