Am I allowed to be depressed?

Existential Experts! Graham here.

We're testing out a brand new feature this week: an advice column.

Gasp!

For a while now I've been wanting to build in more opportunities for interaction.

Over on the Patreon, the contributing members and I have been cooking up ways for people to come together online for a chat about life, the universe and feelings.

Meanwhile, here on the main feed, I want to try answering a few of your big feelings-related questions.

I'm calling this feature the "Existential Crisis Line". For those questions you can't always ask your therapist.

It’s not really going to be ‘advice’. More like, you ask me a question, I write some impassioned words reflecting on said question, and we both think (hopefully) ‘well that was interesting. I still don’t have an answer, but I've got a few more questions to think about.’ 

Here goes...

Existential Crisis Line #1

Our first question is a doozy. . . 

"Do you think there’s a misconception in our society that people are only allowed to feel depressed if something really awful has happened to them? And is there any merit to that idea? I have friends, a great boyfriend, a good job. But I still get really depressed. Am I just ungrateful?"

Big question! Let's dive in?

'My life is fine on paper, but...'

So, here’s the number one thing I hear from people through the Big Feels Club:

‘My life on paper is fine. But I feel like a complete failure, and it makes no sense!’ 

I’m hearing echoes of this in today’s question.

I can trot out the usual reminders that depression is something people experience regardless of how well life seems to be going. In that vein, to answer your first question: yes, absolutely there’s a misconception that depression only ‘makes sense’ if there’s some kind of life situation that appears to explain it. 

I do think that misconception is slowly shifting. But here’s the thing. Even if you know all that, it doesn’t change the bewildering nature of the experience when you’re the one who’s depressed.

Given all the helpful explanations in the world, or reminders that you’re not alone, it’s still really goddamn confusing to not have an answer to that burning question:

‘Why me? Why do I feel like this, and why now?’

'Maybe I'm just ungrateful?'

In the absence of an answer to that question ('why do I feel like this?') we tend to go to a place of blame.

‘If I feel this awful, I must *be* awful. Other people have it so much worse… maybe I’m just ungrateful?’

And I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t tend to make me feel any better.

I’ve met the criteria for ‘severe depression’ on most of the GP mental health plans I've ever filled out. Eventually, that little depression and anxiety questionnaire just became my regular reminder that, to most people, my way of being in the world probably doesn’t make all that much sense.

I’ve had a few explanations offered to me over the years – the theory of chemical imbalance, the role of trauma. At different times these have been useful, but they’ve never really outdone that original explanation for sheer, gut-punching clarity: ‘there must just be something wrong with me.’

When 'why' stops being useful 

So over the years I’ve come to wonder if, for me, maybe this question of ‘why I feel like this’ just isn’t that useful anymore?

To quote Wittgenstein (or really Contrapoints quoting Wittgenstein), some questions can’t be solved. Instead they must be dissolved.

Maybe that ever-present question (‘why me, why now?’) is one of those questions?

Life grief

So here’s a different idea. It doesn’t answer the eternal question ‘why’, but see if it’s useful?

It’s an idea my Big Feels Club co-Founder Honor Eastly talks about.

'Life grief.'

Life grief is the slow, burning conviction that your life has gone horribly wrong. That somewhere along the line, you’ve made all the wrong decisions, and it’s too late to do anything about it. 

Life grief can strike at any time. In fact, it often hits you when by all objective measures things are going well. When you’ve just reached the top of some metaphorical mountain you’ve spent years climbing only to suddenly think… ‘Shit. What if I climbed the wrong mountain??’

Or life grief can hit you when things are just so-so – not great, not terrible, but everyone else around you is climbing mountains of their own and you think, ‘I don’t even have a mountain. Where did I go wrong?’

Depression and grief

I like this term, 'life grief', for a couple of reasons. 

One, it draws on an experience that, culturally, we’re at least a little more comfortable with than depression: Grief. 

From the outside, grief and depression don’t look all that different – except that in the case of grief, there’s a clear and present event that’s triggered it. Unlike depression, we have rituals for grief, we collectively make space for it – to a point.

But – and this is the second reason I like the grief analogy – ask anyone who’s experienced a profound loss, and they’ll likely tell you: in the end, it didn’t especially help that people knew ‘why’ they were feeling how they were feeling. 

In the first few weeks, sure, there’s that superficial understanding, even if most people still don’t know what to do or say to help. But when six months have passed, or a year, or multiple years, and you still feel blown apart? Most people stop even trying to relate. And well, the ‘why’ stops mattering.

Feelings you can't explain

And that’s the thing with life grief too. You can’t explain to your friends and family why you feel this way (or why you still feel this way). Why you’re so sure your life has all gone wrong. You can’t explain it to them because you can’t explain it to yourself. And that can be an incredibly lonely place to be, especially if you feel like you’ve been there for years. 

But it’s also a deeply human experience, to feel like absolute shit and not know why. 

To me, this is both the heart of the deepest pain to be had in the experience of depression, and at the same time, the core of the most profound lesson it can teach us. 

That sometimes there is no ‘why’.

An experience that needs to be felt

You can see this as a sign of your individual failings (god knows there are days when I still see it this way). But on good days, more and more, I somehow seem to take it less… personally?

You’re living through an experience that maybe can’t be fully explained, that can only be born, sat with, lived through.

An experience that – like grief – maybe needs to be felt, needs to be processed, but that our culture doesn’t have space to hold just yet. So instead it sits with you, and you’ll hold it as best you can.

Why not me?

On these good days, if I’m feeling particularly grandiose, I even sometimes glimpse that same old question – ‘why me?’ – in a new light. 

Well, why not me? If someone has to feel this way, at least I’ve mostly got my basic life needs sorted right now (‘my life is good on paper’), so there’s room for whatever this is — today at least. 

As Buddhist Nun Pema Chödrön puts it, to see this not as your pain but as ‘the pain’ – part of the collective, often bewildering pain of human existence. And to hold our piece of it as best we can, while we have to. Even when we don’t know why.

Bodie, having the opposite of an Existential Crisis.

Want to share your thoughts, or ask a question of your own?

I'd love to hear what you think of this topic.

I'll share a few of your responses when we do another edition of the Existential Crisis Line. Click the button below to share.

Want to send in a question yourself?

Please do! 

My first thought is this may work best with open, philosophical questions like today's one, rather than getting too much into life specifics? But I could be wrong about that, so let’s just see what you’ve got, and I’ll see what comes out in response…?

(I'll just answer the ones I feel I have useful thoughts on, so if I don't get to yours, it's not you, it's definitely me.)

Click the button to submit your question...