The Hilarious World of Depression

by John Moe

Finding a therapist is a bit like dating. You might have to have some very boring or weird or tense meetings before you find someone you connect with.

What it really was, of course, was a mind that wanted to rest but kept whirring along and pushing me to dark places.

As if I could simply do that. As if I chose this. As if I looked at the options available to me and they were clearly labeled “Perseverance” and “Freaking the Fuck Out All the Time” and calmly said, “Mmm, yes, I select option B.”

The longest road a person with depression travels can often be the one between where they are at present and where they can get help to improve.

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.

This is why much of the conversation about the origins of major depressive disorder is so often off base.

A disorder is when you feel that way even when devastating events are not taking place or when you can’t hold down a job or relationships or take care of your responsibilities.

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.

In my non-obliterated adulthood, I learned that kids everywhere comforted themselves by telling each other they’d die quick.

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.

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. When you’re up against Clinny D, you don’t have that core sense of self. So you frantically search the world for someone else to provide that sense of self for you.

But although I had rejected the suicide option, it had taken up residence in my mind. I had normalized it. The grim off-ramp to life’s freeway was built and the barricades removed.

Depression shortens your fuse and then lights it.

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.

Thus began my career in public radio. That job, I concluded at the time, was a much better fit. In fact, I thought, it would solve all my problems.

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

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

“Is there any way we could do this without pills?” I asked. “I don’t want to be all altered. I want to still be myself.” “This kind of medication doesn’t make you into anyone else. If it works the way it does for a lot of people, you’ll feel more like yourself. Kind of cleans the windshield. As for not being altered, how’s the status quo working out for you?”

More often, I’d tell my story, omitting the parts I was uncomfortable talking about, which would be the real issues I was having. I couldn’t have the therapist catching on to what a weird, bad person I am.

My brain will always want to go dark. As I write this, that still happens a lot, and it’s up to me to lower that recurrence. It’s also up to me to be ready when that happens, to know why the thoughts are going in that direction and how to head it off.

By applying actual words with significant specific diagnostic meanings to much lighter circumstances, people are robbing and devaluing people with mental illness.