Colour, and Coping

(Apologies in advance for how crappily-written this is. It’s late and I’m tired, but I wanted to post it anyway.)

Pretty much the defining characteristic of qualia is that they’re unsharable. They keep us in our own little bubble-world of sensations, and we’ve no idea what the same ostensible feeling feels like for anyone else. ‘Do the colours of the rainbow look the same to everyone?’ sings Badly Drawn Boy. We can’t even rely on another’s descriptive account as a measure of sensation, however evocative. We’re up in a second-order (at least) stratum, where we’re concerned not with feelings, but with how feelings feel. And we’ll never know.

This is relevant today because I want to write something about depression, which is as defined in terms of qualia as is the colour red. And, of course, just as unsharable because of that. Sure, descriptions of others’ experiences of depression might ring bells here and there, but that first-order stuff isn’t expressive enough. I’d learn as little as from someone describing that red is the colour of blood, or of poppies.

And that’s relevant today because I’m reluctant to write about depression at all. I’m reluctant to write about it, because I’m reluctant to see myself as someone who experiences depression. Because of being stuck in a feeling of being unable to buy into others’ depressive qualia — unable to trust in any parity between my qualia and their descriptions of qualia — all of my reluctances grab hold and tell me that, no, I don’t really get depressed, not me.

It’s an odd stigma, but it’s not the one you might expect. It’s not that depression is too hard a thing to propose — indeed not, I’m fucked up enough to think sometimes that there’s something appealingly complex and brooding and damaged about the artfully depressed. It’s that it’s too easy a thing to propose. It feels like proposing that a psychological dog ate my psychological homework. Oh, I’m sorry that I wasted years of my PhD supervisor’s time with an aborted thesis, it’s just that the psychological dog ate my psychological homework. Oh, I’m sorry that I’ve been neglecting my friends and family for several years at least. It’s just that pesky psychological dog chomping on my homework again. Tsk, tsk. Sorry about that.

See? That’s way too easy. It has the ring of excuse, rather than cause. And yet I do know that something’s up. And yet I feel that it’s not. And yet I know that it is. And yet I feel that it’s not.

Cut to a couple of weeks ago, when I was somewhat taken by a realisation — one of those things which probably is too obvious for me to have noticed before. It came as a potential answer to the question of why I’ve only relatively recently seriously even considered whether I ought to think about applying the d-word to myself, yet haven’t felt significantly different in quality. Days that feel the heaviest have definitely been deeper and more frequent during the past three or four years, but only in degree. Things can be a slog sometimes, but I manage okay, as I always have.

Rather than stubbornly proposing that the lack of change in quality of qualia is because this just isn’t depression, I started to consider whether things feel the same for me on some underlying level because depression has always been there. It’s not a cheery thought, but it has a plausibility to it. The remaining question would then collapse to why things have become somewhat worse during the past few years — joking aside, I do think that depression was at least one of the things that killed my PhD.

So I was thinking about introversion — again, I know — and it occurred to me that introversion might always have been rather more than a positive social and psychological preference. What if the extremities of my introversion have always partly existed as a coping mechanism for dealing with the threat (or presence) of depression — even before I understood what depression was, never mind before I consciously wondered if it might be personally relevant for me? Introversion is always a kind of coping mechanism anyhow, of course — as is extroversion, for that matter — but the specific idea that I might have been using introversion to cope with depression struck me as a good one. If it became instinctive early in childhood — as it probably would have done — then the twin functions of my introversion would have become blurred and blended, and then subsequently hard to tease apart. I’d merely look like a misanthropic hermit to anyone who cared to look.

To be clear: even without depression there’d be plenty of the misanthropic hermit about me — and that’s something I’m quite comfortable with. It’s who I am, and I mostly like me quite a lot. But add depression to that, and then a coping mechanism based on intensifying the introversion, and what you have is something that’s neither healthy nor sustainable.

It’s particularly not sustainable when the small, quiet, simple life such introversion inevitably creates is exploded into something much bigger, richer, and more complex, which is how things have developed for me during the last few years. I’ve sought, and embraced, a much fuller life. I think the old coping mechanisms have struggled to maintain a psychological balance, however, and from time to time they’ve collapsed, leaving me in an unfamiliar position of emotional exhaustion. Dealing with that has often involved not dealing with it: merely curling into a foetal ball and wishing all the world’s complexity away. By the time I was ready to face things, the world’s complexity had made quite a mess for me to clear up. Or allow to get even worse, depending.

I’m not entirely sure where this is heading, except that I think I’ve reached a place where I’m comfortable saying that for several years at least I’ve been experiencing some increased degree of depression, perhaps at least partly because my old instinctive coping mechanisms based on extreme introversion don’t work so well any more. I’m sure I’ll come back to it, but I don’t intend this blog to become one of those daily emotional barometers: today will be gloomy with occasional breakdowns. It’s enough for now to write this, and to resolve that once I’ve got health insurance back (long story), I’ll work to get the ologies on my side too. Coping mechanisms are dandy, but SSRIs are quicker, as Ogden Nash didn’t say. The point isn’t not to talk about depression. The point is not to settle for it.