I want to talk about depression and desire.
Let me back up first and describe what kind of depression I’m talking about. I have been seriously depressed for over ten years. I find it terrifying (and dreadfully depressing) to say that. It has ebbed and flowed, worsened and improved, throughout that time, but it has never gone away. I’ve been trying for a long time to accept that it probably never will. Of the many ways I describe my depression, one is that it feels like an actual being, that is alive, wholly separate from me, living inside my body (though I’m not sure it is contained by my body) and it is trying to destroy me by slowly taking away everything that is humanizing. Sort of like the kinds of giant tape worms that my 9th grade biology teacher was obsessed with, but one that is a shifting amorphous shape with sharp teeth and claws sticking out. I have no doubt that it is trying to killing me. It is not a parasite that needs to keep its host alive so it can live. I don’t know what it will do if it ever succeeds in killing me, but I’m sure it will celebrate this as a success. [In case you are worried reading this, I am in treatment for this and I have many different support structures set up to make sure that when it gets really, unbearably bad, I can find a way out. I am not currently in danger. The more I tell people, the less danger I am in. One of many things this post is doing is telling people. So now, hopefully, you can go on reading the post without worrying.]
My depression seeks to cut me off from the rest of the world because it grows bigger and stronger from isolation. When I try to tell anyone how depressed I am, that I am suicidal, my depression tightens my throat and chest, creates an instant headache, blurs my eyes, furrows my brow, and makes me gasp for breath. It is doing all of those things as I write this. If none of those work, it sickens my stomach and makes my mouth so dry that I gag. If I have not given up, if I am still trying to tell anyone, it makes me cry uncontrollably so that I cannot speak intelligibly. In other words, it is physical. I am not describing this metaphorically – it actually does all these things to my body. It has a physical presence that is palpable for me. It is as if the monster that is my depression can sense that it is going to be even slightly diminished when I speak about it out loud and so it claws and scratches, kicks and punches, furiously to make sure this does not happen. As a result of this, plus a mixture of shame, embarrassment, and a sense of futility, I rarely tell people.
When I am less depressed, I have desires for all kinds of things. Success, security, connection, love, sex, really amazing food. When I am less depressed I want to feel good in my body, to feel passionate about my work, to learn new things and deepen the things I already know. When I am less depressed I want to have adventures, see friends, flirt, discover new things about the city where I live. When I am less depressed I want to find new ways to fuck, I want to try out all of the unbelievable number of sex toys I own (from having worked for years in a sex toy shop), I want to act out fantasies, I want to find the tops who can push me to new places, I want to see how much pain I can take, I want to learn the edges of my sensations, I want to learn new things. When I am less depressed I want to perform, I want to dress up and wear ridiculous shoes and clothes that are way too tight, I want to look like a drag queen, I want to be seen and control that gaze. When I am less depressed I want stories to consume, in all the forms stories come in, books, tv, movies, radio, blogs, magazines, in person. This list could go on and on. You’re probably already guessing the next part. When I am deeply depressed, I can’t desire any of these things. When I am deeply depressed, I can barely muster up the desire to get out of bed. And some days I can’t even do that. I picture it like a pie chart, where in more normal times those hundreds of desires are all reasonably large slices, shifting in size depending on the situation. But when I’m this depressed they all shrink way down to tiny slivers, or even just dotted lines that are the memory of a sliver and they almost never budge. And all of that space from those formerly robust slices gets transferred over to one huge portion filling up the vast majority of the chart. That slice is of course the depression itself, which is the anti-desire, the desire for nothing, to cease to exist, to never have any more desires.
But today I had a very small realization about all of this. When this is my reality, even the slightest desire becomes a tiny, humanizing, anti-depression force. Before I had this realization I thought that the desires I am able to have in this state – the desire for coffee, for example – were basically worthless because they were so puny compared to the panoply of desires I can have other times. I was measuring it against the varied, dynamic portions of desire that I can want when I am in a semi-normal state. But that isn’t how it should be measured. Instead, if I see the depression as this thing that wants to let nothing, no desires, get through at all, then even one as insignificant as coffee – really good coffee from the place that is a 15 minute walk from my house where the baristas know me – is actually huge. It has gotten through the nets that try to stop it from rising to the level of actual desire. Clearly this desire can get me out of bed, out of the house, walking, talking to another person, tasting something, and possibly give me some amount of energy, so it is actually a very good desire. But those are not actually all required for a desire to have small anti-depressant qualities. Almost any desire becomes a little glimmer that there is something else inside of me that still exists, something that has not yet been consumed by the giant tape worm.
What I am trying to say is that today I realized that for me the ability to desire is the opposite of depression. (The one exception to this in my life may be the desire for cigarettes, which is about addiction even though I quit a long time ago.) So these desires need to be – carefully – listened to, fostered, cultivated. They are tiny little moments when my body can express something that the monster that is the depression does not want expressed. They are humanizing and connecting. They are of this world instead of the thing that is trying to remove me from it. They are good.
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