Just Another Day

The more I think about it, the harder it is to remember the last time I actually liked my birthday.

When I was a kid, I suppose I wasn't different than anyone else in the idea that the day I was born was a big enough deal that it warranted me getting cake and ice cream and presents from everyone I knew at the time.

In that respect, I know there were many of those early years where I had no reason in the world to be anything but excited beyond belief about turning a year older.

That all seemed to change by the time I was a teenager and living on the other side of the country.

I know a lot of the reason for that stems from the growth of my Depression. Living in a part of the world I didn't want to be in, surrounded by classmates who despised me and I despised in turn, and not having much in the way of support, affection, or anything from my family, there were many a birthday when I would lie in bed asking myself the same fundamental question...

What the hell am I still doing here?

By the time I hit adulthood, I was forced to come to terms with a reality that not many people I know have had to deal with, but all the empirical evidence was there to support its accuracy.

That reality, as unpleasant as it may sound, is that I am a mistake of two people who never should've gotten married and never should've had children. And when that realization kicks you in the head, ignoring it or denying it eventually becomes a pointless exercise.

In the now forty-two years of my existence, I've done all I can to live as meaningful a life as I know how. I've done a million things I regret, not nearly as many things that I'm actually proud of, and no matter what anyone says or tries to prove to the contrary, I've always tried to do the right thing, even when it was absolutely not in my best interest to do so.

All the hopes, ambitions and dreams I had in younger days have all been blasted into nothingness by the overwhelming cacophony of everyone who ever thought they had a say over my life all telling me the same thing: No.

All the people I grew to love more than I ever really should've are all gone now, mainly because I cared too much, I tried too hard and I wasn't who they wanted.

The days have become such that getting out of bed every morning is just as difficult as it is to get in and go to sleep. And for the past few weeks, the night's brought a new question to the forefront of my mind that's been harder and harder to ignore.

How many more birthdays do I really want to deal with?

An answer I was willing and able to accept came today while I was at the gym. Eight.

In eight years, I'll be fifty and by that birthday, if my life has not moved in a direction where I'm in a better place and able to feel anything resembling happiness or peace of mind, then I've decided there will not be a fifty-first.

That doesn't mean I'm deciding to lay down and play out the string like my dad did for the last ten years or so of his life. If anything, it means that time is ticking. I am officially on the clock to get things done. It means it's put up or shut up time for me and there are no more outs, excuses or grounds for procrastination.

Eight years to get things the way I want them or that's it. Last one out, hit the lights, because I'll be long gone.

Now, I know you're asking why I would do that. Why would I choose this option when there's so many other things I could possibly do instead?

I've tried most of them. They didn't work and the reason is two-fold. First is that for all my family's monumental dysfunction and its susceptibility to both addiction and mental illness, it also blessed me with a constitution that could result in me living potentially another thirty or forty years.

The idea of living that long and being forced to do so feeling this miserable and alone more days than not isn't a proposition I will accept. I'm sorry, and I would defy anyone to see if they could either, were they unfortunately put in my shoes.

Second, if that's what ends up being the outcome, then I would rather leave with some degree of self-dignity and the knowledge that I knew when to see myself out, instead of becoming an even bigger burden or a bigger example of 'what not to do' than I apparently am already.

So yeah...that's the plan. Forty-two birthdays down. Eight more to go.

A lot can happen between now and then and a lot of it will come down to whether or not I can finally find a way to make my life worth something.

Tally Ho.

Writer's Break

I find myself in a position I haven't been in for a while...wanting to write one of my stories again.
...And now we've reached the point in the plot where the protagonist struggles with the anxiety that comes with attempting such a challenging endeavor.

There was a time in my life where writing didn't scare me this much. To the contrary, the prospect of creating people and places, tapping into themes, ideas, machinations or speculations, used to excite the hell out of me.

Writing was one of the few arenas I ever ventured into where I felt I had some modicum of control over something. I know that observation can imply that I'm a control freak and, depending on your perspective or subjective biases of me, it's not an altogether unfounded one either.

When I was a kid, scratching down stories in old composition notebooks, it wasn't about control but creativity. Why it was that I became interested in storytelling, I couldn't really say. For whatever reason, it was something I just developed a knack for, according to my early grade school teachers.

The older I became and the more I struggled with trying to understand both the people I was in constant contact with, as well as the person I was growing into, the more I needed an outlet, some way to process all of these things pinballing around in my head.

And I won't lie. Some of it was fairly messed up and more than a little scary. That said, I always found it a little reassuring that I was never interested in following in the footsteps of Stephen King or Clive Barker and writing horror stories. My interest was more vested in the psychological, even though there are aspects of it that venture well into the realm of the horrific, trying to understand why we do the things we do to each other, good and bad, always fed my curiosity.

But now, what worries me more is the idea that in order to feel better, whatever the heck that means, it'll involve writing a story that taps into everything I've experienced and how I view the world in all its dark, dirty, unforgiving totality. To funnel it all out into chapters, paragraphs and prose.

It wouldn't be the first time I tried either. The last time I did was six years ago and while it had hints of what I think I'm capable of, part of me knows I can do better...if I can let myself fully go there.

The question is whether or not I can fully commit myself to that sort of a deep dive or not? It's one thing to have an interesting story in your head. It's another thing entirely when it refuses to be extracted.

Nightmares, Teddy Bears and Deja Vu

I woke up the other day from a nightmare so vivid that it's stuck in my mind and pulled on my heartstrings ever since...only it wasn't a nightmare in the classical definition of the term.

We tend to differentiate nightmares from other intense dreams by virtue of the sense of fear or terror they impart on our sleeping selves. This dream I had was on shared that same level of psychological or emotional intensity, but there was nothing frightening or terrifying about it.

When I left New England as a kid, my mother told me that she'd taken some of the things I'd left behind, namely my hand-built collection of model airplanes and all the old stuffed animals I hadn't been willing to part with yet. The one exception to that was a brown 'Gund' teddy bear I'd gotten when I was about ten and decided to bring with me out to the Northwest.

Editorial Note: I still hung on to him even into my mid-30's as something I could pass along to my child when they were born. I ended up giving him to my son when he was about two because his mother tried giving him back to me after our divorce. As far as I know, he still has it.

Anyway, the nightmare I had involved me going to my mother's house in Maine and reclaiming the rest of the gang. My mother was nowhere to be found, but I made my way inside and up to the attic. There, wrapped in a couple of old garbage bags, were friends I hadn't seen in more than a lifetime.

The most familiar one was also the biggest, a tan and brown dinosaur I'd named 'Stanley the Stegosaurus,' because that's what kind of dinosaur he was and I knew my dinosaurs well back then, and because by my childhood logic, Stanley seemed like as good a name as any for a Stegosaurus.

And sitting in that cramped, dusty, chilly space, getting reacquainted with Stanley and the rest, I found myself getting blasted by a rogue wave of emotion I could never have anticipated and absolutely could not escape. So much so that even thinking about it now, I'm not ashamed to say, is making me feel it all over again.

Why did it totally wreck me like that? Because they took me back to the point in my life where I was just a little ragamuffin kid who had no idea or even a comprehension that this is what my life was going to be like when I got to my parents' age. At that point, I was still happy and optimistic about life and the world and utterly blissful in my naive dissonance about just how incredibly screwed up it was going to start becoming before I could even blink.

I was still at a stage where my imagination could run rampant and not be shackled in a cage of mental illness and anxiety. Where I could have friends and not constantly worry about what I was going to do or not do that would cause me to lose them.

Where I could be boyishly smitten with a girl instead of having to be completely terrified as a man every time I let myself get anywhere near that with a woman.

At that point in my life, I still had my whole life to look forward to and if you'd told me then that this is where I'd be...that this is who I'd be...I know my younger self would've probably responded with something along the lines of this.

Then I don't want to grow up. Ever.

But grow up I did. Lessons did I learn. Regrets I have struggled with. People I have lost and pain I have felt.

And I know that's why the longer I sat there in the attic, cradling this old thing of fabric and stuffing and memory, I felt it all just start pouring out of me like a waterfall. I don't know how long I cried. I don't know if anyone heard me and if they did, I didn't care.

That little ragamuffin kid who'd been through so much hell just needed to let it out to someone who wouldn't judge him for doing so. The last thing I remember was wrapping my arms around Stanley and just bawling like I haven't in a long time...

...Then I woke up, and I did it all over again.

Just like I'm doing now as I try to get this all down on virtual paper.

I'm not a believer in gods or religions anymore. I used to believe karma was a thing until I realized the people I knew who did things to warrant getting a heaping helping of bad karma never got it, so they never had to live with what they'd done like I have.

But something I have believed in is deja vu, because I've experienced it more times than I can seriously count, and it's always based on something I've dreamed about at some point. I don't mean in ways like I can guess lottery numbers or presidential elections, but seemingly random moments or encounters that trigger a part of my brain that says with a high degree of certainty, we've done this before.

As sure as I am of anything, I know there's a point soon where I will be in that attic. Where I'll find that bag, open it up, see my old friends again and remember, for maybe the briefest of moments, how it felt to be free of all the things that were waiting for me when I had to leave them behind and had to grow up.

And I know that I will sit there and cry like I maybe have never cried before because there's nothing I can do to go back to that time, start all over, and hopefully get it right the second time around.

Detachment

As much as we despise cliches', there is legitimacy in the one that suggests two of the hardest teachers we learn from are age and experience.

If the last decade has taught me anything, it's that there truly is a sense of liberation in becoming as emotionally detached from the people in my life as much as possible.

When I was younger and more naive, the argument could be made that one of my most obvious flaws was I cared about people too much. I cared about both what they thought of me and I cared far more for them than I should.

Despite my ever-present, stubborn refusal to accept it, it would be unfair to put all this on my shoulders. As cliche' also dictates, we don't get to choose the family we're born into, nor do we always choose the people we end up falling for the hardest. And as much as I am deserving of blame for my part in making a mess of those relationships or potential relationships, it's been pointed out on many an occasion that the totality of said blame cannot solely be mine either.

When I set off on my own, following my divorce in 2011, whatever minuscule bits of romantic I'd managed to retain tried to reassure me it was a chance to meet new people, build new relationships and maybe find an avenue to what we're all hoping for when those opportunities present themselves...Happiness.

But, of course, that didn't happen. Instead, I ended up losing just as many friends as I'd made to that time, for various reasons. So I did the only thing that made sense. What people like my mother and some of the therapists I'd gone to to that point had strongly urged me to do.

I stopped caring about people any more, because as best I could tell, people had stopped caring about me.

In hindsight, I don't entirely blame them, either. When you see someone struggling like I was at the time and they're not able to either articulate that in a way you understand, or it affects their behavior in ways that make their presence in your life potentially toxic, the easiest thing to do is just write them off as another lost cause and focus on the people who seemingly have their shit together.

That was a problem for me, though, because those people weren't lost causes to me. They were friends and family that I cared about. People I'd spent years cultivating positive relationships with and not having that as a possibility anymore wasn't something I was willing to concede.

So I didn't. I tried to put out each fraying thread that connected me to them in the hope that I could salvage at least some part of my particular social tapestry. In retrospect, though, I'm realizing more and more that I should've done the smarter thing.

I should've just let the whole thing burn to the ground.

That is, after all, what we're all told to do. In this age of wholly expendable relationships, even with the people who we matter most to, it takes next to nothing to completely shut them out of our lives anymore. It's what the block function was designed for on every social media outlet we're reliant on for relationships and communication nowadays.

Maybe it's because I'm older and was conditioned in a much different time, but I never saw the benefit of being someone who just arbitrarily tossed friendships and relationships away when times got tough. Then again, I'm just as obstinate about the idea of actually talking to whoever it is you're trying to salvage said relationship with, rather than going through text messages or other passive-aggressive means.

By the time I reached thirty-five, I think it finally sank in that what the future held for me involved having next to no connections with people I know or used to know. I won't lie, it was a bitter pill to swallow, but it also came about in no small part because of what happened with Ghost, as well as my inability to get moving in the sort of upward trajectory that affords chances to have a bigger social life.

Being trapped in the stasis of forced mediocrity makes your attractiveness for both platonic and non-platonic relationships incredibly low. As a result, I struggle to keep in touch with even my closest friends from when I was a kid. 

Dating is another matter altogether. More than once, I had female friends whom I found myself becoming attracted to, only to have them do the same thing that Ghost did, albeit to lesser degrees. Thanks, but no thanks. I then got to watch them go into different relationships with guys who treated them just as badly as the guys who'd came before, and inevitably, I was called upon to be a voice of reason and a shoulder to cry on. 

And I did it. I played my part. But I was again reminded of just why it is that I'm not apparently cut out to be anything other than a disposable friend.

So now, as I approach another birthday in a few weeks, I think I've finally turned the corner on being able to keep people at arm's length once and for all, and my days of being as fully immersed in trying to stay connected to people are over.

It's not that I don't care about them anymore. Instead, I think my compassion has been tempered by all the times where I was slapped down and put in my place for caring as much as I did. There are days when the realization of where I'm at now emotionally does bother me. I know it shouldn't have to be this way, except I don't get a say in it anymore either.

It's an crazy new world. I just happen to be trapped in it.

Masochism Tango

"Why can't you just be happy?!"

This may be the second-most asked question I used to get along with why was I so angry all the time.

Logically, it seems purely rhetorical because if a person is always seeming to be one thing, then they can't very well be another simultaneously now, can they?

I started a new job last week and with that came the implied expectation that being able to make money and pay bills again would provide a measure of happiness. And while this may be true on a certain level, I think we often confuse safety and survivability with happiness.

Yes, being able to take care of myself is a nice thing, but that's a given. What isn't is that even though I like my job, it hasn't made me happier by any real measure, either.

In fact, I honestly cannot remember the last time I felt truly happy about my life from top to bottom.

On the one hand, I suppose it's natural for human beings to never want to reach that apex of complete satisfaction with their existence. After all, there are entire threads of both philosophical and psychological theory that state we never can and never should reach that level, because we should always keep driving towards various goals and never rest on our laurels.

And yet, if you're in the rarefied air of the financial and/or social elite, the rest of us poor paeans assume that's the absolute pinnacle of our modern existence, so it must be impossible to not be anything but happy.

I suppose if that were true, we wouldn't have a need for tabloid journalism, because there's few pastimes we love more as a culture than knocking an elite off the pedestal we sycophantically built for them to stand upon in the first place.

Then, on the flip side, are those of us for who being unhappy has become so ingrained in our DNA that we don't really know any other way to exist. It's not that we don't want to be happy. To the contrary, we spend a great deal of time and energy thinking, hoping, praying, pining for the means by which we can escape the maze of misery that we've locked ourselves into, only to realize that we sealed off the way out a long time ago.

For myself, I'm pretty sure that's been the background of my existence since before I was still in elementary school, and there's a name for this sort of psychological mindset:

Emotional Masochism.

Now, the implied connotation of that word aside, I'd like to think I'm not much different than anyone else in that I am not a big fan of being inflicted with pain. But the difference between physical and emotional masochism is that the former is obviously affiliated with sex, while the latter is both more subtle and also more destructive.

Emotional masochism isn't even so much a byproduct of Depression. For a lot of us, it can become the hinge point on which our attempts to break out of a Depressive cycle or resort to self-sabotage often hinges on.

In hindsight, this shouldn't be anything new to me. Like I said, I've lived like this for longer than I really recognize. Part of what I've been willfully ignorant of, though, is just how pervasive and deeply rooted my emotional masochism has become in the last ten years.

I was talking with my brother a few weeks ago and mentioned that I've been trying to convince myself it's beyond time to get off social media and go back to a non-connected lifestyle. After all, I don't get anything out of it and really haven't for a long time. To the contrary, whenever I do go on it, all it does is make me feel empty, unwanted and depressed because 1.) no one really reaches out to me anymore and 2.) I get a deep emotional longing to talk to people that I can't talk to anymore, because they've permanently disconnected from me.

This is a key tenant of Emotional Masochism. You know that something is only going to make you feel emotionally wounded, and yet you do it because on some level, you can only function by being in that position of emotional pain.

The same goes for:

• Trying to hang on to toxic relationships.
• Seeking approval from people who will never give it.
• Having difficulty existing in a conflict-free environment.
• Disregarding compliments or positive affirmations.
• Chronically pushing people away.
• Being unable to let go of past trauma.
• Needing to fix things with other toxic people.
• Taking responsibility for everything, even if you're not at fault.
• Beating yourself up through external stimuli that invokes sadness or pain.
• Feeling bad and apologizing for trying to be your genuine self.

Now, I may be crazy...but does that sound like anyone you know...?

I'm the first to admit that I truly despise either generating or being in orbit of drama. I've had more than my share for one lifetime and in coming to the realization of my propensity for passive-aggressive behavior a few years ago, I've tried making a concerted effort to both recognize and limit my output of both as much as possible.

But this is different.

It's not because I somehow like being miserable. Hell, nobody likes being miserable.

The problem is this is how I've learned to function for so long that if I find myself potentially deviating away from it and in a direction of possible, genuine happiness, my mind sees that and overcompensates by reminding me of all the reasons why I can never be happy.

And believe me...that list is incredibly long and makes a rather valid case when it wants to.

So when I find myself in those brief moments where I start thinking I've found the way out of my particular labyrinth of self-imposed misery, where I think to myself if I can just summon the means to get one of my books done, or focused on my video essays, or opening myself up to someone I might have an emotional connection with, I'm flooded with all the times I tried to do something similar and it blew up in my face.

Then there inevitably comes the sense that...oh yeah...this is how I'm supposed to exist. I'm the one who's not supposed to be happy because like all things, there's a finite amount of happiness to go around in the universe and if I manage to get my hands on some, then it means someone else has to be miserable instead.

Either that or the few people I have left in my life won't have reason to stay connected to me, because I somehow serve as an emotional counterweight for their own happiness and/or successes.

"Remember, if you're not careful, you'll end up like Devin and we ALL know what he's like. Whatever you do, DON'T end up like him!"

The weirdest thing, though, is as much as I feel the hurt I subconsciously inflict upon myself sometimes, other times I just end up feeling...numb. Like I've gotten so used to the emotional self-flagellation at this point that the sting isn't as sharp as it used to be. The result is I don't downshift into feeling miserable or anything, but more that it establishes a baseline for how I'm going to feel for most of the day.

By now, I'm pretty sure I know every nook and cranny of the labyrinth I've constructed for myself, because I've been round it more times than I can count. If anything, I'm at my most stable when I'm sitting dead in the center of it because, as physical/sexual masochists will likely agree with, you feel the most alive when you're in the most pain.

After this long, I don't know if I'll ever truly stop being emotionally masochistic. I'm so comfortable in beating myself down and self-sabotaging every possible avenue that could lead to some form of contentment or happiness that to suddenly stop doing so feels incredibly alien and scary to me.

I've always told people that I'm my own harshest judge and my own worst critic and for good reason. There's things I've done which warrant such scrutiny and some form of punishment. And I've had people try so many times to convince me over the years that I need to forgive myself for both those things and what other people did to me that I still shoulder the blame and responsibility for.

I know they're right. I know that I should. I know there's nothing I can do about all those things and continuing to hurt myself over them on an emotional level is just as damaging as if I were doing it on a physical one.

But honestly...the reason why I don't, as bizarre as this is going to sound...is because I've been hurting myself for so long that I feel the closest thing to happiness I can reach only when I'm feeling miserable.

Rage Phase

"Why are you so angry all the time...?!"

It's arguably the most common question I was asked by my mother in the last few years we still talked to each other.

It's also the question I could answer eight ways until Sunday, and it didn't matter. She just never seemed to get it.

Neither, unfortunately, did anyone else really.

In their defense, it's not their fault, nor am I blaming them. Anger is a hard thing to rationalize or make sense of, and we're seeing more and more evidence of that as we become increasingly split between political, social, cultural, religious, economic and gender divides with both ever-increasing frequency and ever-escalating hostility.

If I'm honest, the anger I've carried for much of the last four decades pales in comparison to what I see wielded by other people, either on social media or in the real world, every day. Most of it for nothing else than to be pissed off about both something and/or everything they find objectionable about the world at present.

And thanks to the power of the internet, social media and the ability to foster a true outrage culture, I watch tens of millions of people launch their intercontinental ballistic rage missiles at each other day after day without even a nanosecond's thought as to who they're directing all that angst toward in the first place.

If there's one thing I can say makes me an exception to that, it's I can both identify the reasons why I've developed my rage arsenal into what it's become and why I'm not so quick to hit the button to obliterate the targets they're currently fixed on.

I once heard an axiom which states, Having strength is one thing. Knowing how to use it is another. The same, as I've experienced, also applies to anger.

To truly understand the foundation of where mine emanates from requires the ability to comprehend a person's life in both totality and context of the various episodes that make up said totality. You have to be willing to examine a childhood interspersed with abuse and neglect. Where I was made to feel both powerless and stupid, no matter what I did to show I was actually neither.

You have to recognize that many of the labels that are thrown about indiscriminately nowadays to define pretty much everyone, don't necessarily apply to me.

Yes, I am a white, cisgendered male. Contrary to popular belief, I had no say in that whatsoever. That's how I was built at the factory and how I rolled off the genetic assembly line.

The dominating rhetoric at present would have it believed that that construct automatically guarantees I also came with inherited traits like privilege, bigotry, misogyny, entitlement. And while I am the first to recognize and admit that I am far from a flawless human being and that I carry my share of prejudices and biases, the assumption that I subscribe to any of those things is antithetical to who I am or have always been.

How do I know? I've either been subjected to them or I've seen people I cared about subjected to them. I've had to watch as every door that potentially led to a better life get slammed in my face by people with those exact same traits, without a damn thing I could do to pry them back open, and all it did was add even more fuel to my anger, because how can it not when you see lives you'd give anything to have squandered by those who never deserved them anymore than they thought you deserved yours?

Not that matters to most people nowadays, of course. We live in a world so cynical and untrusting that I could say the sky is blue or water's wet and someone would have to take to Twitter or Facebook and call for the social media lynch mobs to gather their pitchforks and torches before marching off to bring me to heel.

Editorial Note: For me to recognize just how cynical we've become is saying a lot considering I was a journalist for ten years. If there's a more cynical lot in the history of humankind, you'd be hard-pressed to find them.

You'd also have to venture into the whacking great hole in the center of my being where my heart used to be, and you'd have to be willing to understand why it's not there anymore.

If you did, then you'd see that every person I've ever loved in this life, from my mother on down, took their shots at it, smashing it to pieces over and over again because I wasn't good enough for them to love back. It didn't matter how much I cared about them, how much I wanted it or what I tried to convince them otherwise. The answer was and has always been the same.

No.

And all that's done is add more fuel to my anger, because how can it not when the one thing we're all told we need to survive and be happy is the one thing you have to live without?

I know I'm not the only man to find myself in that situation, nor will I be the last to either. Right now, there's an entire legion of them so pissed off that they believe it's somehow their right to subjugate every woman for their own sick and twisted purposes.

We call these people InCels, and more than once, I've been lumped into their ranks by someone who usually operates solely by indiscriminately slapping discriminatory labels on those they think fit their own prejudicial profiles.

For the record, the ideology these people operate under abhors and disgusts me, and were I to ever come across an InCel in person, I'd be more inclined to knock his twisted head off than shake his hand and say I agree with him in any way, shape or form.

But good luck trying to convince a supposedly rational and open-minded person of that these days. You're just as likely to get a response of socio-political doublespeak cultivated from their own personal echo chambers of media and like-minded sorts who would never dare to think their twisted view of the world could ever be wrong.

And all that's done is add even more fuel to my anger, because how can it not when someone is so quick to define you without realizing the definition it places squarely on them as well?

Now the obvious question at this stage is, Well, if you're so angry all the time, why don't you take it out on everyone who makes you feel that way?

Believe me, there's days where I find the idea more than enticing. Some days, the rage is so intense that I'd like nothing more than to channel in the direction of everyone who, for whatever reason, caused it to build up in me in the first place.

It's one of the most Newtonian things we can do as human beings. Action met with an equally-opposing reaction.

Except here's the thing. I'm old enough to have been introduced to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction when it was still a relatively new term in human existence. The idea being that in nuclear war, if both sides launched their arsenals either simultaneously or in succession, the outcome would be the same.

Neither side would live through the aftermath.

If I wanted to, I could destroy the people who destroyed me and I know there would be at least some modicum of even momentary satisfaction in that. That I would feel just as justified as they did.

But that doesn't necessarily mean I would survive it either. And there's a second axiom that I've tried to adhere to with each passing year: The best revenge is to live well.

And part of living for me, whether I like it or not, is with my anger and not using it against those who gave me all the reason in the world to have it in the first place.

It may be the harder option. It may not always be the better option. But I choose that over salting the Earth with the emotional firepower I carry any day.

Stupid Depressed

I got an email last week from my son's mother, letting me know the elementary school he goes to has been testing him to see if he qualified for their Talented and Gifted program.

The results turned out to be quite promising.

Having just turned eight years-old earlier this month, my son scored high enough that he met the criteria to be considered intellectually gifted with a strong proclivity for both mathematics and reading comprehension.

As a parent, this is one of those things I'm supposed to take a measure of pride in, and don't get me wrong, I absolutely do. My son is an amazing human being and I've had friends who've told me that, "He gets a lot of that from you."

But does he?

On some level, being theoretically half of his genetic blueprint, I guess that's possible. When I was his age, I too was considered intellectually gifted to the point where I was put in a similar program that my elementary school called Enrichment. Unfortunately, I didn't last long in it because that was about the same time that outside influences, namely a rapidly-deteriorating home situation thanks to my step-father's abuse and my mother's denial of reality, impacted how I functioned in school.

Now I, like virtually everyone else on this rock, never likes to think they're not intelligent. In fact, there's a great social and cultural stigma surrounding intellect and our ability to both learn and function as human beings, considering we pride ourselves as the top of the evolutionary food chain.

We look at those who suffer from ailments which affect the brain, many from the time we're born and despite our sympathetic tendencies, there is almost a universal acknowledgment that they are somehow defective people and are therefore, by albeit biased and prejudicial metrics...not really people at all.

If there's one thing I've noticed a definitive shift in since my Depression evolved in 2011, it's that from an intellectual standpoint, and this is going to sound a bit harsh but it's the only way I can accurately describe it, I can't help but feel like I've somehow become...dumber.

Someone I knew mentioned a New York Times article yesterday about an urban dispute between a resident and one of her neighbors...who happened to run a Dominatrix school out on the same block. Their opinion of the article was that it represented "surface-level repetitive hearsay," which is a pretty damning conclusion, to be sure.

Reading the article myself, however, I wasn't seeing much of the same context. Granted, I realize that no two people ever share the exact same opinions on anything. But what concerned me was that my critical eye seems to have developed a cataract or glaucoma, and I couldn't process the information the same way that I used to a decade ago when my vision felt clearer.

The same goes for even simple or repetitive tasks. Where I used to be able to go through them without having to expend much mental energy, nowadays almost everything feels like a constant uphill slog just to get them done.

While I was still living in New England and participating in clinical trials for Depression treatments at Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the things I was both screened and tested for was how my cognitive functions might have been impacted since my mental illness escalated. Along the way, I also discovered an article published in 2016 by the Harvard Medical School, that talked about how Clinical Depression can negatively impact how we think.

"...depression can actually change your ability to think. It can impair your attention and memory, as well as your information processing and decision-making skills. It can also lower your cognitive flexibility (the ability to adapt your goals and strategies to changing situations) and executive functioning (the ability to take all the steps to get something done)."

To be fair, one article does not a formal diagnosis make. But what alarms me is that the older I get and the longer I live with my Depression as it's currently constituted, the more I'm seeing little markers here and there of my brain's inability to process and function like it did before I had my breakdown eight years ago.

It definitely feels like part of why reading has become more difficult than it used to be, even though my eyesight hasn't changed at all. Same goes for both short and long-term memory recall and being able to follow orders of operations. Even the creative side has become more of a consistent uphill climb. Whereas I could sit down and churn out a couple of thousand words a day with little effort or difficulty, nowadays, it's a good day if I can find even two hundred or so.

When it comes to Depression, we tend to look only at the emotional impact it can have on the human mind. It makes sense, considering part of how we diagnose it in the first place is determining a lack of serotonin and/or dopamine in the brain. Both of which are key neurotransmitters that allow us to feel happy. 

But to think that it can also attack and debilitate your mind to the point where you're potentially not as smart as you used to be...?

I'd like to think that I'm not an unintelligent human being and I've proven that many times in my life. Most recently when I completed my education about a year before my breakdown. I know I have the capacity to be able to do all the things I used to, but now they feel harder to execute than they did.

Some of that could be part of getting older, yes, but it's hard not to think that the toll this whole process has taken on me isn't also affecting my intellect, as well as my emotions.

And that is a damn scary thought.