the depressed diaries

I. The Tunnel

As a detail-devotee, I tend toward myopia. Perhaps because of this, I have never been good at the type of documentation necessary to keep a journal. No matter how mundane a day feels when I am in it, when it comes time to write I somehow rediscover enough to overwhelm me, to leave me paralyzed, agonizing over what to include and what not to, wondering what is worth keeping, forever, as part of my written history, and what is just chatter.

Despite every previous foray into the habit failing, I started an email thread with myself in October 2020 and continued to reply in that thread until the end of February 2022 as a sort of digital journal. Partially responsible for my success on this attempt was that I did not intend this thread to be a diary of daily occurrences but rather a way to mark the periods of my life during which I was struggling the most with my mental health. One of my classmates had tweeted about doing something similar at the recommendation of his therapist with positive results and I hoped the same would be true for me. Given the subject matter, the emails were sporadic; there would be none for months and then one every day for a week straight.

In active periods of depression, my myopia intensifies while simultaneously my world thins. There feels like less to see, like there are less details to get stuck on, but those which do remain are made all the weightier for it. Consider this entry:

It was not, however, solely this depressive monotony I was struggling to cope with in my emails, nor was it solely responsible for my deepening myopia in this time period; the far more pressing issue was a profound, consumptive loneliness.¹ 

The thing about loneliness is that it builds on every other time you have ever felt lonely. No matter how old you are, how much distance you have put between yourself and your last loneliness, it will feel like yesterday as soon as it returns to you. Or, not even yesterday, but this very moment. When loneliness comes to you, you feel fourteen again, really feel it, like the you at age fourteen is coiled up against the surface of your being, pressing against the you of now, so close you can taste yourself, sour and shamefaced, rotting in your bedroom in the late summer evening heat, hearing the whole world outside your window and believing you are somehow apart from it.

And it’s not just those loneliest of lonely teenage years, but everything, everything. It’s the first night you ever spent away from your own bed — a sleepover, a hotel, a visit to your grandma’s house — and the feeling of the shadows on the walls being all wrong, of the texture of the ceiling being all wrong, of the knot inside of you being all wrong. It’s being awake in the dead of night and thinking for a moment that everyone else in the entire neighborhood must have gone somewhere because it’s too quiet for you not to be alone. It’s the end of a late night out, when the streets are empty and the warmth of the arms of the people you love around you is fading too quickly to beat the chill.

Maybe loneliness is just what we call the first touch of the self to the body, the wound that forms around the realization that we exist in this world in a discrete, measurable form. Maybe loneliness is what we find when we go seeking edges; maybe loneliness is the seeking.

II. The Track

In a social world, there is no unique self; it is always both nature and nurture, even when we can’t recognize the seams at which they join. We are taught that it is far easier to crush ourselves into line with the world around us than it is to bend the world out of its shape to accommodate us. We are taught that the world has heft. That it runs in deep tracks, and those in power keep the engines hot.²

In their 2016 novel The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing characterizes the current era as having undergone an emotional gentrification, wherein the range of our feelings have been flattened and homogenized. They write that “[a]midst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings — depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage — are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structure injustice or … to the native texture of embodiment.”

Broadly speaking (and you can imagine all the relevant caveats here), it is now easier to get medicated³ than to have real conversations with the people in your life. Therapy has become a must-have item on the well-adjusted-American checklist and therapy speak has taken an even more prominent significance than applying the tools therapy is supposed to teach. The focus is not so much on understanding the self and its consequences in relation to others — Laing’s “native texture of embodiment” — as it is on the promotion of “individualistic self-optimization.”⁴ Through consumption of a series of self-upgrades, individuals are hailed into the category of the conscientious, ‘lifemaxxed’⁵ consumer, one who lives (and purchases) according to the belief that everything wrong — in the world⁶ and in themself — can be diagnosed and therefore cured, for a price.

At a surface level, the destigmatization of mental health has been one of the most championed issues of the last decade. But the early wave of real progress has largely now been subsumed by the norm; well-known actors on television can recommend prescription pills for when you feel “a little blue” or “stressed out,” but anything more visceral and taboo rears its head.⁷ Even those more “acceptable” issues like depression and anxiety (seen as quirky but relatable, because admitting that everyone feels anxious or depressed sometimes is one of the signposts for being well-adjusted) become intolerable to the mainstream public as soon as they tip from a flimsy label of self-identification⁸ to a real obstacle being faced by a real, full-fledged person.⁹

The point I’ve been trying to get at is that mental health hasn’t actually been destigmatized so much as it has been given lots and lots of language. As Laing explains, “stigmatisation is a process designed to deny contact, to separate and shun; [it] serves to dehumanise and deindividualise, reducing a person from a human being to the bearer of an unwanted attribute or trait.” When you consider alongside this definition of stigma a cultural obsession with pathology and an identity politics oriented on labels, it is clear that the sheer volume of terminology given to mental health has not only done little to undo the stigma around it, but has actually strengthened it. By selling this “deindividualization”¹⁰  as self-actualization, the work of self-definition has been pushed aside for the pursuit of self-categorization, and the sense of separation inherent to stigma has been internalized at a breathtaking rate. Running every interaction through the lens of “Well, I have ____ disorder” is not actually the empowering narrative pop culture would like us to believe it is.

Laing rightly identifies loneliness as one of the main consequences of stigmatization, “which is further accelerated by shame, the two things amplifying and driving one another.” This goes some way to explaining the explosion of concern around “America’s loneliness epidemic” in recent news headlines.¹¹ This is not to suggest that loneliness, like the discourse around mental health, has emerged as a new topic of discussion in the last decade (its provenance is ancient!), but to highlight how it has become part of this feedback loop.

Our capitalist socioeconomic system, which relies on competition, naturally prioritizes individualism over collectivism. We are sold the idea that the more independent and self-reliant we are, the more liberated we are.¹² In his article, “We don’t exist without each other,” Chris Bagley claims “this conception [of individualism] promotes an idea that needing others is a pathology and not a fundamental human motivation as demonstrated in oodles of psychological research around belongingness.”¹³ The inherent isolationism of this system leaves us searching for belonging through avenues that feel accessible without having to sacrifice our “liberated” individualism. We feel pressured to identify with aesthetics, microtrends, identity labels — all various flattenings of reality — to avoid generating a sense of self as a lived-in position, which would require the contact we desire but are too afraid to seek, because, to put it bluntly, we are all lonely these days.¹⁴

While at first, identifying with something larger than the self generates a sense of belonging, it can actually prohibit connection when taken to the extreme. The desire to maintain individualism and the social pressure to fit into a targeted demographic combine to produce the erroneous belief that we are alone in our absolute categorization, that our long string of identities ultimately terminates at a population of one. In other words, the self becomes utterly obliterated for the sake of identifying, labeling, categorizing, etc.

The emptiness of chasing these disintegrations of the self further isolates us from ourselves and from community (genuine person-to-person connection), building stigma both internal and external. The potential for intimacy that group membership offers fails in light of this ultimate emptiness because “intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.”¹⁵ This insufficiency of intimacy and connection amplifies the loneliness and shame again, becoming a vicious cycle where every attempt to forge connection seems doomed to fail from the start. What can we do?

III. The Hole

One of my favorite lines from an op-ed (now overworked in some circles of the internet, but only because it cuts to the truth so well) is: “if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”¹⁶ In a depressive state supersaturated with loneliness, I could not remember the rewards of being loved, and I placed myself above the mortifying ordeal of being known. I could not answer the question “Who am I?” nor did I want to try. Emotional intimacy was an unrealized desire, my own boundaries freezing and becoming impenetrable before the want for closeness could even finish forming.

This was because, as Laing explains in The Lonely City, experiencing loneliness for an extended period of time triggers what psychologists refer to as social hypervigilance. In this state, you are constantly on alert for threats, both real and simply perceived. As a result of this excessive scrutiny, you begin to see the world in an increasingly negative light, and “to both expect and remember instances of rudeness, rejection and abrasion, giving them greater weight and prominence than other, more benign or friendly interactions.” In my emails, I described this as feeling like a mirror, reflecting back whatever I thought was being projected onto me: “if i think that someone doesn't like me or is annoyed at me or just doesn't care, then i reflect that back. i will say things that are mean because i think that mean things are coming toward me. it’s an attack disguised as a defensive maneuver. or something” (26 February 2022). Or something, indeed!

During this protracted state of social hypervigilance, I fixated on interpersonal dynamics.¹⁷ It was easier to convince myself that I was ostracized than to admit to anyone who loved me that I always felt alone, no matter who was in the proverbial room with me. My myopia became nearly catastrophic; I was twisted up inside and, while still full of love, fear and paranoia had moved in where trust should have been.¹⁸ I worried, incessantly yet also dismissively. In one email, I acknowledged that I had always known no one would “be able to fill the gap I have open in my side,” but didn’t bother to elucidate what that gap was, or why I was so certain it existed.¹⁹  

Laing describes loneliness as something that grows around a person, “like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired.” I like this description a lot.²⁰ For my purposes, however, loneliness is like digging yourself into a hole. It is a deep hole, and a scary one, and if you spend long enough inside the hole you start to forget all kinds of things, such as what’s outside of the hole, and what else you might do with your hands besides heft spadefuls of dirt, one after another for all eternity.

In moments of clarity, though, you can catch a lifeline.

I like the law of holes because it specifically addresses situations where the shovel is in your hands, and also because its address is frank.

1. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

2. When you stop digging, you are still in a hole.

Remember, loneliness is the hole, and digging is a catchall for self-isolating, making vitriolic comments unprompted, saying no to every outreach, and so on. Even when you make attempts to curtail the latter behaviors, you remain in the former state. But this is not the doom it suggests at first blush.

If, as I asserted earlier, we are all lonely these days, then we must be in need of community more than ever. Or rather, maybe, we’ve let our sense of community be eroded, and it has left us lonelier than ever before. I don’t know. All I know is that to climb out of the hole, you have to let the world in. You have to let yourself be in the world.

And more and more I think you can never climb fully out of the hole, or I think that our entirety exists within a series of larger and larger holes, but, crucially, I don’t believe that this is a negative thing. If we are all of us in our own hole, mired in our own loneliness, our inescapable one-ness, then are we not also all together in our solitude? Does the universality of our loneliness not also ease it?²¹  

IV. The Hole, Again

It would be a neat ending to state that I decided I no longer wanted to carry my loneliness with me on a cold, sunny day at the end of March in the year 2023, but that would be dishonest. Closer to the truth is that on such a day, I realized that I had, at some point in the last year, begun to slow the rate at which I was digging myself into a loneliness-hole, and was buoyed by that realization. I felt, for the first time in a very long time, made alive.

Since the above quoted email, I have swapped the scalpel for gentle hands. When you have forgotten the geometries of the self, as I did, a necessary step toward remembering is to relearn the tangible body. It is a good way to start relearning observation, how to see what is actually there and not the things you convince yourself are there because they worry you. The key to growing bigger than my loneliness was to understand the bounds of it — to feel keenly the edges of my self and rejoice in it.²²

Maybe this ending has made it obvious already (with the way it is dragging on), but all of me remains the same. I am no “better” now than I was before, not more pure nor less wounded. I have simply stopped carrying all that extra weight around.

1  I feel obligated to acknowledge that the dates of my email chain fall within the early period of the Covid-19 pandemic, when lockdowns were frequent and social isolation was affecting people all over the world. I also would like to clarify that pandemic isolation factored rather minutely into my own depression and loneliness, because I had been carrying a sense of separation within myself far before the pandemic put physical space to it. While it did contribute to an extent, the deeply held nature of my depression and loneliness meant that these feelings were amplified by my increased proximity to other people as lockdowns eased rather than alleviated. This is characteristic of loneliness which, as opposed to isolation, is something carried within you rather than a place you are. In fact, the loneliest place to be is always a crowded room of people because it is there that the internal distancing feels most painfully obvious. As Olivia Laing writes, “This is what’s so terrifying about being lonely: the instinctive sense that it is literally repulsive, inhibiting contact at just the moment contact is most required.” (I will return to Laing and loneliness throughout this essay, but this acknowledgement had to be made as early as possible.) Also, while I’m acknowledging things: yes, the title is a bit misleading, but I think the depressed diaries sounds better than the loneliness logs.

2  Several years ago I read something about how cycles of belief can shape behavioral outcomes in children. I wish I could find it again but despite many fervent searches I have been unable to locate it. As far as I can remember, the example used was about how teachers — intentionally or not — inculcate young students with the belief of their own bad behavior. Tell a kid that they are a problem, and they will become a problem. Similarly, students who are supported by teachers and encouraged as “high achieving, good students” do succeed in academic situations. You can imagine how this fractures along lines of gender, race, class, etc. The stereotype of the “bad student” also, unsurprisingly, has a lot in common with stereotypes of “bad” neurodivergency; while the boundaries of acceptability and normality tend to be produced by the system, they are socially policed and rely on the creation of a tangible (as opposed to abstract) antagonistic other.

3  “Use our service to get personalized care from the comfort of your own home!”

4  I’m borrowing this phrase from “Less TikTok, More Screaming,” a killer essay by persinette on Substack. Here’s a little excerpt for a taste: “When you imagine yourself to exist separate from the world around you, and therefore seek to change yourself independent of it, the project of self-improvement becomes about adapting to oppression, rather than working toward a less maddening world. Therapy that prioritizes individual self-improvement with little other context functions to create hypernormal, docile subjects that live in service to power. We become our best selves, not in ways that allow us to find personal peace and better serve the world around us, but in ways that make us better workers and citizens.”

5  I did google ‘lifemaxxing’ to make sure it was actually a new buzzword and not something I imagined. In doing so, google recommended this incredible (meaning disturbingly dissonant) website (link).

6  This is a thumb tack in the much larger conversation about individualism and how it benefits corporations killing our planet and our peoples…

7  I will be elaborating on this with a few examples in the accompanying OTCRF episode!

8  On the level of what “___ era” you’re in, what aesthetic “___core” you follow, or what flavor of “___ girl” you are. Rayne Fisher-Quann’s viral essay “standing on the shoulders of complex female characters” cuts right to the point: “it’s become very common for women online to express their identities through an artfully curated list of the things they consume, or aspire to consume — and because young women are conditioned to believe that their identities are defined almost entirely by their neuroses, these roundups of cultural trends and authors du jour often implicitly serve to chicly signal one’s mental illnesses to the public. […] the aesthetics of consumption have, in turn, become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable: your existence as a Type of Girl has almost nothing to do with whether you actually read joan didion or wear miu miu, and everything to do with whether you want to be seen as the type of person who would.”

9  This Time article (link) about beige/neutral influencers perfectly demonstrates the bizarre way mental health and aesthetics have become linked. Gabrielle Perry, founder of nonprofit The Thurman Perry Foundation: “I decorate my house similarly [with neutrals] because it helps with my anxiety;” Karen Haller, color psychology specialist and author of The Little Book of Colour, “We live in a world that’s full of noise, chaos and clutter. Finding softly colored, minimalistic clips like this on social media can serve as a micro moment of joy and safety;” on Camryn Shows, beige aesthetic TikToker: “Her neutral choices go beyond her content creation, and are more-so a personal lifestyle decision to help with her obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety.” I am not, of course, opposed to people structuring their lives in ways that make them easier to bear, but these quotes make me want to yell, NONE OF THESE WORDS MEAN ANYTHING! YOUR PERFECT BEIGE WORLD IS AN ILLUSION POISONING YOU AGAINST REALITY AND JOY WILL NEVER FIND YOU IF YOU STAY THERE!

10  Recycling this word from Laing, I mean both the way people with mental illness are reduced to their diagnosis — when focus is on the treatment of a disease rather than a person — and also the current state of identity, and online identity in particular, as discussed in the above footnote.

11  U.S. News, “Loneliness Is Plaguing Americans in 2024: Poll” (link); PBS, “How a growing crisis of loneliness is affecting Americans’ health” (link); NYT, “Surgeon General: We Have Become a Lonely Nation. It’s Time to Fix That.” (link); NPR, “America has a loneliness epidemic. Here are 6 steps to address it” (link); American Psychiatric Association, “New APA Poll: One in Three Americans Feels Lonely Every Week” (link); and the full advisory from the Surgeon General (link). And I’m not even touching the sinkhole which is “the male loneliness epidemic”….

12  While working on this section I came across some old notes from new year’s day 2018 for my previous newsletter that feel pertinent: “I've seen so many people say that this year is the year they cut people out, where they don't make time for anyone who won't make time for them. I see people preaching haughty isolation by the dozen, and it saddens me.”

13  Bagley continues, “Satisfying our need to belong requires (a) frequent, positive interactions with the same individuals, and (b) engagement in these interactions within a framework of long-term, stable care and concern.” You can see how online interactions could fulfill the first requirement but, in my mind, an element of in-person engagement is required for the second. It is already difficult to build a sense of stability in a medium that is intangible, and as few spaces on the internet are really controlled/owned by users, it is increasingly precarious. (link)

14  See the quote from Laing in footnote #1 and also this op-ed from 2012 which shows how little has changed, really, in the last decade (link).

15  Laing, again.

16  From “I Know What You Think of Me” by Tim Kreider (link). I recommend reading the whole thing!

17  This excerpt from a 5 October 2021 email shows this succinctly, if painfully; “yesterday i felt insane. like, out of my mind, lock me away, absolutely not human. i felt like i might pass out or start screaming or break something. i had to run run run away from everyone else. in my head i kept up a mantra: i do not hate my friends. my friends do not hate me. and then i kept repeating it until i switched to i love and am loved by my friends. the troubling part is that i'm still not sure i believe it.”

18  If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is essentially what Guru Pathik says of Appa when they meet at the Eastern Air Temple in season two episode 16 of Avatar: The Last Airbender, “Appa’s Lost Days.”

19  From an email dated 21 February 2021. Another juicy excerpt from this email: “i guess i'm getting tired of being me. four years [of college] was always going to be a lot to commit to, but i have to keep telling myself that its almost over.” The idea that my identity is something determined by external conditions (in this email, I jump so effortlessly from me to Me, a role to be played during a four part production titled THE COLLEGE YEARS) is something I still struggle with. The collapse of structure and sense of unmooring inherent to young adulthood has, however, helped a lot. So too has facing the loneliness.

20  Mold often accompanies rot, which is something I wrote about more than once. “maggots in my brain & rotting flesh” (19 February 2021); “i dont know i just feel rotting again. like the worst type of person and im so full of bile” (17 April 2021); “rotting gut is back again” (22 April 2021). And although I wrote about it in less clear terms, I did at times feel covered in fur: “i felt so so so wretched and beastly” (27 February 2022).

21  I am begging you to read this poem by Anne Boyer!!!!!!

22  I am also begging you to read Ocean Vuong’s poem, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” (link).