The Hilarious World of Depression

by John Moe

We’ll laugh about how scary The Day After was, but we never recognize that we were raised in despair and probably handed it down to our kids and to later versions of ourselves.

Frogs, contrary to the oft-used analogy, will indeed hop out of a pot of water being brought to a boil. Of course they will. All surviving frogs are from a lineage of the specimens best equipped for survival.

I was more like a frog handcuffed inside the pot of soon-to-be- boiling water. A kid can’t hop out of his own life. It’s not like I could get a job and relocate to a new city.

Depression does its damage and then it hides, covering its tracks, making you think that it is not an illness, that you’re just bad and weird.

I’ve spoken with a lot of people whose aunts or grandmothers had been institutionalized and remained locked away for years. Thus a kid grows up associating mental illness with being taken from your family and put in a building with scary people, probably forever.

The young people of today see that same doom coming not from Soviet generals but from the planet itself, and it likely seems no less hopeless to them.

Only by being useful or talented, and receiving external recognition, would I achieve personhood. I couldn’t imagine a world where I was a worthwhile person by dint of mere existence; I felt like I needed to earn it and prove it every day.

I could never get enough comedy and spent years consuming it constantly, to the detriment of everyday life functions like school and friendships. Why face the vagaries and humiliations of the world when there are Hogan’s Heroes reruns every single day?

When things were weird and shameful, I knew, we did not speak of them.

When you’re raised in a situation where you need it, denial goes beyond coping mechanism status, surpasses instinct, and becomes reality itself.

The employees of the shop, with the approval of the company’s owners, would print the illegal resistance newspapers after hours, then roll the papers up tight and insert them in the handlebars of their sons’ bicycles. Finally, my father and his friends would bike across Oslo secretly delivering contraband news, with the Nazis none the wiser. Heroic? Sure. Traumatic? Absolutely.

I’ve met a lot of people over the years who think that if they go to a therapist for a certain number of times, they will then be fine and back to normal, as if talk therapy and physical therapy work the same way.

People with minds that have been disordered from depression often find solace in comedy. That’s both strange and logical at the same time. Comedy, much of the time, is built on disorder.

We know we are alien to the society in which we’re attempting to pass, and we struggle to understand the customs and behavior that come easily to everyone else.

And I think I wanted to be a grown-up because I wanted to be able to be in charge of myself. I wanted to be able to maybe change my situation.

Comedy is intoxicating to a young mind in distress. You see these famous people pointing out the ridiculousness of a world that you’ve never been able to make sense of. Comedians offer the hope, the chance, however slim, that it’s not you that’s broken but the world.

I became increasingly fixated on this option. I didn’t like thinking about it so much—it wasn’t pleasant—but I couldn’t stop. With a gun or rope or from a great height, I had the power to end all of it. I’d never had any power before.

Only decades later would it dawn on me that normal people who never deal with depression have a sense of self-worth automatically. Just by being a person on the earth, they feel themselves worthy of respect and love and all that other cool stuff.

For saddies, encouragement is revelatory. Rather than making their resolve stronger, it will implant a resolve where none had been. “Because this person believes in me,” the saddie thinks, “and this person is not me, they may have a point.”

Depression steals your ability to feel happy and proud even at the moments you should be happiest and proudest.

This is something that people do when they don’t realize they have a mental health problem: they blame every possible external factor they can think of but never bother to consider the internal ones.

I didn’t know that depression isn’t a mood. It’s a set of conditions that cause a whole series of thoughts and behaviors to happen over a long period of time, often things that are wildly different from one another.

My mental health treatment plan was “hope for the best” and “hope this stops.”

People, especially saddies (the best people), drastically overestimate the value of getting stuff. They think that achieving that next thing, acquiring that next object, or receiving that longed-for status plateau will fix a mind that’s depressed. And oh honey, it won’t.

You can’t achieve your way to happiness. You can’t win your way out of depression. This does not prevent smart people from thinking that way.

John was once speaking to an extremely wealthy person, he recalled, who “literally said to me, ‘If I could just own a plane instead of having a fractional lease situation,’ and I was like, ‘Stop. Stop. Hold on. You cannot seriously believe that. You can’t seriously think like you’re still just the one thing away. I’m one plane away from ultimate fulfillment.’”

The undue idealization with which the depressed person sees the post-achievement future is matched by a real scorn for the present. So it’s not just that things will be wonderful if I achieve X, it’s that whatever I’ve earned through hard work and talent and my endless series of small decisions to this point is insignificant.

By the time she was ten years old, Mara Wilson had starred in five movies, including Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire. But thanks to anxiety, OCD, PTSD, and depression, she couldn’t enjoy much of anything.

Of all the lies depression tells you, and there are many, “you are doomed” is among the most believable. Nothing is good, says the illness, nothing has ever been good, and so it stands to reason that nothing will ever be good. The way you feel in your worst moments now is how you’ll always feel.

When you’re unable to make the noise stop, a logical thought is to make everything stop.

Those advising against suicide are the people able to handle stuff, the people who haven’t been irredeemably weird their whole lives.

I also knew more about me than anyone else did, so I knew how hollow and worthless I really was, and thus their sentimental mourning for me, if that even happened, would be misguided. It wasn’t so much anguish and pain, just a cold knowledge of my uselessness.

If suicide was a pair of pants (it’s not a pair of pants, it’s suicide), it was time to go to the fitting room and try them on.

I had hoped that love would fix what was broken about me, and it was naïve of me to believe that.

I had not decided to kill myself. I was merely trying on suicide’s pants.

Jumping would mean doing something. Doing something was not really my thing. I was more inclined to not do something. I specialized in stewing.

Not being a God guy myself, it felt like depression holding me back. It wasn’t done with me.

For people who have known depression, even in a fairly distant past, it’s never as surprising. Obviously a person could do something like that, we think, because it’s a means to an end that exists in our world.

For people with depression, suicide is kind of like how the Mall of America is for me. It’s a real thing. This doesn’t mean everyone with depression is constantly clinging to building ledges. Far from it; it simply means we know that it’s a real place you can drive to. (Did I just compare suicide to going to the Mall of America? Well, you heard me.)

Sadly, the pain of mental illness can sometimes be greater than even the most fundamental logic. If this type of despair responded to reason, we wouldn’t be here in the first place. This is when suicidal ideation veers hard into suicidal contemplation.

A few years before I talked to Mike, he had bought a variety of equipment to kill himself by asphyxiation, but he was stopped by a fear that he would inevitably screw the whole thing up. The idea of pulling off something he had never done before and getting it right on the first try was so unlikely that, in essence, he was saved by his own depression.

I could not stop a chain of thoughts that whipped up in a hurry. It went like this: I was lost therefore I was lazy and hadn’t planned my trip and therefore the trip would take me longer than expected and therefore I was a bad husband and father because I was neglecting my family. This series of increasingly terrible thoughts took only a few seconds.

That’s right, to pass the time, I seethed. Even undiagnosed depressives have hobbies.

Depressed people have an urge to make good things into ugly messes to better match their state of mind.