How Do I Tell People I Want to Die without Killing the Vibe: Personal Experiences from the Underground
My Russian literature class, that I took this year to force myself to read more, had us study a good handful of Russian classics. Of the assigned books that I actually read, I finished Turgenev’s Father’s and Sons and got past the first act of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. The first forty pages are spent talking about the protagonist’s own miserable existence, how he has spent the last forty years “in the underground” and how he views his personal identity and society as a farce or some such; I can’t remember much else for the life of me.
But what I can remember are a handful of pages that struck me very harshly. The Underground Man acknowledges the reader’s resentment towards him. He knows that they know that he knows what’s wrong with him. And yet he is unable to bring himself to change. The secular “freedom” brought about by science and logic, from a rejection of mysticism and other romantic creation myths, all these are discarded so that man may face the sobering truth: he is the sole architect of his own misery and his own merriment. By his hand alone can he change the world, and only by his hand will his world ever see any change.
But the Underground Man relishes in his own pathetic misery. He laughs at our frustration in him, he smiles in the face of his own ineptitude in some sort of perverse masochism. And then he goes on to say that man would never be able to function in a perfectly ordered world; he craves violence and mischief far too much, he wouldn’t be able to withstand perpetual serenity or the thought of eternal joy. So he sabotages himself. He ruins his own potential, taking pleasure in it all the while, “in the same way that you can take pleasure in a toothache”: after the first day, the pain is unbearable, so you scream and howl. As the days progress, you become accustomed to the pain, and yet you continue to howl and rage, upsetting your family and fellows as you do so. The pain has become familiar to you, yet why do you continue to find pleasure in bemoaning it and disrupting others?
Mental illness feels very much the same as this toothache. “Radical openness” is exactly the sort of response I would expect from a generation raised by the internet, whose dopamine receptors are so hardwired by notifications going off and the familiar dings of text messages or Snapchats chiming that they couldn’t bear not to share even the most mundane aspects of their lives, lest someone smash that “Like” and “Subscribe” button. It all feels very… disingenuous, for a lack of a better term. I understand completely that my online persona is curated to my exact specifications: I don’t say or do anything that doesn’t fit the image or aesthetic I’m trying to nurture. Doesn’t that mean, then, the trauma I choose to share is part of that image cultivation?
Depression is something that I’ve dealt with for a number of years now. It is a familiar sense of of tiredness I feel right behind my eyes, the fatigue that sits atop my shoulders and slowly starts to dig itself into my brain; when I start to drift asleep it plunges me into a dreamless slumber that gives me no rest or satisfaction whenever I wake, only annoyance that I’ve “wasted” yet another day in bed. It makes the sunlight that peeks in between my blinds feel fluorescent and metallic, and it makes the food I eat flavorless and bland.
The colors that paint my world become a little more subdued, as if someone as dialed the vibrancy back a few notches. It helps me to piss hours and hours away on my phone or on my Xbox, all the while I wish to do something else, something more fulfilling, whatever that is.
The “magic” of depression, the associated novelty that goes along with telling people behind closed doors or hurried whispers in someone’s ear, like this is some fucking J*hn Gr*en novel, has largely vanished. The fact that I overshare my own problems concerning mental health whenever I start flirting with someone new is probably not helpful either, but that’s neither here nor there; depression has fallen off its high horse, at least for me.
I used to look at it as some sort of mythical beast that needed to be slayed, as some sort of nigh insurmountable obstacle on my journey To Be a Better Person. Four some years after my diagnosis, and since I started taking meds and seeing a therapist, well, depression is just something that I live with. I’m no hero for having it and I’m no hero for talking about it.
The way we’ve come to “idolize” having bad days, the way online discourse has shifted more and more into absurdist and Dadaist branches of humor that are so niche and self-referential, so coated in layers of irony, that a person can’t genuinely tell if this is a cry for help or just another shitpost, well, it’s a tad concerning. I have 100% contributed to that discourse and the perpetuation of the “problem.”
But it’s hard not to. It’s fun. I’ve been trained to respond to uncomfortable situations with humor. It’s my preferred method of defense. Why would I open up to the women that come into my life when I can just send them screenshots of SUGAR blasting at full volume? Why would I actually open up to a mutal’s DMs asking if I’m “okay” when I just tweeted “can someone run me over with their mom’s minivan i will Venmo u”.
It’s my trauma and I’ll do what I want with it! Or so goes the rallying cry of radical vulnerability. There’s no right or wrong way to deal with depression. The guideline I try to follow is this: just because you have co-opted your trauma and mental health issues into something that benefits you doesn’t mean other people have. Thus we should be more wary of how we talk about ourselves or the issues we face, because other people not might be at that same stage of… growth? Maturity? Degeneracy? as we are, and might spiral.
I’m going through another depressive episode now. There’s not really much anyone else can do about it. These things come and go; the metaphor that comes to mind is that I’m a piece of driftwood caught at sea. Some days the waters are rough. Some days I just float. These past few days I haven’t had the luxury of “just floating.”
I don’t really think that my experiences are anything noteworthy or worth fawning over. I do my best with where I am with what I have. I try to remember that I need to cut myself more slack, and that the justifications to be Productive or to Do Things, whatever those vague intangibles may be, might be more of the Depression talking than it is me. It’s a constant juggling act, of balancing lucidity and intrusive thoughts and all the techniques I learned in therapy.
I get stuck inside of my head a lot. Hope that doesn’t kill the vibe.
