A page from the diary of a depressed do-gooder
Hello,
Lately everything has been deeply triggering. I find myself going through embarrassing facebook chats when I didn’t know I was depressed and overshared, and want to hide in the dark. Then I feel rage. When I needed help, why did I take so long to do anything about it? I just feel totally ridiculous. About unhealthy love and relationships. About a continued disinterest in self-care. About the looming disillusionment that never leaves me. About the hypocrisy of it all. I begin to wonder — do I think about these things so much because I don’t feel challenged by the things I’ve been doing? Or have I not been reflective enough? How are people out there feeling the hope? How are they able to see such a fucked up world as an opportunity for a revolution?
Luckily, I’ve freed myself from the binary view of people being either “positive” or “negative”. Or I’d also be wondering if all I am is a negative person. I just know that if I’m here, I have to do what it takes to support a more equal, compassionate, liberated society. But I also feel like the faces may change and the problems may remain. There are so many marginalized people in the world that it literally feels like when someone moves “up”, it just means that someone else has taken their place. It would be delusional or too hopeful to believe that someday, the entire problem may disappear. When I dare to say this to an ally or change-maker or (the worst-kind) an arm-chair optimist, I usually am reminded to believe that every drop of water counts and that feeling jaded is the easier thing to do. For me, that’s the obvious part — of course everything counts. But is it enough? How do you tune into a lived experience so much that you turn down the deafening silence created by the “pretence” of a better world? How do you care about a single life enough to feel fulfilled by change that impacts just one person? I have no answers to these questions. Except may be that the goal isn’t fulfillment, it is just the pursuit of an alternative.
These questions make me understand why I’m telling myself a narrative of unchanging hopelessness and how that has nothing to do with whether or not I feel challenged. The truth is, I have felt incredibly challenged. I just haven’t cared about or valued my challenging experiences enough to let that kind of growth define my sense of self. The passion to work for a larger idea of change is deeply embedded within me, shapes my core values and worldview. However, the experiences of working for something beyond myself don’t define me or fulfill me or suddenly make me care about the fact that I’m here and growing. I feel baffled and instantly isolated when equality and freedom for all aren’t considered as obvious aspirations. How can anyone dream of anything else? Demonstrating this version of myself, if anything, becomes tiring because it involves a level of extrapolation and exposition of ideas that demands too much from me — it requires me to “perform” or “communicate” some of my most obvious and inner truths. Imagine having to act out a monologue about the merits of personal hygiene every time you brush your teeth? That’s how I feel about having to articulate my commitment to a better world. It’s exhausting. And that’s why (sidenote) I hate interviewing for social impact jobs. Or the thought of going out on a date when you actually care about feeling understood. That’s also why my narrative isn’t about how much I’ve grown or seen or learned over the past year or month or week. If I give the same exhausting and agreeable pitch to myself about who I am (curious, tenacious, socially-conscious etc.), I will feel even more empty.
I thought that feeling this way meant I wasn’t reflecting enough, but now I realize that I don’t need to treat a fundamental aspect of my being as an accessory. It’s always there and it’s not always seen and that’s fine and I don’t even actively care about it all the time and that’s fine too. I have finally understood that I took it very seriously when I first learned the idea that we are all part of a whole. Spiritually and politically I think it made a lot of sense to me — the realization that everything is connected and something can easily become nothing when broken down into pieces. In an increasingly fragmented society where people collectively lament over the negative consequences of individualistic thinking while unwittingly enjoying the “benefits” of neo-liberal trends, it feels especially relevant to take the “part of a whole” concept pretty seriously. So that’s what I do. I think of people as part of communities, as a part of a larger society and world, and somewhere along the way, I care about the human experience as a means to decode the complex problems of the world — not only for the individual’s story. That’s great for my work, especially for research or impact assessment or other forms of macro-level cerebral fun. But really, what that means for my relationship with myself is that because I don’t care about the individual experience too much, I don’t really look at my own life through my own lens. I look at my life through a million other prisms and I situate myself wherever it makes most sense in a moment but really, I have completely lost the ability to drown out the noise and look at anything about me as being isolated from something larger or simply as my individual experience.
I see myself as a “part of the whole” but I don’t see any “whole” anywhere anymore. So I subsequently view myself as inconsequential, meaningless, replaceable. (I know, I know, the goal is to create the whole — the alternative). But everything really feels pointless at the individual level when the whole is missing. So even though I challenge myself to learn, grow, love people and myself or to care about things that make my life and the world better, that is never the point of my narrative. There is no “point” to my narrative. My narrative really is just a feeling. A feeling that nothing matters and that I’m just humoring the world and myself by being passionate about an existence (since I have to exist) that may accidently leave some remnants of positive change around me.
Sincerely,
Existential Bullshit
