guilt

I've been thinking about Jenny a lot, lately. She killed herself a few months after I started school. I don't know anything about the new relationship she was in, but I know she had no emotional support in her life otherwise, and that she wasn't likely to find any. I should have known she'd need it.

I just cut her out of my life completely, and occasionally took little jabs at her in my blog. I figured she'd never read it. Knowing her, I figured she'd move on, and prefer not to even hear from me. That's how she was about her past relationships. She'd get annoyed if she even heard from them once or twice a year. It never occurred to me, these were people she dated for a few months. We were together for over five years. That's not the same thing.

Then it hits me. I was fucking terrible. It makes me sick to think that maybe she did care, that maybe she did check my blog once in a while, that maybe she needed help.. and even years later, I was just being selfish and bitter. How was I such a child, so recently?

Why have I been thinking about this lately? I think it's just the depression I'm struggling to pull myself out of. On a neurological level, it lights up parts of the brain associated with negative and painful memories. Whatever they happen to be, the depressed brain then builds up those connections through repeated use. It's vicious cycle that devours millions of lives.

It's not that anything I've typed above is untrue. It can be so hard to see why I shouldn't feel terrible, right? Aside from it not doing any good, I mean, I really fucked up, and honestly, it might have made a huge difference. That's hard to live with.

At the same time, there are a zillion other things that are also incredibly important, good, bad, and everywhere in between. A fixation on negatives, no matter how true they are, is pathological. It's depression. Which is not to say abnormal. Depression is also a typical response to getting buried in too much negative shit all at the same time, but having an excuse doesn't make it any less destructive. I need to get through this.

what doesn't kill you

There's often a fixation on death, when we think about how bad something is, and how we should assess that. How many people are killed by the police, or by Covid-19. Poverty isn't real poverty, unless it kills. Threats aren't serious unless people are dying.

For every death, there are often far more having their potential stolen, opportunities to thrive crushed. Some experiences make us stronger, or wiser. Some of us are better at adapting. On the surface, this variation can give the impression that we need only strive for more positive outcomes. That's not how the circuitry actually works, though. There are causal relationships to everything.

Far more often than death, covid causes severe illness, wreaking havoc on the body in all sorts of destructive ways, sometimes causing long term debilitation and damage. Police violence can be brutally traumatizing both physically and mentally. How many people in poor neighborhoods and in prisons have PTSD from how they're treated by our criminal justice system? Or those in poverty, not getting enough healthy food, growing up in a highly stressful environment, drinking from lead pipes or subject to other pollutants? These things have serious consequences for brain function and development. 

We adapt, and think of it as who we are. We can't measure how much we've lost, or who we might have otherwise been, but there are all sorts of studies and statistics on this stuff, making it relatively clear. Stress in particular can be a lot more destructive than commonly understood. What doesn't kill us can make us a whole lot weaker. Then something else kills us.

When I think of my survival, when my problems feel existential, it's because I'm always thinking about these consequences. I've been trying so hard to get myself out of this hole I'm in, that the thought of backsliding terrifies me. I'm ashamed of not being strong enough to have other priorities, like going to visit my father before he dies, but if I'm not judicious here, I'll be no use to anyone.

Dropping everything to spend a month in Hawaii feels like an impossibly terrible idea, as I'm desperately trying to recover from tumbling backwards these past few months. Just maybe maybe I can get it together. I need to transition to thinking long term, as covid isn't going away any time soon. It's a risk I need to accept. Hopefully I'll just be asymptomatic, but I need to stop worrying about catching it at all. 

As long as I'm trying not to catch it, I can't do anything. I can't go on like this though. There are other sorts of survival I need to be thinking about.

end times diagnostic criteria

I've been seeing numerous posts and tweets listing off catastrophes of the past six months, much the way I have. I see YouTube videos by people explaining that we're right to feel the world is falling apart, blaming it on capitalism, etc. Right or not, lots of people seem to be feeling this way. These lists remind me of an attempt at diagnosis. What the hell is wrong with me/the world, that I/we feel this way?

2016 was a terrible year. 2017 was worse, 2018 worse still, 2019 even worse, and then 2020 has been so bad, it made all that look trivial. No longer singular events, this is a trajectory. Given the way elections have been going around the world, things are not going to be getting better. Just worse and worse.. but that can't be right, can it? 

My moods have been strange and difficult. I don't know what's going on with me. I'm adapting by prioritizing survival, over all else - I should clarify that I'm referring to mental health here. Survival mode. I'm not stocking a bunker in my backyard or anything. I've never so much as touched a gun.

What little I have to spare for ambitions or hopes, I spend very judiciously. This feels like regression or relapse, because it's how I've lived much of my life, but it's also a survival tactic that might not be so bad. It's terrible for overcoming my situation, it's more like entrenching, so it becomes a vital question, whether or not I'm assessing the situation accurately. 

I have this theory that we're all in fact, just crazy. That yeah, things are bad, but such is life. It will get better, it will get worse, it will go on until it doesn't. The reason we're flipping out might be entirely due to the pandemic. The social isolation, the deferment of all sorts of life goals and strategies, all the uncertainty around how this is going to play out, but knowing it's going to be some degree of pretty damn awful.

I'm inclined to say it's mostly about being cut off from physically being around other people, that this undermines mental health in a very fundamental way. We're largely oblivious to it, and even as we're starved, we don't understand why we're wasting away. We're prone to looking to events and circumstances for something to blame.

Or maybe things really are apocalyptically bad. I honestly don't know and that itself feels nuts.

second wave

I have these vague memories of being around people. Community college. Was I trying to go to school, or did I dream that? I don't remember what I was doing exactly, but it felt like I was doing something. I wonder what it would be like to feel that way in real life.

There were martial arts classes too. I used to struggle to go, sometimes my mind or body just wasn't up for it. Sometimes I had to take months off, healing from an injury while focusing on school. but sometimes I'd actually get there.

I have so many nice memories of almost feeling like an actual human being for a while there. It's been a huge improvement for me, such as it was. It was my entire life. Those two things.

Now they don't even seem real. Was that me, doing all that? It all feels increasingly distant and unlikely. I used to bike all over, but I've had nowhere to go for months. I think it's still summer outside.