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Wednesday 7 June 2017

Mental Illness: You Or The Universe?

I've been pretty ill this past week. It wasn't an easy time, I was in a lot of pain, but I did what I could -- I sought medical help, took what was prescribed to me, let people know what was going on, accepted support and sympathy where they were offered, didn't blame myself, and took the time needed to heal. It was a tough thing to go through, but I faced it the right way, and it turned out to not be so bad.

I'm talking here about getting shingles, but I could just as easily be referring to a bout of depression. And yet, if my illness had been mental rather than physical, the likelihood is that I would have dealt with it in a very different way.

I tend to isolate myself when I am depressed. I work extra hard to pretend everything is fine. I suffer in silence. I don't ask for help. But, most of all, I really struggle with blame.

Either I blame myself, for being weak, for being pathetic, for being a coward, and suffer the pains of guilt and shame and embarrassment, or else I blame the universe for foisting this misery upon me, and I drown in self-pity.

I doubt these feelings are unique to me. There is still such a taboo against mental illness in our culture, especially among men, emotionally cut-off as we often are, dealing with outmoded concepts of masculinity -- having to be the strong one, the breadwinner, the head of the household -- as we often are.

We're terrified of something unseen affecting our will, our resolve, our sense of self. We feel if something goes wrong with our ability to want, to care, to hope, then something horrendous has gone wrong with us, in a way that we don't when we have a problem with our leg, say, or our liver, or, as is the case with shingles, our skin and nerves.

The thing is, despite decades of knowledge garnered from neuroscience, psychotherapy, quantum mechanics, philosophy, countless other varied disciplines, our common understanding of the relationship between our mind and our body, between our body and the universe, between self and other, is pretty much stuck in the Dark Ages.

Here is my bold statement for this post: There is no point blaming either yourself or the universe for your depression, because in truth you are the universe, and the universe is you.

I'm going to get a bit trippy here, but let's go for it...

Everything in the universe, right, is made of the same stuff. This stuff cannot be seen, or known, because it has no opposite. There is nothing that isn't it with which it can be contrasted. It is all that there is.

Everything that we think of as individual things, including you and me, is simply this universal stuff arranged into different structures.

Bear with me here. Let's say you made, I don't know, a child's fort out of chairs in your dining room. The fort itself wouldn't be an intrinsic thing, it wouldn't be made of "fort", it would simply be an arrangement, a structure, of chairs.

And yet a chair is not an intrinsic thing, either. It is an arrangement, a structure, of smaller things, known as atoms. And atoms are not intrinsic things -- though we thought they were when we discovered them, hence the name, which is Greek for "unable to cut". But atoms are not atomic, they are simply structures of smaller things, of electrons and protons and neutrons. And electrons and protons and neutrons are not things themselves, but structures of quarks and leptons and gluons and the like. And these fizzly bitty little things may have been named "fundamental particles" (rather quixotically, I feel), but what can we expect to find, if we are ever able to peer down inside them, other than more arrangements, more structures?

There is an emptiness going all the way down. In place of substance, of matter, of stuff, we find instead shapes, patterns, space. Relationship. A dance of order and chaos. All of it joined with all of the rest of it.

Or, OK, try this: At the moment of the Big Bang everything occupied the same point in space. All of space, in fact, occupied the same point in space. And then it exploded. Simple structures were formed, and began themselves to form into more complex structures. Atoms arranged themselves into the lightest elements, hydrogen and helium and such.

As these arrangements cooled they formed together into stars. And the immense pressures at the centres of these stars pushed the structures of atoms together with such force that some of the structures were broken or fused together into new patterns. Yet more patterns were created in the supernovae of dying stars. And, in such ways, every single element that makes up our world was created. Carbon, oxygen, magnesium... byzantium... rope... jam. The whole periodic table. There is no difference between any element in existence save the way its electrons, protons, and neutrons are structured -- like different forts all made from the same chairs.

Anyway, some of these structures of atoms, after taking their bloody time about it, eventually arranged themselves together into our Earth. And some of our Earth's structure eventually arranged itself together into a type of energy transfer we call life. Some forms of life evolved structures called brains. Many didn't, such as fungi and jellyfish, and these lifeforms seemed fairly content to be brainless, and survived well. But among the lifeforms that did evolve brains, a tiny minority eventually developed their brains to a level where they could invent chess, and the Sistine Chapel, and poetry, and the Beatles, and cheese on toast, and this was all rather nice.

But every power contains within it its own flaw. To be able to fly, you must run the risk of falling. To be able to float, sometimes you must sink. And for the human brain to be able to care, to dream, to hope, it must run the risk of this hope faltering. To love, it must risk depression.

So this is what I say to you: When you get depressed, you can blame the fucking stars, if you wish -- although remember that the stars are you, are burning outwards through your very eyes. Or you can blame yourself, if you wish -- although remember that you are but a permutation, a unique expression, of the whole vast interconnected universe.

Or, alternatively, you can drop the blame game altogether. Stop beating yourself up for being depressed. Stop beating the universe up for making you depressed. Recognise that depression is just an unfortunate thing that happens, like a breaking a leg, or catching a cold, or getting shingles. It is an obstacle before you, one that you would never have wished for, but one that is here -- and you can face it in a way that helps, or a way that does not help.

Be brave. Reach out. Accept support. I can tell you honestly that there will be people out there who will be there for you, if you look for them. I am there for you. We are all in this together. We all are this together.

Keep going. You are incredible. You can do this.

[A final, brief note: I am aware of a couple of scientific inaccuracies in this piece that I couldn't be bothered to write out. Electrons are not, in fact, of the same order as protons and neutrons, i.e., comprised of quarks held together by gluons, but rather fundamental particles in their own right, of the family of leptons. Also, technically not *all* of the elements of the periodic table were formed in the ways I stated; 26 "man-made" elements were created in nuclear power plants and inside particle accelerators. But as my main thrust is that man him-or-her-self is in fact a function of nature, I didn't figure this required time wasting upon it. But just in case you were worried that I didn't know, I did. Any other errors, however, I have made because I am a nincompoop, and if you find them you can go "nurr-nurr" at me.]

Saturday 3 June 2017

Would You Just... Stay Upbeat?

Well, that’s another couple of days got through. Spent yesterday zonked out on meds, napping in front of Netflix (I’d barely slept the night before again), trying not to concentrate on the pain. The blisters were starting to scab over, and the burning, stinging pain wasn’t as intense, but I was nauseated and dizzy, and my head was aching I guess right down the major nerves to the eye and the ear and up the forehead. It made me feel seasick to try to read or to watch anything too frenetic, and when I closed my eyes it was like my vision was being pulled in different directions and I was tumbling slowly over, and my stomach would lurch and I’d have to snap my eyes open again, so I mostly just lay in bed and ate painkillers and tried not to think. It was a pretty bad day.

Things were a little better this morning, though -- I’d had the tumbling lurching sensation for a few hours in the night, somehow horrifically more torturous lying alone in that silent darkness, but I had eventually fallen asleep, and then I slept through until around 10am today. When I awoke the scabs were dryer and the burning pain was again lessened. The other symptoms were still extant, but I felt well enough to shower and apply wet compresses to my face and then to get dressed and potter around a little. I did some light exercises, tidied my room, and helped my mum with some spring cleaning.

I’m utterly exhausted again now though. My eye is sore and the pain in my head is pulsing in and out, and it’s a struggle to see this screen.

Shingles sucks, basically. But I suppose when I think of all the things that could be wrong with me, this is still fairly low on the list. It’s painful, but there are worse pains, and hopefully it’s already getting better. And when I think that I live in a time and place where I can get diagnosed and given treatment rapidly, where I can sign myself off work without losing my job, where there’s a bed and Netflix and boxes of painkillers available to ease my suffering -- the truth is that I’m still pretty damn lucky, and I’m going to choose to remember that, to be grateful for that.

I hope you can also find something to be grateful for tonight. Even if it's small, hold onto it. It matters. Take care x

P.S. Here’s what I look like today. If you can believe it I am actually attempting a smile.

Thursday 1 June 2017

Would You Just... Accept The Things You Cannot Change?

Another day that has been precisely no fun whatsoever. The shingles rash has grown into large, painful blisters that are beginning to ooze fluid, my vision has gone blurry and teary in my right eye, and I’ve got a headache, dizziness, and mild nausea. Plus the cocktail of different medications I’m taking has left me wiped out. I didn’t sleep last night, and I’ve been dozing on and off today, trying to watch episodes of things and read, but unable to concentrate. I’m staggering painkillers to get the most use out of them, but they don’t have much effect.

But it’s all right. It’s quite nice, in a way, to know what the problem is, to know that I’m doing everything possible to get through it. I find with my anxiety it’s easy to spend a lot of time worrying about what might happen, picturing how bad it could be -- so having found that something legitimately quite horrible has happened, it’s almost a relief to be able to simply face it, to quit worrying and instead deal with it.

And with depression as well you’re always fighting an unknown, unseen foe, chronic pain, yes, debilitating tiredness, yes, a lack of joy, a loss of hope -- but all as it were “in your head”, impossible to get your hands around, to truly understand. And because you never really know what it is, you never really know what to do to fight it.

Yet with the shingles here is something with obvious causes -- the varicella-zoster virus lying dormant in the roots of nerves -- with physical pain that is clearly understood, with medication to combat the worst of it, and with a good estimate of the duration of the suffering.

And so I am finding myself feeling remarkably Zen about the whole thing. It hurts, sure, but I’m doing everything I can about that. My face is a mess, but it will heal. I hope my eye isn’t being permanently damaged, but if there are complications then I’ll deal with them when they arrive. For now all I have to think about is eating soup, taking painkillers, letting the virus run its course.

Pretty much everything in life takes care of itself, I guess I’m saying. There’s no point worrying about anything other than what is in front of you, and even what is in front of you can only be handled to the best of your ability. Or, as those recovering alcoholics like to say:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 
Courage to change the things I can, 
And wisdom to know the difference.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s Zovirax and codeine time!

Step light x