Jess lanai

Depression is an emotion I’m very curious about.

Because I want to know what it does.

I do not have depression. But I feel depressed often. More often than most people? I’m not sure.

If I were to average it out I’d say I feel depressed about three to fours times a week.

I do moderate my depressed feelings by doing things to counter them.

I have a bunch of different tricks to either jolt me out of or at least lessen a depressive moods.

Cold plunges are extremely effective. Exercise is extremely effective. Walks in nature. Cleaning or organizing my home. Eating healthy.

Another emotion I feel very often, four to five times a week on average, is awe.

I get awestruck a lot.

I can see a bug and get awestruck. Look at the sky and get awestruck. Read Kazuo Ishiguro (he’s really good at arranging his writing to invoke awe) I can watch a friend smile. I can think too much.

I’m highly prone to awe.

To me the feeling of awe is opposite to that of depression.

Awe actives my motivation, obsessions and confidence. It gives me drive and ambition.

Depression takes all that away.

That’s one of the theories behind depression, that it’s the give up emotion.

Helps us to stop wasting our energy on futility.

I certainly could use high doses of that. I do tend to get obsessed.

I’ll get obsessed on one guy and stay loyal to him even before I know whether or not he likes me.

I’ll give a hundred and ten percent to a job that has no promotion opportunities, just because I like the people I work with.

I’ll tie myself in knots trying to please friends that aren’t actually all that into me.

Depression isn’t such a bad emotion for me to feel. I’d probably save myself more time and energy if I let it take over once in a while.

Most of the things I’ve put my efforts into, by all traditional measurements of success, have been futile.

The friend I put the most effort into is no longer my friend.

The men I liked the most didn’t work out.

The jobs where I tried the hardest fired me.

If depression is the give up emotion it might be a necessary counter weight for my tendency to become obsessed.

But what about when depression is wrong?

I know it’s wrong a lot. Not everything that doesn’t have an immediate reward is futile. And not every reward needs to be big and shiny in a way that everyone can see it.

My writing for example, no one but me can imagine or understand how much I have improved. And how that improvement has translated to my life.

But writing is still a very long game that I could play until I die and still end up with nothing shiny.

The most interesting thing about writing is once I get going I start to realize I know more things than I thought I did.

Until this instant I thought of my depression as an effect of my mood. I didn’t think of it as an effect of my environment.

But now that I’m writing about it in a way to be understood by other people I’m realizing certain things.

That there is very specific things in my environment that can sink me into a depressive mood. That it’s not really fully my body chemistry.

If depression kills motivation then the question is what are the conditions in which motivation needs to be killed?

What happens that makes my body feel like motivation has become dangerous and needs to be extinguished?

To answer that I just have to look at what most motivates me and be really honest about it.

What makes me work harder?

It’s not money. It’s not power or promotion.

It’s feeling useful and helpful to a team.

That’s my strongest motivation.

So depression hits me most strongly when I feel like I’m not respected, trusted or valued intimately by my team.

Whether that’s my work team, my family team or my close friend team.

So maybe depression is effectively tying to kill the things it perceives as danger to my status.

It’s probably the hardest thing for most people to push through.

I’ve known women that won’t divorce abusive husbands for fear of being perceived badly by their friends and family.

I’ve known men that kill themselves for a job they hate just because it has the respect and admiration of their spouse or their family and friends.

This blog I’m careful with in the case that people I know and care about read it. I’d be afraid to get their judgment or lose their respect.

But I have some practice with that sort of thing. I did porn.

So it is easier for me to push through things like that to do and try things that might get me ridiculed.

It’s probably why I’m willing to tamper with depression and do things to move past it. On a deeper level I might know I can get to the other side even if I lose people in the process.