A JAIL CREATED BY AN UNBALANCED PERCEPTION OF REALITY:
Mistrust and catastrophism about oneself, others and the future generate depression.
Depression is a torrid cold. A disease of the spirit that becomes yellowish as a result of only conceding the gift of truth to the past. It is a conclusion about life which works like a burial from which one sometimes strolls limply and lamely, like the living dead. In search of a little sugar to savour and distract from the pain and helplessness but when consumed it leaves you licking your fingers and in the biggest condemnation of this world which is having to choose. And then that doubt is created about whether I am doing the right thing. A doubt that is a haze of guilt that becomes stagnant like a puddle in the person’s gaze.
Depression is living constantly correcting life and correcting oneself through attack or guilt (which is the same); through punishment because of fear of error, and without forgiving the nature of life and of the human being that is to “err”, also understood as a wandering in infinity and eternity.
Some are silent when they do not know, and in that silence they implore life, like Leopoldo Maria Panero when he said: “One day I will have the nobility to stop writing, but the silent hand still crawls for the paper”.
The muddy soil of depression is time. Time that is left over and weighs heavily and in which one sinks, reclaiming a meaning or motive from a flavourless logic without knowing towards what or who. And in a state of anguish in that diabolical question that insidiously appears constantly in the mind: for what?
And, as Dostoyevsky said: “We must love life more than its meaning.” To which Albert Camus replied: “For when love for life is lost, no meaning can console us.”
Depression is death in life. It is a life of enduring and having had enough. A demand sheltered in boredom and addiction that causes you to be continually consuming that arrogant and complaining feeling of knowing more than life and of feeling superior to it. And at the same time pontificating what is right and what is wrong from a lonely and stinking throne.
Depression is a dawn that sucks. Depression is a “no”; it is to live in the “no”.
As psychologist Beck said, “There is a cognitive triad in depression of dysfunctional beliefs that have to do with mistrust and catastrophism about oneself, others, and the future.”
Others like Levinshon talk about the theory of overexposure to effort. That is people who have lived very intensely and now nothing satisfies them. As if they lived, in the words of Joaquin Sabina: “Going over the box of ashes that pleasure left behind itself. ” And that if it was left it was probably because of an addiction to intensity without realizing that: “perhaps peace is the most intense experience that exists” as my great friend and brother Victor Jimenez says.
Depression is a weird and strange world! Jim Morrison also sang: “People are strange when you are strange.” An interior nauseating place where fear and anguish live…
A place where it is very cold. Where the torches weaken before the storms of confusion. An empty place where the wind of imprecise threats swarm and do not abate. Where the compass of the mind goes crazy and in which only the bare heart can enter.
It is a kingdom with a silent law, pregnant with punishment and condemnation, where the end lurks and the shadow of loss happens like a dying sunset. It is a twilight that is not serene. It is a mermaid that suggests waste and delirium.
How can we conquer that kingdom if we do not carry a moving and joyous style, full of love and dance in every place, praying and proclaiming one’s devotion to life? How to do it without falling into the banality of the grotesque and the superficiality of an undetermined insecurity?
The most commonly used therapy by psychologists today is “behavioural activation” which consists of doing things that you like or you would like to like. Overriding your emotional state and not waiting to “feel good” to do it because that would be like putting the cart before the horse.
In my opinion and experience this therapy is an option to finding the answer but it does not dissolve that hunting trap that one is in. Depression becomes chronic when you wallow in the web of the victim and egoic self-pity, in which you find a certain power and immobility because it gives you a fictitious peace, the peace of the dead. The therapy of cognitive restructuring tries to crumble the black castle of our beliefs by reducing it to absurdity and Socratic irony. But it is a treatment that only clears the way. It works with what it is not, without touching the being of the person. With this therapy there is no catharsis. There is no such explosion that necessarily brings the recitation of your being to the ends of the universe. Yes, that’s how I found myself on my first ayahuasca session, seeing myself as a monkey with a bone and pounding the ground while a primal scream opened the rusty hinges of the floodgates of my heart.
If you see yourself with a furrowed brow you should know that it is not because of the sun outside. It is because of another internal sun that burns you from the inside and that bids impetuously to get out.
The only thing that can awaken you from that bitter dream is a cry of inner freedom. A cry that melts the depression with a spring light. A light that will not appear on the horizon until you fully immerse yourself in the night. Not until you have dived deep within yourself, not until you appear on that purple beach where the moonlight reigns showing you your true desire and the essence of what really matters. Only when you are there, on that purple beach, will you feel the dawn of gratitude for living again. For it is there that everything becomes understandable. Because behind all pain there is a story and in that story you will inevitably find beauty…
We are adrift and for some like Schopenhauer: “We can not aspire to a happy life, but to a heroic life” even though sometimes one gets tired of fighting. Others say that constant struggle is the root of the problem and that we must surrender ourselves with patience and trust in life’s hands so that it makes love to us sweetly and slowly. But in depression, that slowness is a paralysis. A succession of yellow and black strobe images like those of the negatives of the photos that don’t mean anything, spitting dumb and mute pain with contempt in your face.
I could not have written this if I did not feel what you feel, brother and sister. So if you are depressed and want to reconnect with the source of life, come to get to know us. Because although I don’t know you, I love you and I wanted to extend forth my soul in what I write here so that we can hold hands in some place of time and space, either ethereal or material, and feel close, neither of us feeling alone.
What’s up with us is that we don’t know what’s up with us, said Ortega y Gasset. Or maybe it’s time to stop questioning life, in the jail that is questioning …
Depression is pressure. Pressuring you and putting pressure on life. Apprehending you, imprisoning you, squeezing you. It is an existential self-molesting anger whose goal it is is to submerge you into a bizarre and horrible amnesia. An amnesia of disaffection and cosmic orphanhood feeding you dirty rags and chewing the sawdust of boredom, constantly engulfing you with your hatred for yourself.
Which is the way out? I don’t know. Where do you want to get out of? Of life, of death?
It is possible to navigate serenely in incomprehension, with our hand on our heart and at the same time caressing our innocence and impotence. It is possible to wake up love and for our whole face to become illuminated with the astonishment of a child again. And it is possible to surprise yourself and be surprised with life, while you laugh at the arrogance with which one day you wanted to slit your throat.
Sergio Sanz Navarro
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