depression

Day 2339, other road.

Daily picture, Poetry 
The dark road had a warning sign standing on the right side that I couldn't see. 
Fog was still there to disturb the light of the sun. 

The road I took was good but not like the one I drive on now and feel. 
Crushed rocks make you slow down and realize the old roads pleasant feel. 

I open my mind and roll down the window. 
The fog smells clear further down the road where the darkness is still. 

I see a subtle bend in the distance.

Day 1771, metronome.

Daily picture, Poetry

I have a sad undertone in my life, my internal metronome swings from left to right, uneven before every step. The strange thing is that I am outwards, and inwards a positive person. Sure, I like to complain, but I do that merely to hide my detachment for what is trivial.

The poem from Day 1547 goes about the scars we all have.

There are day’s

that I look down

and feel good

about the scars that I have

These scars can be carved in your flesh, but also in your soul. My own scars are not a source for sorrow for me, I look down at them, and almost always feel good about them. I don’t know why I have this positive attitude, one rationalization is the simple fact that you can’t turn the clock around and change things. I am also happy with who I am now, despite all that has happened in the past. I might also have liked the person that I would have become, if things had gone differently , but that is like looking in the future of an alternate universe.

I sometimes try to tell people that they should forget the past, or put it in a better contexts, but I know that this is like a musician telling me to keep the rhythm. Maybe you can learn to be more forwards looking, but I know a lot of people that seem to be born with a certain preference in either direction. Some people change after they fallen down hard, the chock can help, but also in this case, in either direction.

Maybe Nietzsche was right when he wrote that one of the best blessing we can have is: having a bad memory. I have forgotten all the stress that you get immediately after a setback, I remember that I had stress, but that dark cloud is absorbed. Maybe the stress and sadness got absorbed by the sad rhythm of my internal metronome, maybe it drives it.

Day 1750, white road marks.

Day's pictures, Poetry

I had periods in my life that depression debilitated my will. The light, life, all of it, felt like it was not there, and at the same time, it was all there and pressing the air out of me. Like a good Marine I obeyed my superior, in this case my shrink, and injected my life with routine like walking the dog everyday for a couple of hours. The same route, the same stick to throw. All this outside, and the world, that had made me sick, was also the thing that healed me at the end.

In life, the things you love, are often also the things that make you sick. An obvious one is off course unhealthy snacks, a cigarette or driving to fast on your motorcycle. You can also think of the relation you have with you parents, friends or your wife or husband. The unhealthy things in the first category are never healthy, they are tolerable when you reduce the intake to a minimum, and if you like driving fast, you should go to a race track twice a year. The second category can also be toxic at the same time that you love them.

With your friends and family you might take a little bit more distance, if you feel that gas is building up in your stomach, but if you are married, and also have kids, it becomes much harder to put distance between you and them. A lot of people will choose the easier road that leads to a divorce, but if you use the same routine that helped me getting over my depression, confronting it all in a structured way, you might find the reason again why you once loved this all.

There is a reason why you loved your life, wife, husband and kids once. The reason is… that you loved them…and there is nothing rational about it. Al the stupid things you do in life, you do because you love it, not because you thought your way into it. And because there is no reason for it, there is no reason to stay with it, or with the person you once loved, if that love is gone. But I once lost my love for life, and life has also no reason, but I found the love for it back again when I walked the dog.

My girlfriend and I, we are no sentimental fools or hopeless romantics. We have our routines that guide us like the white road marks besides the road do. This guidance helps us, specially when it is dark, you can see where the road ends, and the ditch starts, and steer the relationship down the road with more ease. This way I also have more time to look to the side at her, like I did in those first days when the car was still in cruse control.

The poem is from Day 1324, November 2019

I turned

and a dark forest arose

from where I was

before

~

lost

~

though soon

the familiar sound

that brings you down

brings you back

to the light

like a stream

to the sea

Day 1709, looking down.

Day's pictures, Poetry

What is reality? Or, what is your reality? The favourite question asked at philosophers kindergarten before nap time. There is enough written about that question and its in my opinion enough to know that what you touch, feel, see and smell is real for you, even if you can’t know that your reality is the same for an other. We know that if people have healthy eyes, that are made after natures specifications, we will interpret the same wavelength of light as red. What we don’t know is what someone sees if they have some kind of defect in their eyes or “process” centre in the brain. So in general we know what most people see as red is the same as we see it but there are exceptions.

Scientifically we understand what light waves are and which molecules are in a specific oder. We humans also react in similar situation, like fear or joy the same, we thus can assume that we experience the same sensations similar. It is off course not so important for our daily lives to wonder about these questions, but what if you try to understand what someone feels or experiences when grief, loss, love, anger or any other emotion or state of mind is involved. There are no light waves or molecules involved in these experiences. We might see where they light up on a brain scan but that tells you little about…what they do to you.

I found an other poem from the past that spoke to me, it is from the 23 of June 2018, Day 822.

Pull

Reality fades

caught by egos gravity

a depressed black hole.

If you try to understand what someone is experiencing who is, for instance, depressed you can only do that by delving in your own experiences. And then you have to assume that we use the same word for the same kind of experiences. People can “feel” depressed but you can also “be” depressed. You feel depressed when you breakup with someone but if your brain forget to mix the right chemicals you can be depressed without any direct influences from the outside world. Are these two comparable? There are also combinations of these two, and they can probably influence each other. We can also use words like down, heavy, somber or dark to describe the feeling of being depressed but these are all subjective to.

We humans have realized that it is difficult to share these feeling in any meaningful way with each other for thousands of years. We talk to friends or a therapist, who can fix us enough so we can go again for a while, but do we really learn something? I think that art comes the closest to give you a feeling that your not the only one with these feelings of depression or loss. You have music, paintings, books, poetry, movies and other art forms that all in their own right can make you feel recognized.

I am to modest to say that I am any good in writing poems, but it is also therapeutically for myself to write about my experiences.

I’ve been depressed, mainly because of brain chemistry that went rogue at a time when things where going fine. The way I perceived the world was that it slowly changed, my “reality faded”. Things that where valuable before suddenly lost that value, so to speak. My reality as in the school I went to and the girlfriend I had where still the same as before but they where no longer recognized as important, they faded to the background in my mind, for no apparent reason to me.

“Caught by egos gravity” You have to look at the picture that belongs to that day to understand why I used these words (its not the picture you see above this post but the one from post Day 822) I can only interpret this line now like: Your ego, or that nagging little red devil on your shoulder, is telling you that its all wrong what you do, he had such high hopes and you slowly start to doubt yourself. The unbalance between the life you live and the life your ambitious ego wants create a “black hole” where time stands still when you get pulled in…because that’s, what you want when your depressed.