On Depression Ver Circa 2022
I am trying to accept my depression, and am trying to figure out and do the things necessary to live a life that is worth living
Myself, 12:30am 1/1/2022
My goal in writing this is representation. Mental illness is common amongst mathematicians but is not often openly talked about, which gives the battle a certain feeling of loneliness. My words will not be more flowery than they need to be. Each sentence will have a point, and my goal is to get straight to it. I would like to thank my 11th grade English teacher Mr. Pierson, who forced me to start a journal of my thoughts which I continue to write in (now virtually). Many of my words here come directly from this journal, and I blame it as the source of angst for this article.
In my experience, depression is emptiness.
Depression can cause nullity in one's emotions. It is possible to sometimes spend hours, days, even months feeling almost nothing. However, like the sound of a droplet of water hitting the cave floor, emotions during this null period feel amplified. Anxiety gains a significant boost in power, and the pain of everyday life feels more.
Not everyone's depression comes from the same source. Mine seems to be genetic. It has afflicted me for a while. My suicidal thoughts started at the age of 9 and persisted until a series of complicated and unimportant events led me to get help. The pills took multiple months to kick in. But they did not bring me happiness, instead they brought more emptiness. The goal was to nullify my negative emotions along with my positive emotions until I was able to reach a point of mental stability where I could allow myself to feel again. It took much time, but it did work.
I firmly believe that my depression is part of who I am as a person. However, it does not define me. Some believe that tragic events and painful memories are most valued in making one "who they are". I claim that every event in one's life is equal, in that changing that event would lead to the creation of a whole new person. I would not be "me" without my depression, or any of my past tragedies, or any of my current faults. If I wish to be a better person, I must seek to do so in my future instead of my past.
I found interest in philosophy not long after I started my medication. If I was going to be forced to exist in this world, I wanted a reason why. I did find it, within Albert Camus' essay on the myth of Sisyphus. But it didn't help. My mental instability didn't instantly vanish after my grand revelations about the meaning of life. My genes didn't decide to alter themselves. The emptiness was still present.
I sometimes felt like a parasite on this earth. I felt like there was no reason to continue living if my very existence was a burden on others. I confronted these emotions using my newfound philosophy, that my life should be lived for my own sake and not others. This meant I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted with no regards for others. This also meant I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted for others, not out of obligation, but out of my own free will. I do not want to help others so that I can be a "good" person. I want to kind to others because it makes me happy. My motives are fundamentally selfish, and this is something I accept.
Friends are good.
I did not discover my love of math and physics until my senior year of high school. I was a very poor student, constantly on the brink of failing my classes but just barely scraping by. I never particularly "enjoyed math". My senior year I took an introductory calculus course along with a non calculus-based physics course, and something just clicked. I kept making little connections between the two subjects, and found myself wanting to learn more. Since then, my research in mathematics and physics has become a main source of happiness in my life. But I still feel the same way about math as I did before. My first semester of graduate school was a brutal reminder that I do not enjoy math, I enjoy the parts of math and physics that I'm interested in.
I am a believer of eudaimonism, the ideology that happiness can come from the process of one's self-actualization. For me, the feeling of "improvement" that comes from learning brings me an immense amount of joy, and my discovery of this is arguably the reason I am alive today. However, my academic studies have not always brought me happiness.
After discovering my love of math and physics, school became both a major source and a major barricade for my happiness . There is a direct correlation between my levels of depression and the level of interest that I have in the courses I was taking. I found myself incredibly depressed during the second semester of my freshman year because the classes I took were of no interest to me. This effectively cut me off from my main source of happiness for months. I was unable to study mathematics that I found interesting because I did not have the free time or the mental stamina to do it in conjunction with my school work. A certain guilt became attached to any extracurricular math studying because I felt like I was wasting time that should have been spent on my classes. These classes were necessary if I wanted to continue studying math and physics. I was performing short-term sacrifices in the pursuit of long-term happiness. I found myself asking how many short-term sacrifices I could take.
I will briefly state my experiences with the ongoing effort towards" getting better". When I was younger I used to think that things would never get better. I was correct in a sense. Things didn't get better. But I got better at dealing with it.
"Getting better at dealing with it" is hard. For me, it meant learning how to become self-aware when in the middle of a panic attack. It meant learning how to reach out to my loved ones when I was in need of their help. It meant affording myself the flexibility; both mentally and academically; to have moments of weakness. All three of these things can be put into the general umbrella of "I am trying to accept my depression, and am trying to figure out and do the things necessary to live a life that is worth living".
Of the three things I listed above, flexibility for weakness is the hardest to wrap my head around. It's essentially planning for failure. Positioning yourself so that in the event that your depression decides to hit hard, your entire life doesn't fall apart. For example, my mandatory writing course had a policy that 6 absences would net any student with an automatic failure. I was assigned to have lectures at 8:40 in the morning, which my fellow night owls will recognize as a tragedy. However, rather than trying to switch out of the class into another time-slot or going to the administration to try to get accommodations, I thought to myself " maybe it'll be fine". I did not give myself the proper flexibility to survive the course when shit hit the fan, and ended up failing. The same pattern repeated itself next semester, and I ended up having to drop the course. My third semester is when I started making the necessary changes to make sure that I could live. I made sure to sign up for class times I could make it to, I made sure to always have at least one course in an interesting math/phys topic for reasons outlined in the previous section, and I got accommodations from ODS in case I ever needed them for a class. If I had continued the trajectory that I was going on before making these changes, I probably would have failed out of college. Flexibility is good, not just for school but for other things in life too.
