Thread by @PennyRed

Right. It’s Friday night. The rainforest is burning and fascists are wrecking what’s left of democracy.
Let’s talk about depression.
[content warning: mental health chat!]
Firstly: seriously, how is everyone doing?

Almost everyone I know and love is having a hard time right now. Almost everyone I know comes home from a hard day being ground on the wheel of late stage disaster capitalism and tries to wrap their shattered brain around the very real prospect of species collapse. It’s a lot.

If the state of the world is contributing to your anxiety, your depression or your ill health, it’s not your fault. It’s not ‘all in your head.’
Depression is, in part, a physiological reaction to overwhelming circumstances.

Unfortunately, this means that on top of having to save the world, many of also now have to handle major depression. (Thanks a lot, capitalist patriarchal death cult, you’re a gem).
And when you are depressed, pushing through it can feel as impossible as saving the world.

What many of us are experiencing is a sort of *cultural* depression- what Patricia Lockwood calls a ‘fever in the collective head’. Circumstances are overwhelming. It’s easy to feel powerless, like all we can do is just lie down and let things happen to us.

But the thing is: depression lies.
I don’t have a neat, cheery, easy solution for all of this- and I strongly recommend you back away FAST from anyone who claims to.
But I do know depression lies, and the biggest lie it tells is that resistance is futile, recovery pointless.

The same muscles that are required to survive an episode of depression are the muscles that are required for what is nebulously called ‘resistance’ to this current dark tide in the history of our species.
Yes, it’s about hope- but not in the way we often speak of it.

Hope is not thinking positive thoughts. Hope is not self-delusion. Hope is clinging to the life raft and kicking, even when there is no sight of land.
Hope is a muscle. Like most muscles, it gets stronger the more routine, seemingly pointless work you put into it.

When you’re depressed, changing your circumstances feels impossible. Brushing your bloody teeth feels impossible. Especially if your depression is a response to very real, prolonged and often ongoing trauma.

But it is possible. It’s not easy. It takes work. It takes the sort of work, every day, of doing what needs to be done to care for yourself, your community, your society, even when you resent having to do so and would rather lie down (and who can blame you?)
And that’s hope.

I’m in long term recovery from depression, anxiety and other things. I’ve dragged myself out of impossible pits several times. And let me say upfront that I’m not a particularly strong person. I had help. I’m a white middle class person from a country with socialised medicine.

But still, there were times when almost everyone was preparing to give up on me, it was that bad. When *I* was ready to give up. And I can categorically say that nothing I will ever have to do will be as hard as coming back from those times. As that leap of faith.

Depression can’t imagine a future. Literally. Depression closes off your imaginative facilities. In Bessel Van Der Kolk’s studies of traumatised people, he showed them Rorschach tests and what they saw wasn’t monsters or murders. What they saw was *nothing*.

So part of recovery, as a culture- and I really mean this- is pushing on when you can’t imagine any possible future that can hold all this pain, trusting that some day it will be different, there will be change. Pushing on anyway, into the dark, a few steps at a time.

That’s it. That’s hope. It’s the basic work of acting as if there will indeed be a tomorrow. That’s easy to write and hard to do. And we don’t do it alone, any of us.

In circumstances like this, the basic work of caring for yourself- on the smallest, most pragmatic level- the basic work of trying to maintain even a modicum of joy in the smallest things is the most important work there is.
I do believe it’s an active strategy of resistance.

Because without it we can’t do anything. We can’t run into battle on wholly broken hearts. We have to at least splint ourselves up first. Whatever it takes, without hurting ourselves or others.
Like @katebornstein says: ‘do what you have to do to survive. Just don’t be mean.’

@katebornstein I would like to end this Friday night chat by saying that if you AREN’T currently flat on the floor with existential dread, that doesn’t mean you don’t care, or that you are a bad person, or that your problems don’t matter. Depression is not after all a competitive sport.