On Jan 17, 4:32 pm, ornamentalmind <[email protected]> wrote: > Just one small observation about depression…and I do not mean to imply > it directly is applicable to you too…but… I long ago learned how easy > it is to feed upon such extreme angst and in that way, perpetuated the > duration as well as on occasion, the depth of such episodes. Take or > leave this sharing as you will. Often the ‘bitter pill’ is that one no > longer need ‘emote’ in what has all too long been familiar ways.
I can sort of understand that, but at least part of the problem is that there are real factors underlying my depression (which is another of those unmentioned reasons why I usually find it unhelpful to think of depression as an 'illness'), such as (i) the collapse of a fragile construction of the only career I could imagine for myself, (ii) almost lifelong silence and isolation, (iii) being transgendered, and unable to find any framework whatsoever into which my gender identity and sexuality can be contained and expressed, (iv) powerful social pressures to continue in the same despairing pretence that broke down at age 19 or 20 and led to my depression, (v) a lack of any intellectual framework in which to even formulate my difficulties, let alone work them out, (vi) truly bizarre and abusive responses from other people, not easily classified under (iii)-(v) above, (vii) a lifelong submissiveness towards other people's judgements, quite promiscuously and indiscriminately, coupled with a quite ferocious inner devaluation of my own thoughts and feelings and perceptions, and a futile kind of intellectual rebellion which only distances me further from reality and, by its inevitable collapse, only condemns me further to slave-like submission to a socially constructed 'reality' in which I do not at all believe (a but like /The Matrix/), (viii) a complete non-recognition of the significance of the kind of family environment in which I grew up (partly due to my own reluctance to talk about it, for fear of not being believed, and/or being accused of whining like a child), and ... and ... And that's only a first stab at it - I'm sure I could easily list many other real obstacles to me actually living a human life in society with other human beings. It isn't that I haven't tried, or that I have focussed obsessively on some mistaken conscious perception of my own condition or my own identity. In my 57 (going on 58) years, I have tried many things, and my ferocious self-criticism has not allowed me to rest easy for a day. However, I have a growing conviction that, whatever causes for my misery may exist in external 'reality', either in the past or in the present, even these causes are invariably expressed through my own 'self', and a truer sense of reality, both external and internal at once, can enable me to recover my freedom, or even to find it for the first time. I didn't mean to go on for so long - my aim in coming here was, while not denying my state of depression, to focus on what is objectively real (not, of course, in the sense of scientific or even purely rational 'objectivity'). Pursuing this line of conversation too long would illustrate the truth of what you are saying. :-)
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