The Hilarious World of Depression

by John Moe

If you can’t understand your past, then you don’t really know how your mind got to where it is now, because you simply don’t know yourself.

I regarded this as merely an odd thing that happened. But the older I get, the more I think about it and what long-term effect that trauma (and it was trauma) had. Trauma occurs when something happens that’s too horrible for your brain to deal with, so you just store it away. Over time, the horrible thing, which is still there, starts coming out in a variety of ugly ways, causing mental problems that you don’t even associate with the trauma because it happened so long ago.

In my family, when things went wrong, you carried on as if they hadn’t. My father drank, a lot, alone, and persistently. He was never abusive; he just checked out from the world most nights, and you couldn’t get anything resembling intelligent conversation out of him after dinnertime. It was a problem. It was compulsive behavior. It was an illness. It was addiction. It was alcoholism. We pretty much stayed silent about it. If there’s a big furry animal in your family and it has big claws and hibernates in the winter and can swat salmon out of a stream, but no one ever calls it a bear, you can go through many years not knowing you have a bear living in your house. Eventually, you’ll think you must have been scratching yourself with your own razor-sharp claws.

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.

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

When you grow up around substance use, you develop certain skills. Not ninja skills, unfortunately, but you learn to see what you want to see.

This started out impossible and became more impossible with each passing day.

Most if not all successful people I’ve talked to about this have had some form of impostor syndrome along the way. In fact, it’s the ones who have felt perfectly entitled to all their success that you have to watch out for.

You can’t achieve your way to happiness. You can’t win your way out of depression.

My mental state was a disaster, but it was my disaster and I was protective of it.

“My own low self-esteem has kept me from suicide many times,” he says.

The parent is the first person you learn to rely on, and when your parent proves unreliable, that means everyone is unreliable.

Depression builds a protective carapace out of your worst habits.

If I’d spoken from the heart, it would have just been screaming and maybe throwing some chairs.

Among the things he taught me was that the best interviewer in the world was a three-year-old child, because three-year-old kids ask “Why?”

Your problems have maps, and they will find you.

“Trauma that is not transformed is transmitted,”

People who grew up in the unreliable orbit of an addict or in other similarly traumatic situations have no such belief in a grounded universe, so to them that passing storm is likely to destroy everything.