I was going to write an essay called “I Assume Everyone’s Depressed,” or something like that where I was going to talk about how I keep relating to these depressed, moody characters like Holden Caufield from "The Catcher in the Rye", and how I assume that everyone does, forgetting that a lot of people didn’t have a tumultuous mental health ride when they were teenagers. I’ve got this mood thing where I get really emotional basically randomly and it’s led to some… Well, let’s just stick with “tumultuous mental health ride". But there’s this weird thing about mental health issues like that; you’re never really sure if it’s a real thing.
Just before I started writing that paper, a thought kept nagging at me. “Were you actually depressed? Do you really have a mood thing, or are you just saying that because it sounds cool and because you like those angsty characters?”
“But Me,” I’d say to myself, “Your actions totally fit everything that a mood disorder would cause.”
“But what if you’re faking it? What if deep down, you’re just acting like that because you want to have a mood disorder? I bet you’re not even actually moody. You’re just so conniving that you managed to trick yourself into thinking you have problems.”
And on and on and on. I couldn’t and can’t write that paper because I can’t get out of my own head about what’s going on inside my own head. And that’s the thing about mood disorders. I was told I have one. I go to therapy to talk out my random sobbing fits, super manic happy bits, and intense bursts of anger. But when it comes to matters of your brain and your emotions, you’ll always second guess yourself.
I’ve talked to a bunch of people about their experience with mental health, and they’ve all said similar things. Their brains would be telling them the same thing mine does. “You don’t actually have problems because if you did, you’d be committing suicide or banging your head against a wall. You’re just being a whiner.”
Knowing it’s a shared experience should help, right? But really, it only makes the dialogue get even more meta and muddy. No matter how many people go down with you, you’re still falling down that rabbit hole, kicking yourself and kicking yourself more and more until you get to go to sleep and hopefully forget about it.
Really though, this is just another part of what this whole “having emotions” thing does to you, especially when they’re kind of out of control. When you have a mood disorder, you can’t trust what you’re feeling. No matter how strong you feel something, a part of you has to be constantly checking in saying, “Hey, you arguing parts of Miles’s brain, do you have a real reason to be self-depreciating or is this just y’all being especially sad today?” And the more you realize that these intense feelings might not be proportionate to what’s actually happening, the less power they have over how you act.
For example, if you don’t know me, my mood stuff’s caused plenty of problems. I’ll get ridiculously sad during a practice to the point where I can’t even stay in the same room without sobbing. I’ll get so angry about one tiny phrase and end up walking out of a funeral. All of these feelings feel so massive and important in the moment. They feel so urgent that I’m compelled to act on them right away. But that’s when I need to step back and assess the situation reasonably. “Me, when your feelings can’t be trusted, leave the actions to the mind.”
Why am I talking about this? I dunno. Since I couldn’t write that first essay, I needed to turn something in. And really, most of the time I’m totally fine and dandy, so maybe I’m not the person to talk about mental health. But I think whether you’ve got some crazy mood stuff going on or not (as if I believe anyone’s completely stable all the time), this idea of being constantly mindful and aware of your own head in a constructive way is something we could all work on. You can’t let you convince you. When we step outside ourselves and look in, we’ll learn that life’s much better than it seems.
