Fits of Madness, and On Thinking Positively

I was rereading an fairly recent interview with famed Mac developer Wil Shipley on DrunkenBlog. To sum up, he's a fairly well-respected figure in Macintosh programming circles, and for good reason. He was one of the principal minds behind software powerhouse The Omni Group, and is now head of Delicious Monster, maker of the critically acclaimed Delicious Library.

One of the things that really lept out at me was this particular bit:

My discovery is that everyone I meet is broken in some way. As I've gotten to know my friends and business associates and girlfriends, I've discovered they all have some kind of problem with their emotions. And they all compensate for it in different ways, so it's hidden from other people most of the time.

Fits of Madness

There's certainly no shame in realizing that you're flawed. But we often lose sight of that. We build up massively overblown expectations of who we are and what we can do, and when we fail to meet those expectations -- as we invariably do -- we often tend to magnify our flaws, and dwell on them. And that leads to a whole variety of ways that we can deal with that. Which led me to this post on Shipley's own blog, linked to that article:

Depression is not glamorous. It's not like a movie. You don't get to get cured of it. You don't wake up one day and realize that life's tough, but there it is, so slap a smile on your face and keep on trucking. Some people have never dealt with depression, and they can't figure out how it's different from "being sad." "I've been sad! I don't whine about it! I just get over it." Yes, that's nice. Also, not the same.

Depression completely robs you of hope. You don't believe things can get better, and you don't believe anything is OK. You look around you and realize that everyone and everything you love is going to go away, sooner or later, and you don't believe anything good will replace them. Sometimes you just want to self-destruct: you get so tired of waiting for the things you love to abandon you, waiting for that shoe to drop, that you push them away pre-emptorily . Take that, you thing I love, now you can't hurt me, now I don't have to live in fear.

If I just stay in bed, and pull the covers around me; if I just unplug the phone, if I don't answer the mail, then whatever bad news is waiting for me can't get to me. If I can just sleep, and then just sleep some more, then I won't have to deal with it. Not now. I can't deal with it now. Maybe it'll go away on its own. Maybe I'll die and I won't ever have to deal with it.

I realize I'm probably overstepping my bounds since I've never been formally diagnosed with clinical depression, but I want to say that I feel that a lot of the underlying emotions that are felt by people who have to battle through this are emotions that a lot of "normal" people can relate to. Which is why I think that there's a special kinship that can be felt between the mental "haves" and "havenots" when it comes to depression. What Shipley said in his blog really resonates with me, because it reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a while ago. She told me that she just feels this overwhelming urge to just lay in bed and sleep all the time. And it seems silly to most people, perhaps, but to me, I said to myself, wow, in some perverse way it makes so much sense. When you sleep, you don't think about all of the things that are bothering you. And you don't have to do a thing about them.


On Positive Thinking

Which is the real challenge when you're trying to rationalize in your head all of things you should do keep afloat; to not just give up and let yourself be swept away by the current, caught in the undertow. For me, it's not a sense of dread over an impending and inevitable loss; it's just this constant fatigue from having to fight life or God or whomever and whatever is out there, every single step of the way. Why do things always have to be so hard? Why can't things run a little more smoothly? These are questions we ask all too often, but we never really see the meaning of them until the shit really hits the fan and we realize that what we worried about five minutes ago really didn't matter in the Grand Scheme of Things.

There's a quote I picked up a few months ago, one I ended up saving in my email .sig file:

"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."
- St. Augustine of Hippo, (354-430).

I think that's one of the keys to thinking positively. A sense of anger and frustration at the the way things are. Sure, it's possible that you may not be able to change a thing, but you did something, and that something will at least go to making your life better in some way. If you're going to be executed, you'd might as well go feeling comfortable.

We often associate anger with destructive, negative tendencies, but here I think it serves a valuable, constructive purpose: a driving force that pushes us to do things we otherwise thought we couldn't do. Maybe that's one of the things we could do to help us fight depression: be more angry -- at ourselves, at the world, at others...and then use that anger to make things better. I find it almost fitting that someone could in some way find help in improving themselves with something that we think makes us worse than what we are.