When you’ve had to deal with something for far longer than most, a change in perspective is inevitable. I found myself having thoughts and feelings I never would expected myself to be capable of back before my depression began. A lot of it was of course dark – some more positive – and others that didn’t seem inherently either, but simply strange. I felt it worth sharing some of these experiences before closing my miniseries on depression.

Sense of self

An odd thing happened when I tried to heal from my wounds shortly following the beginning of my depression.

In the spirit of carrying on, moving forward, getting up every day and letting life happen, I found myself weirdly disconnected from myself. In every situation I found myself, I would pause to ask the question, “What would I do in this situation?” It seemed an odd question to ask, since I was the one in the situation having to make those decisions. But it’s like I had to open an imaginary manual on myself, because I was not there to ask myself the question directly.

I started feeling, weirdly, like an imposter of myself, living in my own skin, but not me. It wasn’t exactly the feeling of being an imposter, of course, because I had all of my own memories. As far as I could tell, I was still Ben, but it’s like I was a different version.

It wasn’t until many years later that I heard about something called Dissociative Disorder – or, as it is more commonly known, Split Personalities.

I wondered if that was somehow me, but my core personality felt the same, just in a different gear. When I learned that one of the known causes of Dissociative Disorder is trauma, and the brain having to create a separate ego in order to deal with the trauma, I became more suspicious, to the point that I asked someone close to me if I ever showed signs of not being myself, or not having memories of conversations. There were no such occurrences to report.

I’ve thought about it more since then, about the fact that these alternate egos tend to form as protective shields – as heroes to keep the person safe from future trauma. Defense mechanisms. The new ego tends to be someone or something the person wishes they could be. I’ve wondered if the reason I feel different from my past self, while still being the same person, is because I just made a version of myself that was capable of carrying on despite the pain. Maybe I had to be that person for a time, and now I’ve been living as that ‘stronger’ version for so long that I don’t know how to go back to my core self, or how to join the ‘split.’

This is not a professional psychiatric assessment, just my own wonderings. I feel like I had become a living memorial to myself, living as closely as I can to how I think Ben would live, to honour his memory, rather than feeling like I’m living my own life – and I feel like I’m screwing it up often.

Distaste for Justice

Another odd thing that occurred in me, early in my depression, is that the whole idea of ‘justice’ had become repugnant to me.

I’ll try to explain.

I realize this sounds dramatic, and exaggerated, and is probably coming from a place of narrow perspective, but it is genuinely how I feel.

The pain that I have been through, I would not wish on my worst enemy.

I know there are greater forms of pain that happen in this world. I am not claiming that my own suffering is any greater than anyone else’s. All I mean is that, for me, what I’ve gone through was so emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically devastating that the idea of me inflicting that on another – even someone I hated – even someone I thought deserved it… There is no one I hate that much.

Nobody should have to go through this.

It’s why, even despite constant feelings of jealousy, I have never wished to swap places with anyone, because I would not want anybody else to have to be subjected to this.

This feeling seemed to seep over into the general concept of ‘justice,’ the idea of truly evil people getting what they deserve. I found myself completely turned against the idea, because, in my mind, there was already enough suffering in the world.

‘In the world.’

I don’t know why it became a collective thing in my mind. Everyone’s experience is their own. Perhaps I was trying to see things from God’s perspective, who I know sympathizes with our pain, even if we don’t feel it. There was enough pain going around in the world – especially among those who don’t deserve it – so why add any more suffering into the universe, even if to someone who does deserve it?

I don’t remember exactly how long this feeling lasted. I know it did eventually wear off, giving way to my own logical argument.

In keeping with the general feeling of, ‘we don’t need any more suffering in the world,’ one of the key proponents of justice came to mind – that of deterrence.

Because evil people are still inclined to inflict acts of suffering unto others, when acts of justice are performed on them it deters others from doing the same and spreading more suffering. In the most basic sense, it is mathematically less suffering overall when justice is administered – if done correctly and not simply out of anger.

I still hate to see it, but recognize its purpose again.

The Inward Spiral

It’s common for depression to come in waves. Somebody can be doing well for a while, able to focus on the positives and be uplifted by them, and this can last for a time, before something triggers again or too many straws pile up and the person feels back in the muck.

It’s considered a loop. A cycle. Circling back around emotionally, to the place where one started. It’s a normal process.

One of the things that can happen when one has been living with depression for too long is that the extra curvature in the loop starts to become apparent. In the same way that, as you get older, the years feel like they pass more quickly, so too, if you’ve been doing the emotional rollercoaster, living the same loop for too long, you notice it beginning to tighten. You begin to recognize the tracks in advance.

Even the orbit of a planet around its parent star is not eternal, but over eons the orbit gets smaller and the ‘years’ get shorter until it eventually crashes into the star.

This happened to me, as I was going through cycles of deep depression and thankfulness in alternating phases. Eventually, what looked at first like a cycle became a spiral, speeding up as time went on until every emotion I could feel became more tightly packed together as I spiraled closer and closer to the centre, until I hit a kind of emotional singularity.

On the other side, I found myself in a place where I was both thankful for what I had, and still depressed over what I don’t – at the same time.

That might sound strange, and it probably doesn’t make logical sense when looking at emotional scales. Two opposites can’t both be true at the same time. But neither does it make logical sense to feel good about everything in one minute, and depressed about everything in the next. The situation itself is not different from one emotional phase to the other, nor is it different after collapsing into an emotional singularity, but the singularity allows for both feelings to be true about different things.

It makes sense to be able to do that, from a purely logical perspective. It might not make much sense from a human perspective, since we as emotional beings tend to feel just one emotion at a time – but that is usually due to changes in life circumstances or changes in perspective.

An interesting thing about being in the same situation for so long is a bird’s eye view of time.

To use an illustration from my fantasy literature, one of the differences between humans and elves is their vastly different spans of natural lifetime. Humans are mortal by age – elves are not (at least the pure-blooded ones), and both have different perspectives on time because of this. Elves are more patient; humans are more eager. Humans think about projects in terms of years, elves think of them in terms of decades or even centuries.

We humans look at time in the same way that an ant looks at a room. All they can see is the ground. To an insect, every little detail is a big deal. Comparatively, elves look at time the way that you and I can look at a room. We can see the whole room – not just a small patch of floor. What is a big deal to an ant is nothing to us. We’re so tall that we have a ‘bird’s eye view’ in comparison to an ant. We see the big picture. Compared to us, elves don’t panic over little things.

Going back to my experience with the emotional singularity. It’s like most of us live our lives going through one emotional phase after another, like different coloured tiles on the floor. On one colour we feel this way – on another colour we feel that.

I’ve been in this depression for so long that I’ve gained a more ‘elvish’ perspective – more of a bird’s eye view. I’m not just experiencing one tile at a time anymore but am able to see the whole room and every individual tile within all at once. I recognize all the different colours, acknowledge their impact on my life, while recognizing that they’re all a part of the same room. I am thankful for some things and not so much for others. I feel both emotions at once, but different emotions about different things. It’s not contradictory – it’s just a change of perspective.

This too shall pass

One thing that helped me, from a point of emotional healing, was having early morning walks. I don’t mean crack of dawn – I mean before dawn.

I have always naturally been a late sleeper. It’s the way my body seems to naturally want to operate. I think it’s referred to as Delayed Sleep-Wake Phase. In my autobiography I referred to it as the Nightwatchman – the theory that, in the ages of tribal survival, mankind adapted to having a few members of each grouping be naturally inclined toward late night alertness, so that someone is always watching the camp.

I am more awake at night. My body wants to go to sleep in the morning. And afternoons are generally my ideal waking up time. In the rare times of my life where I found myself on an earlier sleep cycle for a week or more, I would be waking up and going to bed around the same time as everyone else, getting the same amount of sleep as I would on my natural cycle, but would be tired and less productive all day. The ‘normal’ sleep cycle doesn’t seem to work for me.

So, early morning walks had become a favourite thing to do right before going to bed. Even before I hit my depression – they were a common way that I would gather my thoughts, reconnect with nature and God, and then fall asleep with a mind at ease. During my depression though, it switched from a common pastime to an important healing factor.

I said at the top that I specifically mean pre-dawn walks. There’s a reason for this. Though not a requirement for the common walks I was already doing, the decision to specifically go for a walk before the break of dawn was psychological. On some mornings I would intentionally go out while it was still dark (not far from the house, to be safe – we do have coyotes in our area).

But I would go out while it was still physically ‘night time,’ and start my walks then – in the dark – barely able to see anything more than my next step. I would try to time it so that the sky would be turning from black to grey or dark blue before too long, because the point wasn’t to wander in the dark for a long time – the point was to be there when morning broke.

It was important for me, and healing for my soul, to go out while it was still night, be walking around as the world was slowly turning to morning, and then witness the first rays of sunlight as they broke through the trees. I needed, in some way, to have real life, physical, observable, experiential proof that the night does not last forever. That it has an end. That the world turns despite what I am going through, and despite my active involvement or lack there of, and that turning of the world forces the night to retreat. Long as the night might be – it does not last forever.

I needed to experience that, at regular intervals, throughout the early years of my depression. It put things in perspective, and I found it helped me to have hope.

Thank you for reading this. If you missed my first post on depression, and my advice to those suffering as well as advice to friends and family of those suffering, you can find it at this link.

This content was originally posted on Medium. You can read the original post at this link.