Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

when your brain works against you

A chorus of demons resides in my head.

They echo the chorus from an ancient Greek tragedy. They comment on everything, hold nothing back, and tell what they believe to be the unvarnished truth.

So why are they demons?

Because they appear only when things are bad and serve only to make things worse. At present, they are so loud and annoying that they make me wish my internal ears were as deaf as my external ones.

Wintertime, particularly post-Christmas, depression is nothing new for me. Last year, I sidestepped it by focusing on a spring plan so wonderful, I hardly dared to believe it would come true. The tension between anticipation and guarding against crushing disappointment consumed so much energy, I think I inadvertently distracted myself from depression.

In past years, it’s happened more often than not. So this is nothing new, and I’m not experiencing anything I’m not used to experiencing.

The demonic chorus is not singing any new songs. But the songs it is singing are beyond deranged, full of ideas and suggestions that are all as evil as they are moronic.

Meeting A Small Challenge

This raises a question: why write about something as mundane and, well, depressing as the demonic chorus?

Posts trying to “normalize” depression or other mental illnesses take up roughly fifteen percent of the internet¹ at this point, and they’re all, universally and without exception, boring.

I’m thoroughly bored of contemplating my own feelings, much less other people’s.

But I have found, this time, that some of my strategies for fighting depression have proven unexpectedly helpful. More helpful than they were the last time I was this depressed, anyway, which admittedly isn’t saying much.

But it is saying something.

And a lot of you subscribed to my Substack because you have PTSD, C-PTSD, or just a dark backstory of your own. Which means that a lot of you likely also have your own struggle against darkness. If you don’t, someone you care about almost certainly does. It’s both edifying and life-affirming to write something that might help someone else.

Mostly, though, I need to write about everything I’m doing to try to manage my depression, so I can do a better job of being consistent with all of it.

The Keystone Undergirding the Strategies

This time, I’m not judging or berating myself for this.

In the past, depression often triggered intense anger at myself. This has gotten worse as I’ve improved my life — the better my life gets, the more I resent this challenge. The better my life gets, the more depression seems like a fucked-up game I play against myself for no reasons beyond sadism and masochism.

On one level, this makes sense. Depression in bad circumstances is rational. This is why when we consider humans experiencing terrible suffering — Auschwitz, the prison camps of North Korea, Syrian refugees, etc. — we think in terms of helping them escape their horror, not air-dropping Zoloft. So getting angry at myself for being depressed in what is a pretty good life, overall, isn’t unreasonable. But it’s also terribly unhelpful.

So this time, I’m just accepting it. Any time I feel resentment bubbling up, I let it go with this thought: “I need my energy to help myself get through this, not resent myself for it happening in the first place.”

Sometimes I have to visualize it as turning to the demonic chorus, facing them directly, and telling them this, explicitly: “I refuse to go along with you and hate myself for being depressed. My energy is better spent on trying to get through it.”

Not that I’ve ever, in my life, needed a reason to be depressed, but right now there’s a weird context. Last month, a good friend died. I wrote a eulogy for him here. It didn’t “ruin” Christmas, by any means. In his honor, I couldn’t let that happen, so I found a way to still enjoy the season. But it did make December a completely surreal month. Christmas music sent me to weeping, and I spent much of the time I normally spend enjoying Christmas turning down interview requests from Canadian reporters who read my eulogy.

That’s just so goddamn bizarre, and I had no mental framework for handling it very well, which is why I didn’t handle it very well — we mathematical types like to have formulas, frameworks, and plans.

But I did the best I could, and better than younger versions of me would have done. That’s all I can do.

The Strategies That Are Helping

1. Priorities, priorities, priorities. In my case, not having a family, that means my job. I use every available scrap of mental and emotional energy, Monday through Friday, for my job. I’ve got a routine that helps a lot: the Pomodoro technique, for which I use the timer function on my brain.fm app². The Pomodoro technique is 25 minutes of intense focus followed by a 5-minute break.

   I use the breaks to do the most helpful thing I can make myself do in a given moment. In order from most to least helpful, those tasks are: riding an exercise bike, meditating, talking to a friend, working on a number theory problem, working on a drawing, reading a book I love (“comfort reading”), or watching something I enjoy on YouTube. 5 minutes doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough. At the end of every Pomodoro, I can re-attempt using my brain to do challenging work again. I also write down how I spend the breaks, which is helpful — at the end of the day, there’s some objective information. A day where my breaks were spent exercising or meditating is a day when I managed a lot better than a day where they were spent doing comfort reading or comfort YouTube watching.

   I know I’m not at the top of my game, but I also know that I’m doing everything I possibly can to stay as productive as possible. And that is just about the only thing I feel good about on some days, which makes it incredibly valuable. And I’m very grateful, right now, not to have kids, since I have no conflict as to where my best available energy should go. I really don’t know how depressives with families manage.

2. Using the mornings well. This has been creeping up on me for awhile, and I was making myself stay up until 9pm to try to keep it from getting worse. Oversleeping is one of my brightest and reddest red flags, so I was trying to keep it from overtaking me. Well, that’s over. I don’t have four hours after work in me. But I stay up as late as I can, and save the thing most likely to keep my mind pleasantly activated — a number theory problem — for the last thing I do every day, on my iPad in bed. And I use the mornings as well as I can — meditating, eating a healthy breakfast, and trying to get some exercise.

3. Trying to think about other people. I’ve got four drawings in progress, each of which is intended to get mailed to someone in my life. Progress is slow, but steady. And it’s especially helpful to work on these after work, when my mental and emotional energy all went into my code and the demonic chorus is so loud that it drowns out my thoughts.

4. Attention to diet and exercise. I don’t have the energy to make myself exercise every day, but I do every time I possibly can make myself, even if just for five minutes between Pomodoro focus sessions. And I re-activated my Hello Fresh subscription, so easy-to-prepare healthy meals are available.

5. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. I upped the reminder count on my gratitude app from 5 times a day to 10, and I make myself write substantive entries. I have also put many items in my apartment that were gifts — things that remind me of my friends and loved ones — in more prominent places, to remind me that my life really is quite good now, feelings be damned.

   

   My favorite American icon is the red pickup truck. The model is a gift, and it’s made me smile every single time I’ve looked at it.

Conclusion

The demonic chorus hasn’t shut up yet, and maybe it never will. I hate that idea, but I have to accept it as a possibility. It’s been with me since early childhood, and while I hope to find a way to exorcise it, that may not be on the table. We’ll see.

But these days, I’m learning to ignore it. When it’s too loud to ignore, I’m learning to at least not listen, agree, and obey its equally demonic suggestions—even when they seem rational, sensible, and reasonable.

My strategies aren’t perfect, and neither am I, but they’re helping me at least tread water. Treading water isn’t drowning.

And for now, that’s enough.

1. I pulled this statistic out of my ass.

2. The brain.fm app is the single most helpful thing I’ve ever run into, in my entire life. You can read my post about it here.

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