Posts tagged with "depression"

What Do I Know Of Suffering?

Sometimes I ques­tion whether or not I real­ly know what suf­fer­ing is. Reading back on my last entry, it struck me that in many ways, my life was­n’t that bad.

A Hero Of Our Time was writ­ten dur­ing great mil­i­tary con­flict, where peo­ple were fre­quent­ly “exiled” by being sent to remote places along the front of the Russian-Circassian War, where Russia had already been fight­ing for over 40 years. Some may argue that I don’t tru­ly under­stand suf­fer­ing, because my cul­ture has­n’t been through some­thing like this, where­as such pain is already in the blood of Russians. Even in pop­u­lar cul­ture, such as Babylon 5, the Russian char­ac­ter Susan Ivanova (whom I quot­ed in this tweet) seems to fol­low this stereo­type.

So can I tru­ly relate to this with­out hav­ing gone through any of it myself?

If you look at Aya Nagatomi’s per­for­mances of Chopin, specif­i­cal­ly her inter­pre­ta­tion of his Étude Op. 10, No. 12, you can tell that it’s tech­ni­cal­ly amaz­ing — cer­tain­ly a vir­tu­oso in the mak­ing as she’s only 19 in this video — but you don’t feel the ruba­to with which Chopin intend­ed it. As such, it sounds like it’s being per­formed by a com­put­er. You have to won­der whether it takes a cer­tain degree of hard­ship expe­ri­enced to do it jus­tice, per­haps going through the polit­i­cal tur­moil of the November Uprising in Warsaw that inspired Chopin to write this Revolutionary Étude.

Could Leonard Cohen have been able to pen a song like Famous Blue Raincoat with­out hav­ing suf­fered through a few lone­ly nights in New York City? I think not.

I don’t know enough about Chinese his­to­ry to know what my ances­tors went through. The rel­a­tives I know of in pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions escaped the Cultural Revolution — where they would have been sub­ject­ed to unbe­liev­able hard­ships — to Hong Kong. Maybe it’s not in my blood, and I’m just drawn to the idea of Nihilism on a super­fi­cial lev­el, nev­er tru­ly under­stand­ing it any deep­er.

But a long time ago, I remem­ber read­ing an entry by Tina where she felt dis­turbed by oth­er peo­ple’s opin­ions on how jad­ed she was feel­ing, as they were say­ing she had noth­ing to feel bad about. I told her not to com­pare her­self to oth­ers. That one per­son going through heart­break is a dif­fer­ent kind of suf­fer­ing than a per­son going with­out food, and that one can’t said to be more “painful” than the oth­er.

I may have been well-fed, healthy, and from a mid­dle-class fam­i­ly in my child­hood. But none of things mat­tered to me because it was the emo­tion­al con­nec­tion that I was seek­ing, but could nev­er find.

I’ve always had the bad habit of com­par­ing myself to oth­ers. I should prob­a­bly just fol­low my own advice and enjoy the com­fort, beau­ty, and inspi­ra­tion that Russian lit­er­a­ture gives me.

After all, if I can acknowl­edge that my suf­fer­ing is my own, no one else would tru­ly under­stand any­way!

Someone To Take Care Of Me

It’s times like this I wish I had some­one to take care of me1, because I’m tired of tak­ing care of myself.

  1. Pat once told me there should be a per­son in every group who’s always con­trolled, calm, and togeth­er (in case of emer­gency, or oth­er­wise), and he tries to be this per­son. It must be true, because he’s my rock, the friend who has nev­er let me down. I once asked him if this idea extend­ed to his mar­riage, and he told me that it applied to 90% of the time. But for the oth­er 10%, when he’s tired, unmo­ti­vat­ed, and does­n’t care any­more, Jenny takes over, and he admit­ted to me that he’s become depen­dent on this. [↩]

Questioning Happiness

Last class, Mike asked how I was doing, and as a some­what phat­ic response, I told him I was doing well.

He told me, with a chuck­le, that if he did­n’t know me any bet­ter and went only by my writ­ings, he would imag­ine me to be like Joe Btfsplk, with a per­pet­u­al rain cloud above my head.

So I went home and read through the last cou­ple pages of my entries, and found that they paint­ed a some­what lugubri­ous pic­ture.

I’ve always con­tend­ed that hap­pi­ness is too hard to write. When I feel like express­ing myself, it’s often because of a prob­lem of some sort, inter­nal or exter­nal, that I need to fig­ure out. Writing has always been a way for me to get my thoughts in line, and off my chest. Not much of a peace­ful, detached, care-free Taoist, am I?

Perhaps I’ll always lead a Cohen-esque life, where love, sex, phi­los­o­phy, and depres­sion are the dom­i­nant themes.

The fun­ny thing is that my life has improved tremen­dous­ly after ther­a­py. I used to be a very dark per­son. After gain­ing the sta­bil­i­ty of a house and a career, along with sep­a­ra­tion from my moth­er, not much else has changed. I’ve come to real­ize that it’s not so much the things in my life that’s improved in the last few years (aside from the strug­gle with anx­i­ety), as my atti­tude. To be hon­est, I have noth­ing to com­plain about.

That does­n’t change the fact that my entries have been some­what depress­ing.

Perhaps I’m still not tru­ly hap­py yet.

Or per­haps I’m still not look­ing at things the right way.

Defining Myself Through Others, Revisited

A deep­er look at an old top­ic

Some time when I was a child, I asked my moth­er if she loved her nails more than she loved me. She had this kit full of nail tools — clip­pers, files made of met­al and emery, toe sep­a­ra­tors, fake nails sep­a­rat­ed in lit­tle box­es, even a small hand-held, bat­tery-oper­at­ed dremel with dif­fer­ent attach­ments used to grind, sand, and pol­ish — that she would car­ry with her around the house. When I asked her this ques­tion, she picked me up in her arms, and vehe­ment­ly denied it. I did­n’t believe her though, not in my heart. She had always paid more atten­tion to her nails than to me.

My dad was no bet­ter. One time I googled his name to find his work num­ber, and came across an audio/visual site where he had writ­ten a small para­graph as a review on a pro­jec­tor he had. I was crushed. It was more effort than he had ever put into my life, sit­ting in a cou­ple of short sen­tences in front of me. It would have been okay if he had been so unin­ter­est­ed in every­thing, but he was­n’t. He loved his car, he loved his home the­atre, he loved his karaoke, but me he had no inter­est in.

So, before I had become a teenag­er, I start­ed to look for some kind of approval from oth­er peo­ple. At that point, it was Andrew and Alex. They were my best friends in grade 3 and 4, but I changed schools in grade 5. Even after this, I tried to hang out with them but they seemed to be more inter­est­ed in school, and we lost touch.

Pretty soon, I real­ized that I was­n’t any­one’s “best friend”. I cried and I cried and I cried. I felt like I need­ed this to define myself. I need­ed be a pri­or­i­ty to some­one because I cer­tain­ly was­n’t a pri­or­i­ty to my par­ents. Without being some­one’s best friend, I was worth­less.

As an adult, you may feel inse­cure about cer­tain aspects of your life. You lack self-con­fi­dence in areas where you feel vul­ner­a­ble — inti­mate rela­tion­ships, social sit­u­a­tions, or work. Within your vul­ner­a­ble areas, you feel infe­ri­or to oth­er peo­ple. You are hyper­sen­si­tive to crit­i­cism or rejec­tion.

I still feel this way now. The prob­lem is that the need isn’t being met. Everyone puts oth­er peo­ple first, and the one foun­da­tion I believed I had in my life has crum­bled. I’m nev­er impor­tant enough.

Two things keep me from killing myself.

The thought that one day, I may mean some­thing to some­one. Or the thought that one day, I’ll be able to stop defin­ing myself through oth­ers, and sim­ply be con­tent with who I am.

Either way, some­thing’s got­ta give.