I’ve thought once or twice about how pretentious it is to quote yourself, but I like these paragraphs I wrote a few years back:

Too far out and you spread yourself too thin, the world, the universe, becomes a vacuous, empty place and it seems that every road runs to nowhere, and you’re moving but it seems you’re still in the same place no matter how fast you run, how hard you punch the accelerator. There is a deadening sameness to everything that happens, and you wonder what the point of it is all, why you should even bother.

Too close in and you may very well implode. Every single moment becomes a decision of tantamount importance, every act becomes a battle between life and death. This is when a single look can kill you, a moment of neglect can suck all the life out of you, a misspoken word can send you reeling, heart stopped, vision blurring. The most minor mistake is like setting off a grenade, a nuclear bomb, and the fear of meltdown and fallout looms like a suffocating cloud obscuring the sun. You know that there’s no way to keep going on like this, and yet it doesn’t seem like it’ll ever end.

These days are closer to the former than the latter, which is, I suppose, when comparing the two head-to-head, preferrable.

Still, I find it a little sad.

Just as one of the cardinal symptoms of depression puts it, I have lost my ability to feel pleasure in things that used to feel pleasureable. Simple, lazy pleasures like reading, drawing my useless maps, watching TV. Staring at the sea, driving to random places, walking up and down the city streets.

And I have no sex drive whatsoever. (I know, way too much information.) Instead of being frustrated by the fact that there is no one out there who’ll have sex with me (without being enticed by money or drugs), I just don’t care any more, in an empty sort of vacuous way. Intellectually, I know that it’s either the depression itself, or maybe it’s the anti-depressants, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if maybe I’m just burnt-out from rejection.

Most of the time, it’s OK. Like one of my patients recently put it, he takes his antidepressants not because it makes him happy, but because he doesn’t have madness-inducing highs and lows anymore. While he states that his life still kind of sucks, he’d rather have this flatline existence than the roller-coaster-like insanity that alternates between white-hot anger and inconsolable sadness.

So, similarly, I’d rather not feel at all, instead of having these alternating waves of feeling like wanting to kill myself followed by feeling like wanting to kill other people.

But in quiet moments, when I’m left to the dark silence, I can’t help but wonder what it is like to have a normal spectrum of emotions. To be able to feel happy, for one thing, although in all perfect, pathetic honesty, I don’t remember the last time I felt this way. To be able to feel sad, I mean, to really feel empathetically sad. Not just for myself. Not this dispiriting, lead-weight of self-pity that I’ve been carrying around for years, but to be able to feel truly sad for other people. And then to be able to feel passion, drive. That’s probably what I miss the most. Inspiration. Magic.

But I tried getting off of the medications, and while it was OK for a while, for almost a good month, I started wearing down (in retrospect), and then the darkness damn near suffocated me one bleak March morning and it took me a while to right myself again.

So here we are back on the (metaphoric) barren plain, staring at the miles of empty space. While I’d rather have this than the goddamned pits and chasms that I’ve struggled to barely climb out of, I would, just once in a while, maybe even just once, just once, I would like to see some mountains.