Realms of Roush is a monthly newsletter that sends you to strange realms, typically in sci-fi and fantasy. This newsletter deals with the realm of reality, which is mysterious enough.
The Darkness is Real
You remember the very first time you felt depressed.
You were a sophomore in high school. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and you were listening to Bon Iver in your bed, playing the Minecraft beta when a stomach-dropping emptiness stole over your entire existence. It was something stronger than the typical angst of those teenage years. It was something clinging, waiting, and alive, dragging you down to a place without reason, where neither words nor friendship provided succor.
You didn’t have the words for what was happening to you, and your only outlets for expressing this emotional state were hasty thoughts and impulsive behavior. Everyone in that time brushes with depression at some point. There’s just too much change and chaos and confusion; you’re a half-formed, hormonal human larvae that demands complete independence - it’s a weird place to be.
For some, teen depression is mild and doesn’t return. For you, the depression stuck. Ever since that day, and probably before then, depression comes and goes according to the unknowable seasons of your subconscious. You’ve had more dark nights of the soul than you care to admit.
In fact, you’re going through one right now.
You say this so they know you’re trying to help. You want to help someone get through their dark nights, whether it’s on the horizon or clouding their bright sunny day right now. You’re hoping to toss a lifeline from the deep to anyone who wishes to grab on.
Maybe you can help pull them up. Maybe you can help them feel more seen.
Being depressed is incredibly lonely. There’s a certain sort of survival required to make it through each day. You have to learn how to fake a smile. You have to pretend to be a positive person. You have to find a way not to let the smallest failed human interaction derail you. You have to reach deep inside and squeeze your heart out for every drop of confidence and extroversion possible. To make it, you tell yourself that what’s happening to you isn’t real. You tell yourself:
It will pass. It will pass. It’s just a phase.
This is in your imagination. You’re actually happy and grateful for everything in your life.
Your life is so good you have no reason to be depressed.
And what’s actually crazy is how horrible it is to say these things to yourself over and over and expect a different result. After being depressed for so long, you can’t lie anymore.
Your feelings and experiences are real. Your depression is real.
The Darkness is Sacred
There’s something terrifying about someone easily accepting your depression. You doubt the depth of their understanding. These days, it’s rote to say “I have depression.” Everyone has it!
But then you wonder how many people really do understand that when the darkness hits, it sucks you down, keeps you pinned to the bed waiting until the last minute to get up. It’s all-consuming.
It feels like nothing is sacred in those moments. Life is an abstract thing happening to someone else. It doesn’t matter what you believe or want. It’s a divorce between who you know you are and the real world, stuck behind a veil of water.
And you just hope to God or whoever is out there pulling the strings that you get to the other side of it, when it feels like everything is sacred. When every ray of sunlight, strand of hair, drip of coffee, speck of dirt in your sandals, smile from your dog, or story from your partner can be so beautiful you could die happy while appreciating their inherent, atomic sanctity.
You live every day in a different position on the continuum of sanctity. You feel sorry that the people in your life don’t know what version of you they’re going to get. You wish you could always give them the everything is sacred side of yourself.
When you’re really down, you always strive to remember that the opposite of your darkness is true. It even helps to think that somewhere, someone is seeing life as the beautiful, sacred thing that it is. This thought reminds you that the dark, low place is not forever, nor is it the true reality.
Reality has many shades and even though depression casts a pall, you do know light. Avoiding any platitudes like “the shadow proves the sunshine” or that you need darkness to appreciate the light (honestly, does anyone?), you are learning to give the depression its due. You’re giving your shadow love and appreciation no matter what. You’re giving your light love and appreciation no matter what.
Nothing is sacred. Everything is sacred.
You Must Love the Darkness
You’re so sensitive that strangers you just met have a direct line to your identity and self-worth. This has impacted all of your relationships and career opportunities. Where some people brush over things, you can’t help but zero in and obsess, whether it’s a colleague’s misunderstood joke or a critique. You often feel like an open sore, having, for some reason, stuck someone else’s sword right in your gut.
Depression loves to take any word and lie and twist, telling you it’s your fault you don’t defend yourself and don’t toughen up; it’s your fault you feel so bad and so deeply, for others and yourself. But it’s not like you can’t joke around. You can be “normal.” But it’s not on tap or as easy as flicking a switch.
There are millions of thoughts swirling in your mind. Good, bad, benign, vile, righteous, petty, prideful, merciful, etc. How many of those things do you try to push away? Repress? The more you lock away, the less you can interact with your strange ideas and let them go. You want to express, not repress.
You want to sift through your mind and explore the negative situations that repeat again and again, without judgment. This Shadow Work is revolutionary. It’s freeing. It’s giving yourself the ability to pull the dark things out of the ego and hold them, grant them a name, and then let go. In this, there is no slippery slope. In this, there is true, unconditional self-love.
You’re sensitive and that makes you kind.
Your kindness is not a weakness.
It’s not your fault there are people who mistake kindness for weakness.
You have to love who you are or you will be controlled by everything.
The Darkness Dislikes Company
Depression breeds loneliness because it robs you of the energy to engage with people. People require energy, and when you’re low, it’s very easy to blame others for the sadness you feel. There’s a lie you’re trying to forget, that if you fix yourself and your depression, you’ll finally be perfect. And when you’re perfect, people will never be able to hurt you again.
There’s no way around it. People are a double-edged sword. They are the pain and joy of life. They embody the absurdity of never being known and yet having brief glimpses of being known. People are the divorce and the grace you need; the tug-of-war in the pursuit of meaning in your life. There’s so much to say about how your day and age is the most connected and disconnected of all time, and the answer to this crisis has always been this: only you can save someone else. Only someone else can help you discover your values, challenge you, enrage you, make you laugh, be your shoulder to cry on, and show you life from a different set of eyes.
People keep you alive in every way that matters.
People are the curse and cure.
Are You the Darkness?
You’ve brought up a number of different fears. But the scariest thing is wondering whether or not your depression is who you are. For so long, you tacitly accepted that depression, your sensitivity, and your shyness with people meant that something was inherently wrong with you. That, maybe, through therapy and healthy relationships you could finally discover the source code of your absurdity. But the deeper you’ve delved, you’ve begun to wonder:
What if there’s nothing wrong with you?
You’re afraid of this idea. Perhaps your depression is a symptom of being a human on this crazy spinning rock orbiting inside a spinning galaxy flying through an expanding universe filled with endless potential for chaos and life.
What if there’s nothing wrong with you?
There’s something sick in the world that requires you to optimize. You must conduct internal witch hunts to zap away all of your human faults, from errors in communication to your fears. You are familiar with the word “sin” and have caught yourself believing that everything is, at the subatomic level and beyond, divorced from its true expression.
Yet there is power in the question: What if there’s nothing wrong with you?
You don’t see how you can live with an identity of irreversible wrongness anymore. You know it’s not all bad. So many people go around believing that they and the world are forever touched by evil and that belief encourages them to bring goodness to their lives. But for your sake, you lean more toward a sense of potentiality, where everyone exists on the continuum of nothing is sacred and everything is sacred, and your power lies in how you choose to express the sanctity of life. In between the extremes, there’s a large, liminal space where how you live and what you do is simply gray.
What if there’s nothing wrong with you?
Your Darkness is Neverending as Light
Where do you land with all this? You know you’re still falling (with style), but yet you do know where you are in the air and where you came from. You’re reaching out with both hands to the people that ground you. You’re trying to see your depression from as many angles as possible. You’re trying to live whimsically and according to the strangeness that you are learning to love.
You will fail. You will fall prey to doubt and depression. And it gets to you that you don’t know what this internal struggle is for. Nor do you believe that you will finally, ultimately, actually land on some certain ground and finally be free.
Does anyone ever land?
For now, you are content to fly through this life like a satellite, your vision rotating, seeing nothing but darkness and light and beauty and nothingness again and again. You are content to fly, whispering to yourself…
Your feelings and experiences are real. Your depression is real.
Nothing is sacred. Everything is sacred.
You’re sensitive and that makes you kind.
Your kindness is not a weakness.
It’s not your fault there are people who mistake kindness for weakness.
You have to love who you are or you will be controlled by everything.
What if there’s nothing wrong with you?
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Sources:
“You Are Accepted,” by Paul Tillich
Specifically: “Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself. Grace is the acceptance of that which is rejected. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful destiny; it changes guilt into confidence and courage.”
“The Myth of Sisyphus,” by Albert Camus
Existential Kink, by Carolyn Elliott
Faith After Doubt, by Brian D. McLaren
From Substack writers:
On our pandemic of loneliness:
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
Other information tributaries:
Dr. Bob Moorehead: “We have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints; we spend more but have less; we buy more but enjoy it less; we have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, yet less time; we have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgement; more experts, yet more problems; we have more gadgets but less satisfaction; more medicine, yet less wellness; we take more vitamins but see fewer results. We drink too much; smoke too much; spend too recklessly; laugh too little; drive too fast; get too angry quickly; stay up too late; get up too tired; read too seldom; watch TV too much and pray too seldom.”
Acknowledgments:
I could not have made these discoveries about my depression without the love and support of many people in my life. Everyone I know is an important piece of my daily existence. There are a few key individuals who have been guides and supporters in this journey: Don, Aden, Michael, and my wife Stephanie.
Dark Night of the Soul in Second Person