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Life update
Apr. 13th, 2015 08:03 pmOn one hand, while I'm still dealing with eating and sleeping issues, I do feel better on a daily basis. On the other hand, that might be because I've reached the "don't give a damn" stage about law school, and I don't know whether that's necessarily a good or bad thing. I spend most of my time recently thinking about video games (either playing them or planning on playing them during the summer), watching Youtube and TV (although I blame Daredevil and Netflix's desire for everyone to binge-watch their shows), and just...daydreaming about non-law-related things.
Objectively, on some level I know this isn't great. I never used to be the kind of student who tried to skate by on the minimum amount of work necessary to pass; I want to spend my time doing something I'm really engaged in. But right now it's hard for me to care about my law courses, and thinking about law school too much makes me depressed, so I'm just trying to hang on, survive the semester, and figure things out as I go along.
I had a really terrible culmination of depression around the last week of March, and it's hard to say I'm "better"; it's not like the underlying issues have completely gone away. It's more like, for whatever reason, I'm in a state now where I'm able to think about stuff that cheers me up (video games, comics) and minimize thinking about stuff that stresses me out (law school, the future).
It's difficult to speak of depression as being a changeable thing, and I understand the impulse to avoid that characterization—because for so long depression was assumed to be temporary and therefore not serious. But what do you do when, in someone's case, it is a changeable thing? When, for a certain person (like me), it seems to be more context-based rather than an alteration of brain chemistry, or an unexpected, inexplicable combination of random things happening can "pull" you out of the worst of it? Because I really don't know how to explain why the switch "flipped" for me; why it was that for several weeks, I was unable to think about anything other than how my life was miserable and hopeless and painful, and now I can think about something else.
There's a delicate balance when it comes to people with mental illness in terms of attributing agency. I think certain progressive (for lack of a better term) people's impulse is to assume people with mental illness have no agency. And I don't disagree with this; I've had to spend far too many times trying to explain to people that depression isn't something you can "will" yourself out of and that such a belief is deeply damaging and stigmatizing and just outright inaccurate. Because part of the illness is feeling like you have no control over what you're feeling and experiencing, and that's one of the most terrifying aspects of it.
But I think it's also harmful to assume people with mental illness are always completely passive victims. For one, it really doesn't work very well for people who experience "gray" or more "minor" (relatively speaking, in terms of severity) mental illnesses; for another, I personally find that it can erase the individual experience, or the "complex personhood" of having a mental illness. Because part of my experience has been, yes, feeling hopeless and feeling like I'm drowning in an endless sea that I can't do anything to get out of, but part of it has also felt like a relentless battle that I fought each day. Maybe I lost, most of the time. I couldn't get myself out of bed. I couldn't make myself feel better. I couldn't avoid crying.
But even if I lost, I was still fighting. And that aspect is something that I sometimes see unrecognized (*cough* especially in many Bucky Barnes fanfic *coughcough* okay I'll stop now).
In short: Depression can be a really complicated thing.
Objectively, on some level I know this isn't great. I never used to be the kind of student who tried to skate by on the minimum amount of work necessary to pass; I want to spend my time doing something I'm really engaged in. But right now it's hard for me to care about my law courses, and thinking about law school too much makes me depressed, so I'm just trying to hang on, survive the semester, and figure things out as I go along.
I had a really terrible culmination of depression around the last week of March, and it's hard to say I'm "better"; it's not like the underlying issues have completely gone away. It's more like, for whatever reason, I'm in a state now where I'm able to think about stuff that cheers me up (video games, comics) and minimize thinking about stuff that stresses me out (law school, the future).
It's difficult to speak of depression as being a changeable thing, and I understand the impulse to avoid that characterization—because for so long depression was assumed to be temporary and therefore not serious. But what do you do when, in someone's case, it is a changeable thing? When, for a certain person (like me), it seems to be more context-based rather than an alteration of brain chemistry, or an unexpected, inexplicable combination of random things happening can "pull" you out of the worst of it? Because I really don't know how to explain why the switch "flipped" for me; why it was that for several weeks, I was unable to think about anything other than how my life was miserable and hopeless and painful, and now I can think about something else.
There's a delicate balance when it comes to people with mental illness in terms of attributing agency. I think certain progressive (for lack of a better term) people's impulse is to assume people with mental illness have no agency. And I don't disagree with this; I've had to spend far too many times trying to explain to people that depression isn't something you can "will" yourself out of and that such a belief is deeply damaging and stigmatizing and just outright inaccurate. Because part of the illness is feeling like you have no control over what you're feeling and experiencing, and that's one of the most terrifying aspects of it.
But I think it's also harmful to assume people with mental illness are always completely passive victims. For one, it really doesn't work very well for people who experience "gray" or more "minor" (relatively speaking, in terms of severity) mental illnesses; for another, I personally find that it can erase the individual experience, or the "complex personhood" of having a mental illness. Because part of my experience has been, yes, feeling hopeless and feeling like I'm drowning in an endless sea that I can't do anything to get out of, but part of it has also felt like a relentless battle that I fought each day. Maybe I lost, most of the time. I couldn't get myself out of bed. I couldn't make myself feel better. I couldn't avoid crying.
But even if I lost, I was still fighting. And that aspect is something that I sometimes see unrecognized (*cough* especially in many Bucky Barnes fanfic *coughcough* okay I'll stop now).
In short: Depression can be a really complicated thing.
