Despair and Bliss

Do not, when people tell you they are depressed and wish to die, regale them with reasons why the world is so beautiful that it is simply wrong for them to think that way.  It is true that the world is so beautiful, but the world is also brutal, nasty and despairingly flawed.  Try to resist propelling any repulsion you feel outwards but instead remember that you too will one day die, and that unless you are extremely lucky you too will one day feel this way.

If you tell them that they must stop feeling this way, it denies the black moon beauty that is found even within those spaces where we wish to be no more.  It denies the golden thread that runs through everything.  Leonard Cohen's crack runs very deep, right to the core.

:P

Which is a tragedy, and an opportunity for Kelvin Cunnington, and also a fine, fine beauty.  Depending on what world you find yourself in.

The world to you bares her beauty.  You roll in her mists, and so you should.  The world to them is a differently made-up composition of chemicals and genetic mutations that make what you are saying not just a farce, but the fact that you would deny their experience to their face a slap and a travesty.

Stand Alone Complex by =Lucid-Light

When people tell you they are depressed and wish to die, take the beauty that you swim in in the world and try and creatively package it.  Not a mass-produced item, but instead take her moonlight and her sun and if you can, help them find out what it is that they love, what it is that they crave, what it is that they need so badly that it has pulled itself completely inside out and become its own opposite.  And if you can at all possibly do it, package it up into something just for them, and give it to them.  You may not be able to.  But if you can, do not expect the sort of response that you would receive if they were bathed themselves in moonlight.

You cannot fix anybody at all.  But you can accept them.  Acceptance of them may just help in some very small way for them to find acceptance of their own in being in this space, to see the deep beauty that exists even here. 

It is a paradox that making yourself at home in any space helps you to stop embedding yourself so hard into it, and might help you, in whatever way is required and possible in your situation, to begin the climb out again.

Economically Unviable

According to the Melbourne Institute’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, the majority of Aussies are better off now than they were ten years ago.  I am not one of those people.

I am in the process of applying for a disability pension.  It is horrible enough filling in page after page of personal details for faceless bureaucracy.  If I wasn't feeling small and losery and ashamed to begin with, this process would instill in me the levels of shame required for those who will claim support from the government.  After all, you cannot make this process too easy or else everybody will be rushing from their cubicles onto the social security bandwagon.

As a further insult to my flaccid confidence levels, as part of my application I have to provide details of my sole trader economic status for the transcription work I've been doing from home for the past three years.  Problem with that is that I haven't been keeping up with my tax payments.  Money’s tight, especially when you have a chronic illness, and managing my money well has never been one of my strong suits.  Which adds to my already flailing confidence because we are expected to juggle fiscal balls along with all the others  imposed upon us by a system that serves those at the top far better than it suits me at the bottom.  If we don't perform well in the areas that have been assigned to us as recognised markers of adultness – like being able to earn dosh – then we are failures, even if we happen to write some pretty good poetry, even if we say so ourselves.

This system pits its slaves one against the other, so that rather than feel sympathy for someone who’s struggling some may well be inclined to look down on me for being a financial mismanager.  It may be an occasion for them to pat themselves on the back, glad that they are not me.  It will also serve the purpose of getting them to focus on me, instead of the system we live under.  It serves its purpose well, (although there are signs of it crumpling round the edges as more and more of us question why the way we live is so completely alienating to us, the tellers of our own stories).

Some may be inclined to be glad they’re not me because of my chronic illness/pension-claiming/tax-dodging status.  Hell, I would.  Being me is not something you aspire to.  Unemployable (apparently, if job applications are anything to go by), I have been out on the edge of financial vulnerability for years.  I am the type of person who perpetuates that starving artist in the garret scenario by stupidly choosing as their passion writing, which does not pay well, if at all, and which is notoriously difficult to break into, requiring a hide of steel that was not made available to my genetic subset.  But then again, we do not seem to choose our passions;  they choose us.

I am the type of person who feels sorry for themselves, who complains on my blog about my situation instead of sucking it up and getting on with it.  But that's the problem with chronic illness – you can't always suck it up because you're ... well, you're not well.  I am the type of person who you cannot begin to understand because my illness is invisible and it's chronic and you can look at me and say, "But you look so well!" while I feel sick, and poisoned, and toxic and unhealthy.  I'm the type of person who is in bed for part of the day and then suddenly cleaning the bathroom at 10pm because I'm feeling up to it and feeling good and I want to contribute, and be useful, not a liability.

But I am the kind of person who has got myself into a bind so that before I can impose my small and defeated self upon the Department of Human Services I first have to fill in three tax returns and lodge them before I make a claim to the ATO to tell them that yes, paying this tax would mean that I would be not buying food or paying rent or paying for medications for myself.  Yes, it surely would, and would they mind it if I didn't pay it at all, or else if I paid it in lump sum installments?  And some most likely faceless person working in the cogs of those machinations will decide my future.  And whichever way it pans out, I will feel shit.  And some will judge me for not contributing.

Because there’s nothing we’re scared of more than someone else getting away with something we can’t.

But if it makes you feel better, whatever the ATO decides I will feel like I want to curl up into a small ball in the corner, a ball so small that I will complete some amazing magic trick of scientific law-defying and disappear into my very own black hole of economic unviability.

Memento Mori

You know, it really doesn't pay to trust people who are "up" all the time.  Or who insist on always looking on the bright side of life.  That doesn't ring true to me.  It feels like they're lying.  Or at least that they're hiding their less pretty sides. 

Sometimes I think that people who insist on always looking at the bright side are really in denial and terrified of what they may find if they go scrabbling around in their own closets.  Sometimes people who don't wanna go down are suffering from one of the diseases pertinent to our culture - the sort of excessive hubris that automatically comes after a while when you're up too long.  It starts to feel illegal to go down in a death-denying culture which insists that you must be always up, and that if you go down we'll medicate you.

That's insane.  That's like being a parent and allowing a red lemonade-drinking child to have as much as they want and to stay up for as long as they want.  Who isn't allowed to see dead Uncle Fred in the front parlour because that's too scary for children.  (But then what kid would see dead Uncle Fred anyway these days?  We secrete him away before he can give the game away.  Chances are Uncle Fred will wait out his closed-casket funeral in a funeral home.

It doesn't pay to shield ourselves from the dark, simply because we'll always be afraid of it.

When you are down, there are no end of advisers on hand to recommend how to change your viewpoint,  your habits, your diet, to quite simply harden the fuck up.

But no.  When you fight tooth and nail not to come to the dark place like I consistently do and consistently have, once you are here there is a clear-seeing that strikes you, that is beautiful in its starkness, so that you almost don't want to leave.  There is a space here and a silence that you wish to try to remember to take back with you when you swim back up to the surface.

You want to find a way to bring these anti-hubris eye drops back with you when you go back.  To remind you of that which you keep forgetting, that both sides of the coin belong. 

Darthdowney

And that your sadness is beautiful. Though it not be sociable, or you be palatable when you are in that space.  That's okay.  Let it be.  Despite what anyone else may say, your sadness and your darkness is a holy space.  It is sometimes best to walk the holy and dark space in your own solitude.  It's okay.

I think this is why people have skulls on their desks.  It is a reminder of the darkness, of that which is not able to be seen when you are in the light.  Memento mori - remember that you shall die.  It's not really as morbid as we've been led to believe. 

Sometimes it doesn't matter how much you micromanage your life to deal with your high sensitivity/post-CFS/adrenal fatigue/stresshead/empath/bad health/inability to function in the world loserness..

You micromanage your life, but then you have to take calculated risks, because that's what life is, right?  Life is about living.  About not needing to micromanage all the time.  About jumping in.

And so seven months ago you take a calculated risk because it feels right, even though it is a stressful thing to do.  But then two weeks later, when you're still dealing with the stress because of your high sensitivity/post-CFS/adrenal fatigue/stresshead/empath/bad health/inability to function in the world loserness, out of left field comes something to stress you off the dial.  Your past, holding a remote control, presses a couple of buttons from 50km away, and so you are reminded that (a) getting rid of your past is not as easy as you would like it to be and (b) you can't remember what (b) was because you have no fucking memory.

Sometimes your health goes backwards in your quest to bring it forwards.  I had a hypoglycemic attack last night.  And so after eating two pieces of toast I didn't want to eat because I really wanted to make the stir fry I really wanted to eat but I couldn't because I thought I would melt into a puddle on the floor,, I lay on the couch for the rest of the night feeling fatigued, weak, and depressed.

I hate the world today.  But hating the world and feeling depressed are no-nos in the energy consciousness field - if I do that I'm dragging down the planetary consciousness sphere with my negative mental energy, man.  Because don't we all know - if we all just stay positive everything will change.

But maybe some things are never going to fucking change.

Agents in our own meaning

To heal your depression, you must force life to mean. You force life to mean by sitting down and deciding what you want your life to mean. When you are satisfied with your answer, and if you have been truthful with yourself, you will have stripped away false meanings and motives and arrived at your best understanding of how you intend to shape your life. By providing yourself with personal reasons for taking your own life seriously, you begin to build a shield against meaninglessness.

These reasons must be personal. The hunt for ultimate reasons will prove a waste of time, even for believers, since we are built to dispute anything, even putative pronouncements from gods. No ultimate reason takes precedence over a righteous human reason for taking action and making meaning. Anais Nin echoed this idea when she suggested, "The personal life, deeply lived, becomes universal." If the laws of the universe are not directly within us, where are they? If they are within us, what could make them more purely or more powerfully manifest than living acording to our own best reasons for living?

Eric Maisel, The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression