Optimism About Pessimism

Good news, readers: I probably have a mild, but chronic, form of depression--and I've probably had it for a long time. My counselor's take: Dysthymia--literally, "bad state of mind"--the less dramatic, but longer lingering, "functional" cousin of major depression.

WAIT! Don't go away! This isn't a sad post! It's an optimistic post. No, really. (As such, I plead for your pardon in advance of any clichéd, "self-actualizing" speak.)

Now, of the (thankfully) small number of you who read these entries, at least a couple are thinking, "Jesus, it's about time we started calling a spade a spade." (Very well--we'll chalk one up for stubbornness.) And since the rest of you are very close and dear, you're not likely surprised either, even if I'm way too square for substance abuse and way too nerdy to drop out of school.

How does realizing that I'm stuck in a psychological rut qualify as good news? Because now I know what I need to do to leave it. Since such a condition is clearly not something to be managed alone, I can stop feigning that my pervasive distress will organically resolve itself over time. My childhood mantra, steeped in all the hardheaded resolution of the terrible twos, threes, fours, and onward--"Do it self!"--will not work here. And for the first time, that doesn't worry me.

Last week was a particularly disheartening week, and I would be delusional if I claimed to be free of heartbreak and doubts. But sometime afterward, perhaps by a combination of grace, desperation, and illness-induced delirium that somehow led to clarity, a few thoughts finally entered my head and stayed there: I've been generally distressed about my entire existence for longer than any "slump" should last. This is senseless and isn't going anywhere.

An analogy for this epiphany, if you will: My 7th grade life science teacher once showed us a video in which an incorporeal scholar narrated the behavior of caterpillars that instinctively follow each other in a line as they inch along in search of food. The camera had zoomed in on a few caterpillars, each fuzzy tail dutifully followed by another fuzzy head. They were so cute and helpless, yet so charmingly determined. Our out-of-body narrator had moved to a broader subject, but the camera still focused on the caterpillars--only it began to pan out slowly, so that instead of a few caterpillars, we saw a line of ten or so, traveling in the same direction as another adjacent line of caterpillars. The camera panned out further, showing even more lines of caterpillars, scooting forward, side-by-side and head-to-tail. Something was amiss, but I didn't yet know what. The camera continued to zoom out, slowly revealing a terrible scene: hundreds upon hundreds--if not thousands--of caterpillars blindly scooting in the concentric loops of a massive spiral at whose center they simply stopped moving or piled up on top of each other, presumably never finding food. I was horrified.

It was kind of like that. And when I finally saw that my proverbial caterpillars were leading me absolutely nowhere, I decided to look back to determine the point at which they set out on the road to nowhere. Suffice it to say that I had to look a long way back to find the first red flag, but what really triggered my current state, I determined, was my freshman year of college.

Almost everything about freshman year made me feel hopelessly helpless--all the lost documents, the volatile roommates, the in-your-face political radicalism, the art instructor who had a private meeting with me to call me a xenophobe (a foreign languages major who teaches ESL and opted to live with international students? Really?), my obsessive rationing of food and excessive exercise, etc.--but by the time most of these things happened, I was already steeped in bitter pessimism.

The result of this journey through time was a compelling list of reasons, extending well beyond purely emotional symptoms, why I might have at least some form of depression. This realization came as a tremendous relief, because I could do something about it! In fact, by this time, I had already made an appointment with a new psychologist. That appointment happens tomorrow.

I was never so optimistic about pessimism in my life.