Also Remarkable:
The degree to which (and the rapidity with which, to maintain the parallelism) my mood will shift. Those of you who haven’t experienced depression or anxiety outside the bounds of normality probably have little idea of what this might be like. Even if you know someone who has…the observation of the external can never equal the experience of the internal. It’s not the kind of thing one “snaps out of,” which is a bit unfortunate, as I’d really like to.
Imagine, for a moment, that your emotional life is in the hands of someone else, someone you've never met. Not someone malicious, but someone whose intentions and whims are entirely unknown to you. You will never know, from one morning to the next, whether you’ll be normal, happy, in despair, or in fear. Sometimes, your state will shift from hour to hour. You can be laughing on the way to lunch, and half an hour later inexplicably gripped by dread, on the verge of tears. You are not in control. There is no equilibrium for you, only the rushing pendulum swing of extremes.
It’s frightening at times. I mean, honestly: who wants to go through day after day tethered to an emotional bungee cord? To be dependent upon pharmaceuticals which may or may not be effective, just to function? When I drank, I at least had the reassuring sense of familiarity that came with knowing exactly what a 375ml bottle of vodka would do. It was dependable.
Something I realized—intellectually—during my cross-country trek was that as bad as I felt on any given day, it wouldn’t last forever. Couldn’t possibly last forever. Not knowing this is a major component of depression: the certainty that you’ll always be this way, that there is, in fact, no other way for you to be. That, in turn, segues nicely into anxiety.
I write this now from a kind of remove. The sensation of my emotional life being almost entirely out of my control can lend itself to a certain distance, if I take the opportunity to achieve it. That doesn’t lessen the impact of the sensations, but it does allow me to do things like sit here and write dispassionately about my state, an activity which is, at the last, helpful.
I’m not entirely sure what part of posting such writings here is helpful—there are, after all, only so many ways that one can say "Gosh! I'm really fucked up!"—but it seems to be. I know, with humility now, that there are many aspects of my experience that are far from unique. There is an entire psychopharmaceutical industry worth many billions of dollars that rests upon that reality, not to mention a cavalcade of recovery programs. Any popular vestige of artistic romance associated with a melancholic disposition has been buried beneath an avalanche of pills.
And yet…yet, there is a part of me that relishes these tides. There’s a reason Civil War soldiers were given strong drink before having their wounded limbs hacked off: alcohol is an anesthetic, a numbing agent that affects the heart and mind as well as the body. Paradoxically, it is also an amplifier of emotion (“I love you, man!”), and I have, in fact, deliberately used the stuff to produce just that effect in myself, in an effort to simply feel something. Anything. But those were transient experiences that fled with the sober dawn, and, eventually, alcohol no longer worked that way at all for me, becoming an agent of full, insensate darkness.
But now: I am awash in the debris-filled torrent of my emotional life, like a hapless backpacker in an arroyo swept along in a spring flood. I feel everything. Sometimes all at once. There was an article in last week’s New York Times Magazine (“The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis”) which described the peculiar corner of academic psychology that is concerned with the study of wisdom. Despite Plato’s best efforts, it remains nebulous concept at best. However, one passage in particular struck me:
The results suggest that older people on average are more even-keeled and resilient emotionally. “Younger people tend to be either positive or negative at any given point in their daily life,” [researcher] Carstensen says, “but older people are more likely to experience mixed emotions, happiness and a touch of sadness at the same time. Having mixed emotions helps to regulate emotional states better than extremes of emotion. There’s a lot of loss associated with aging, and humans are the only species that recognizes that time eventually runs out. That influences the motivation to savor the day-to-day experiences you have, it allows you to be more positive. Appreciating the fragility of life helps you savor it.” Fredda Blanchard-Fields of the Georgia Institute of Technology has produced a series of studies showing that the emotional equilibrium of older people allows them to negotiate solutions to interpersonal problems better than younger people. “She wouldn’t call it research on wisdom,” Carstensen says of Blanchard-Fields, “but I would.”
I lay no claim to wisdom (that would be foolish). But the idea of mixed emotional states as a better means of regulating emotion than the extremes I am currently experiencing has great appeal to me. To realize joy and sorrow simultaneously is a profound thing…and I’ve experienced it now and again over the past couple of months. Laughing through the tears. There’s no reason, really, why it has to be one or the other.
So, maybe that’s where I’m headed. Maybe not, I don’t really know. On my good days—in my good hours—I can see the way forward, and I still believe that I am, in fact, trudging forward.
Quite a journey, really. A pain in the ass, vertiginous, bash-myself-about-the-head-with-a-rock journey, but a journey nonetheless.
