Writing A Bit About Loneliness And Depression
Okay so, let’s get honest and vulnerable for a spell.
Yup, the kind of honest vulnerability that makes you unpopular at parties and barbecues, but a delight to your expensive shrink.
The kind that harshes mellows, kills moods, and lands you a reputation as the local, gloomy nay-sayer.
I am, of course, talking about many a writer’s closest companions.
Drumroll, please:
Loneliness and depression.
Loneliness looks and manifests a little differently in all of us, but many the most profound literary minds have, at some point or other, described feeling… disconnected from the world at large.
Probably why they wrote about it to such lengths.
Whether it was Albert Camus’, “when all of us are guilty, then we will have democracy,” in The Fall, or Carl Jung’s, “all mass movements must, as one might expect, slip with the greatest of ease down an inclined plane-,” in his Undiscovered Self, or Jame’s Baldwin’s, “-I struggled with the world of commerce and industry, or I should say, they struggled with me-” in his biographical notes, or Soren Kierkegaards’, “-to suffer from a lack of possibility,” or my favorite quote from Rainer Maria Rilke,
“I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish,” in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge- these men, have at one time or other, described loneliness.
I feel it often. Lonely.
WHEN I FEEL LONELY, I WRITE A BIT
It’s for many reasons. I am an African-American man and my mind leans more academically so I am uninterested in things most are interested in, and as a result I find many spaces either sort of passively neutral, in an almost begrudging manner, or actively hostile towards me.
Never truly welcoming.
And on top of that, few places feed me the things I want to eat. It’s like I’m being kept on an all-beef diet against my will. Starved of everything content and nutrient rich. Everything I’m curious about.
All while the world gorges itself on slop.
I admit to feelings of jealousy at times and wishing I wasn't so picky.
It’s why I read and, I assume, why I write. I’m curious. I’m picky. Though I prefer- discerning.
What? Wouldn’t you?
I cannot find what I’m looking for out there for many reasons- chief among them being, chance and circumstance.
I am always, often through my own doing, at the mercy of one or both.
AGE, MATURITY, AND DEPRESSION
I’ve heard it said that if sadness is a wave, then depression is an ocean.
As of last March, I am 34 years old.
I emigrated to The United States of America in 2001 when I was only a child. When it was a different sort of America.
I will spare you the sordid immigration tales of a Congolese war refugee in The States and will simply say that I still find it hard to belong anywhere.
Fast forward a few years and quite a few mistakes later and I now find myself very much at odds with, well- let’s just call it, the dualistic nature of man.
I know, I know, just… bear with me for a bit.
I say it that way because I feel in myself something like a- a splitting, that I could never reconcile before.
As a child, I was bright, but I’ve never been particularly forthright or honest. I was always a bit closed-off, a bit of a mischievous schemer and quite self-centered. These attributes have undoubtedly contributed to my loneliness.
Eventually, as I grew, my manipulative self-interest evolved into a sort of rebellious hatred of all things lacking in what I deemed to be “depth”. Which would eventually mold in me an immature and nihilistic attitude towards the world.
And once I left home to live in said world, my closed-off nature made it so I had no real guardrails to act against the worst parts of my nature.
But I grew some more and I travelled, and read, and loved, and hated, and experienced and I did eventually, mature.
THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE
And some of that maturity came from what I’ve taken to calling, my mental footsteps, or if you’re not the poetic sort, my writing. In essence, all my essays and journal entries.
In them, I could see I was starting to develop some sense of self-awareness, however myopic. The barest of requirements to exist in polite society, I find, though many still lack it.
But this awareness, which I’d been mercilessly honing, has worked against me. I wear it almost as a second skin now and it is with me always. Like an overbearing partner or a tyrannical parent.
I am so constantly aware that I police everything about myself. From my dress, to my mannerisms, to my speech, and especially my true and unfiltered thoughts.
Like doctoring a perfect copy from a flawed original. I imagine many of us do this.
All to (not) fall short of a set of arbitrary expectations I had taken upon myself. All in order to circumvent old, but persistent feelings of shame and inadequacy.
I know a lot of my readers won’t be able to relate but many of you, I suspect, will.
BECAUSE CHANCES ARE, YOU’RE LIKELY DEPRESSED
Growing up in the United States of America as a non-white, non male member of this society really does something to you.
The impact is quite psychologically profound.
We are all more impressionable than we believe ourselves to be.
And that’s because to know what is being done to you, you must first possess knowledge of the thing being done.
And many of us just don’t know what’s happening to us.
We are losing the words to adequately describe the cultural and epidemic flattening of what it means to be a human being, possessed of self-awareness.
We are losing the words to adequately describe why we feel lonely and depressed- why we feel this disconnect, and why it causes in us, an un-fillable void.
And let’s not forget the two factors at play as well: chance and circumstance.
There is a very likely chance that you are going to be lonely and depressed because of a circumstance you were born into.
Now ain’t that a bitch?
Talk about unfair.
CATHARTIC TEARS IN DEPTHS AS OF YET UNTAPPED
Ah, but what to do about it? Everyone will surely have an opinion.
But what do they really know about you, besides what you’ve told them? Which likely remains unsaid, is omitted, or untrue.
And I wish I could tie this up nicely in a bow. A call to action or a lovely medical statistic, I know how you all love the numbers, or a handy quote like I did before, but I have to admit- that won’t change the fact that I am likely still a little depressed.
I still feel lonely.
I’ve resolved myself, as a matter of personal growth, to be more honest when I write so as to avoid feeling like a hack or a hypocrite. I’m challenging myself to explore depths as of yet untapped, especially those found in perpetual melancholy.
My only regret being that my writing- my words and letters, often read like sad poems, or tears.
Maybe that’s why it feels so cathartic.
