Perfectly Imperfect

I’ve spent some time thinking about an event that went well, but not perfectly. Afterwards, I felt satisfied. Mostly satisfied, anyway. I tend to over-plan things, which means that if you come to my house for dinner, I am more likely to have everything ready ten minutes early rather than ten minutes late. This isn’t great, because that means the food will be cold, or even over-cooked, because I shot for the stars and landed on the rooftop, but the rooftop is still cold.

Anyway, I wonder a lot about what causes depression and what causes happiness. I’m not at all sure that the current model of depression being “bad brain chemicals” is at all useful. If it works for you, great, but my personal experience is, well, mixed. As far as I can tell scientifically, doctors don’t fully understand why SSRI’s seem to help depressed people. Most depressed people are best helped by medication AND therapy, but I’m not sure we fully understand that, either. Is it the attention? The social need for affirmation? Is it important that the therapist be trained in one or another discipline or will a good friend or a cleric of an accepted religion be just as good?

The other problem in my personal experience with depression is that I’ve watched myself enough to see that things that might be good in one interpretation can be twisted by my brain into something that “proves” how terrible I am as a human being, and can actually trigger more suicidal thoughts, sometimes because I know I should be made happy by this thing and the fact that I am not must mean something is wrong with me. There is no real objective “good” or “bad” thing as far as my brain is concerned. It is determined to interpret everything that comes in as meaning whatever my brain has decided that the world means right now. When I am happy, that means that I’m not fazed by unexpected results and when I am depressed, a big success might do no more than give me a blip of pleasure that fades in seconds.

In this particular case, an event that I was nervous about turned out better than expected. I did spend time nit-picking various things I wished I had done better. I guess my brain is wired for this. It’s a good thing in certain ways and a bad thing in other ways. But the things my brain decided to offer up for improvement next time were small enough in comparison to the purely good things that I didn’t feel any trigger into depression. Maybe this means that I am doing something “right.” I’m not on a depression medication, but I am working regularly with a therapist. Does that mean I’m never going to be suicidal again?

Sigh. Probably not.

I am trying to leave a record to future suicidal me so that she will remember that whatever her brain is doing to interpret things in a dark and horrible light might be reconsidered. Or maybe just shouted back against. Brains are funny things. We don’t realize how much they are doing in the background, telling us what things are and what they mean and how they fit together, until suddenly they’re not doing it the way that we think they should. Or maybe I should put it a different way. It’s only when we’re thrust out of a normal world that we start to see the cracks that were always there. Maybe depression is an important thing to experience, to force us to see that our brains aren’t letting us see any reality in an unfiltered way. Maybe this is why depression is so clearly linked to artistic minds, and to madness. Because normal people don’t see the cracks, and sometimes we wish we didn’t, either. But we do.