On Depression
Nov. 6th, 2006 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeBefore I go into even the beginning of this post I feel I should define a couple of terms, since this started out speaking of a couple of terms. These terms refer to archetypes as defined by Jung and revised by me. These archetypes are the Sorcerer and the Priestess.
This is for the two or three of you who might read this who don't know what these are. Goddess knows I've ranted on the topic a lot.
The Sorcerer is the archetypal shining figure who falls to self-destruction. He is proud, arrogant, and charming, wants something so badly (often someone) but can never quite make himself reach for it the proper way or simply because of circumstances and background can't even see the proper way. Whatever way he goes about trying to get this thing (or person) involves messy, self-destructive and generally destructive practices. In the end, implosion or sometimes explosion happens. The trick of the Sorcerer, the tragedy of it and what makes him so dangerous, is that he is aware that he's screwing up the whole time he falls. And for whatever reason, impulse control or skewed point of view or mental illness or choices at the time, he's still falling. He can't help it.
Examples of Sorcerers include Jareth from Labyrinth, Raistlin from the Dragonlance books, Angier and Borden from the recent book and film The Prestige, Lucifer from mythology, John Constantine from the comic book Hellblazer, Melisande from The Kusheline trilogy, Lilah from Angel, Lord Byron from history
The mandate of The Priestess is balance and order, much like the archetype The Witch. The contrast is perhaps best established in the example of, when teaching a teenager how to drive, the Witch will gently correct with calm words and a hand on the arm while the Priestess will grab the steering wheel and say "Pull the fuck over." The Witch is also charged with maintaining balance and order with nature, in the rhythms of the natural world. The Priestess maintains balance and orde within the world of man. Or sentient being, if you feel that's too speciesist. The Priestess can be brutally practical, but also deeply compassionate. She is often blunt, forthright, and efficient. She is skilled at using tools she has to hand in strange combinations and unconventional ways. She can make you solve your problem by riddling at you or giving you step by step instructions with diagrams and arrows.
Examples of Priestesses include Sebastian and G'Kar from Babylon 5, Inara from Firefly, Jaenelle from The Black Jewels Trilogy,
And wow. That went on a while. Okay. Now to the ramble.
A couple of friends of mine were commenting on the states of their lives and emotions right now and someone came up with the notion that a depressed Priestess = Sorcerer. Leaving aside the whole debate as to who falls in what canon or whether or not archetypes can be descriptive of real people anyway...
My sentiment? No. Depressed Priestess does not equal Sorcerer, it's not that simple an equation. And here's why.
Depression is a state. It's an emotional state, it's not a series of actions leading to an increasingly inevitable consequence. Depression may lead you to take actions that are Sorcerous, self-destructive and manipulative being what that adjective usually means. It may cause you to believe that things are closing in around you, depression may have you thinking in patterns of self-castigation, solitude, and emotional vulnerability or what have you. And it may make it easier to live in a Sorcerous, self-destructive manner.
Worse, if you are used to being one way, a Priestess in this case but in general someone at all self aware enough to know that something is very rotten in the state of Denmark, there's the fear of becoming a Sorcerer. There's the self-condemnation of watching your thought patterns turn into something darker, more paranoid, and more chaotic than you think you should be. You are supposed to be the one who fixes things, not the one who spirals down breaking everything and everyone around you, and even yourself, and all the while saying that it's beyond your control.
To take this out of the archtypal metaphor, depression sucks. You start by feeling down, maybe something's gone wrong in your life. Maybe the cause is biological or chemical, maybe it's circumstancial, maybe it's historical. Maybe you're coming up on the ten year anniversary of your mother's death. Maybe your car broke down, your cat died, or your significant other left you and maybe it all happened all in the same week. Maybe some neurons just aren't firing like they should, or maybe your glands aren't glanding. It varies for everyone.
You're depressed. And whether it's right away or eventually you realize you're depressed, that you're feeling upset and something's just not right. No one wants to feel that way, right? That's the first pitfall, sometimes; no one wants to feel that way but maybe a part of you does because when you say you're depressed and act like it, people give you attention. Maybe it's attention you've been secretly wanting for a long time, or you've been lacking for it lately. No one wants to feel that way, but a part of you does, because being depressed gives you slack and makes people act to make you feel that you're loved. And then you feel not quite right because the normality, as you know it, is to want to feel happy. Societies are geared towards the goal of feeling happy, and when you go out of society's accepted or understood goals you run the risk of being labeled as a crazy person.
There are a bunch of reasons why you might want to feel depressed; I listed a couple above. You want the slack that comes with being depressed, you want people to remind you constantly that you're loved. In that case, you've got problems as well as or other than depression, and it gets even more complicated than I want to talk about right now.
But let's say you don't want to feel depressed. Let's say you're looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, this isn't who I'm supposed to be.
Well, hell. That's not going to make you feel any happier, is it.
Depression is an insidious little worm. If it lasts longer than the obvious cause should be able to sustain you then the feeling that you shouldn't be this depressed for this long starts to pile on top of it. There is guilt. There is shame. And because we tend to associate guilt and shame with something we've done more often than with something we are, we think that we can change this. That's not always the case.
Sometimes the causes of our depression are too complex to be untangled swiftly or easily. Using an example from my own life, say you have a number of bills that have all come due at once, there's a storm coming in that's supposed to bring tornados and last a couple of days, and you have a project deadline. All of these are bad enough but when you pile them on together, they get stressful. And then as it gets towards bedtime you realize you can't sleep and you start crying hysterically because a tornado might hit your house and kill your cat, and you can't get the image out of your head. Now, up until this point you think you've been a reasonably practical person, and anyway they haven't even started the warning sirens yet. So what's going on to make you feel this way?
Stress is going on, that's obvious. Job stress, financial stress, and even environmental stress. The weather can be bloody depressing, and humans are creatures that need sunshine as well as rain. When it's been gray and cloudy for three days straight, maybe you don't get surly or sobby, but something happens that's as much biological as it is emotional; you're lacking a chemical whose name I can't think of off the top of my head, and probably couldn't spell it even if I can think of it.
In my life I was able to rearrange some bills and defer others so I could pay them off without going completely bankrupt, the storms passed, I buckled down and managed my time well enough to meet the deadline. Which leaves the randomly having a panic attack and bursting into tears. Well. Let's see. Date of last period? Check. Date of next period? Impending. Last emotional outburst this extreme? Hmmm.
And even that's a simplistic example for a complex series of circumstances. In that case I had to get a doctor's appointment (ten days), get a prescription for birth control and wait till I could start (three weeks) and wait for the chemicals to get into my system (two months). That's a hell of a long time to get my biologicals in order. Meanwhile I'm coping with bills, deadlines, and oh look. The dog's gone into the vet's. And a good friend of mine's disappeared and suddenly not talking to me anymore. Back into depression I go! But wait! Drugs, blessed drugs! Three months or so later, I can almost feel myself regaining some semblance of chemical normality. So why am I depressed?! Now I'm depressed and pissed off at myself! I should be getting better, dammit! Well, the dog's gone into the vet and I'm friends with a crazy person who routinely disappears and then pops up again and says hey, want to have lunch, so that will make me sad. Must make allowances.
And on and on and on.
If you haven't managed to attack all the causes of your depression at once and solve them, you're going to be depressed for a lot longer than you may have expected. And then you're going to feel guilty, ashamed, and damaged for being out of the state of normality that society expects of you. If you have managed (lucky) to fix all of the causes at once and new ones pop up while you're doing that, you're still going to feel down. And then you may feel guilty again. If you haven't even managed to find all the causes of your depression, or buy a clue as to where they are... well, you get the idea.
And all of this is still a very simplistic tirade or explanation for a very complex problem. Depression fucking sucks.
But you know what? It doesn't make you a Fallen One. It doesn't make you (to go back to jargon) a Sorcerer. It doesn't make you a bad person, a hateful person, it doesn't make you someone that your friends want to avoid.
Feelings are so rarely something we can control, which can be difficult because also, often, they're powerful enough that we have to fight to keep them from controlling us. That's exhausting. The more resources you spend wrestling for control over your emotions, the fewer you have for daily things like getting out of bed, doing laundry, making dinner (healthy dinner, because junk food day after day has its toll in so many ways) and all that jazz. Worse, we're told by a lot of people and a lot of sources that feelings should be something we can control. You shouldn't be in love with that person, they're married. And in California. And a movie star. It's pointless, give it up. You shouldn't hate that person, you should be better than that. Forgive them, and move on. You shouldn't feel sad, what's there to be sad about, it's a sunny day and you've got a terrific job, smile. Bullshit.
Feelings are feelings. They're what we feel, they have causes like just about everything else but we can't always figure out what those causes are. Sure, if you get in a car crash you're going to feel scared and hurt and upset and angry, and we can accept that. Because we can understand it. It's clear cut, A to B. But if you fall in love with someone... why do you fall in love with this person and not that person? That's A to PluralZ9-Alpha Quadrant. That's A-huh? Feelings are feelings. Emotions happen.
Your actions, now. Those can make you a Sorcerer. Which, as we all know (or at least you know now) is synonymous with bastard. Although it's not commutative. If you start lying with the truth a lot, you're turning into a Sorcerer. If you start seducing people just to snap them in two, you're turning into a Sorcerer. If you start throwing yourself off of cliffs and giggling the whole way down? You're probably dead, but if you can do it repeatedly and survive and still think it's funny? Yeah, you're a Sorcerer.
But it takes years to reach that point. A year, at least. It takes a lot of careful self-sabotage to get to that point, and it takes a lot of mistakes. And even when you reach that point, not all Sorcerers are irredeemable. Personally, I only know of one real life example. And he's spend thirty some odd years getting that way. And even now I'm not sure I'd call him irredeemable. Really far gone, at least.
Sorcerer's an easy word to toss around when you're depressed, when you're hurting and tired and you're so, so sick of feeling that way. When you know you're off balance or out of sorts, that something's wrong, and you just can't figure out what. And you think you're being self-destructive, and you think you're being a bastard, and maybe you are. People in pain lash out, we know that. Even the people who feel that they should know better. But really, Sorcerer isn't what you are. You're just a depressed Priestess. And like Tarot readings, it's not something you can do for yourself. That's why we have friends.
And after all that, if you're still reading, well, then this was a better ramble than I give it credit for. I am willing to discuss depression, Sorcerers, Priestesses, archetypes, whatever, if you want. I am not a licensed psychiatric or psychologic professional by any means, in fact, I've never taken a psych course ever. This is just my ramble based on a couple of comments that people have made. More personal answers to the comments and posts will probably follow.
Jaguar out.
This is for the two or three of you who might read this who don't know what these are. Goddess knows I've ranted on the topic a lot.
The Sorcerer is the archetypal shining figure who falls to self-destruction. He is proud, arrogant, and charming, wants something so badly (often someone) but can never quite make himself reach for it the proper way or simply because of circumstances and background can't even see the proper way. Whatever way he goes about trying to get this thing (or person) involves messy, self-destructive and generally destructive practices. In the end, implosion or sometimes explosion happens. The trick of the Sorcerer, the tragedy of it and what makes him so dangerous, is that he is aware that he's screwing up the whole time he falls. And for whatever reason, impulse control or skewed point of view or mental illness or choices at the time, he's still falling. He can't help it.
Examples of Sorcerers include Jareth from Labyrinth, Raistlin from the Dragonlance books, Angier and Borden from the recent book and film The Prestige, Lucifer from mythology, John Constantine from the comic book Hellblazer, Melisande from The Kusheline trilogy, Lilah from Angel, Lord Byron from history
The mandate of The Priestess is balance and order, much like the archetype The Witch. The contrast is perhaps best established in the example of, when teaching a teenager how to drive, the Witch will gently correct with calm words and a hand on the arm while the Priestess will grab the steering wheel and say "Pull the fuck over." The Witch is also charged with maintaining balance and order with nature, in the rhythms of the natural world. The Priestess maintains balance and orde within the world of man. Or sentient being, if you feel that's too speciesist. The Priestess can be brutally practical, but also deeply compassionate. She is often blunt, forthright, and efficient. She is skilled at using tools she has to hand in strange combinations and unconventional ways. She can make you solve your problem by riddling at you or giving you step by step instructions with diagrams and arrows.
Examples of Priestesses include Sebastian and G'Kar from Babylon 5, Inara from Firefly, Jaenelle from The Black Jewels Trilogy,
And wow. That went on a while. Okay. Now to the ramble.
A couple of friends of mine were commenting on the states of their lives and emotions right now and someone came up with the notion that a depressed Priestess = Sorcerer. Leaving aside the whole debate as to who falls in what canon or whether or not archetypes can be descriptive of real people anyway...
My sentiment? No. Depressed Priestess does not equal Sorcerer, it's not that simple an equation. And here's why.
Depression is a state. It's an emotional state, it's not a series of actions leading to an increasingly inevitable consequence. Depression may lead you to take actions that are Sorcerous, self-destructive and manipulative being what that adjective usually means. It may cause you to believe that things are closing in around you, depression may have you thinking in patterns of self-castigation, solitude, and emotional vulnerability or what have you. And it may make it easier to live in a Sorcerous, self-destructive manner.
Worse, if you are used to being one way, a Priestess in this case but in general someone at all self aware enough to know that something is very rotten in the state of Denmark, there's the fear of becoming a Sorcerer. There's the self-condemnation of watching your thought patterns turn into something darker, more paranoid, and more chaotic than you think you should be. You are supposed to be the one who fixes things, not the one who spirals down breaking everything and everyone around you, and even yourself, and all the while saying that it's beyond your control.
To take this out of the archtypal metaphor, depression sucks. You start by feeling down, maybe something's gone wrong in your life. Maybe the cause is biological or chemical, maybe it's circumstancial, maybe it's historical. Maybe you're coming up on the ten year anniversary of your mother's death. Maybe your car broke down, your cat died, or your significant other left you and maybe it all happened all in the same week. Maybe some neurons just aren't firing like they should, or maybe your glands aren't glanding. It varies for everyone.
You're depressed. And whether it's right away or eventually you realize you're depressed, that you're feeling upset and something's just not right. No one wants to feel that way, right? That's the first pitfall, sometimes; no one wants to feel that way but maybe a part of you does because when you say you're depressed and act like it, people give you attention. Maybe it's attention you've been secretly wanting for a long time, or you've been lacking for it lately. No one wants to feel that way, but a part of you does, because being depressed gives you slack and makes people act to make you feel that you're loved. And then you feel not quite right because the normality, as you know it, is to want to feel happy. Societies are geared towards the goal of feeling happy, and when you go out of society's accepted or understood goals you run the risk of being labeled as a crazy person.
There are a bunch of reasons why you might want to feel depressed; I listed a couple above. You want the slack that comes with being depressed, you want people to remind you constantly that you're loved. In that case, you've got problems as well as or other than depression, and it gets even more complicated than I want to talk about right now.
But let's say you don't want to feel depressed. Let's say you're looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, this isn't who I'm supposed to be.
Well, hell. That's not going to make you feel any happier, is it.
Depression is an insidious little worm. If it lasts longer than the obvious cause should be able to sustain you then the feeling that you shouldn't be this depressed for this long starts to pile on top of it. There is guilt. There is shame. And because we tend to associate guilt and shame with something we've done more often than with something we are, we think that we can change this. That's not always the case.
Sometimes the causes of our depression are too complex to be untangled swiftly or easily. Using an example from my own life, say you have a number of bills that have all come due at once, there's a storm coming in that's supposed to bring tornados and last a couple of days, and you have a project deadline. All of these are bad enough but when you pile them on together, they get stressful. And then as it gets towards bedtime you realize you can't sleep and you start crying hysterically because a tornado might hit your house and kill your cat, and you can't get the image out of your head. Now, up until this point you think you've been a reasonably practical person, and anyway they haven't even started the warning sirens yet. So what's going on to make you feel this way?
Stress is going on, that's obvious. Job stress, financial stress, and even environmental stress. The weather can be bloody depressing, and humans are creatures that need sunshine as well as rain. When it's been gray and cloudy for three days straight, maybe you don't get surly or sobby, but something happens that's as much biological as it is emotional; you're lacking a chemical whose name I can't think of off the top of my head, and probably couldn't spell it even if I can think of it.
In my life I was able to rearrange some bills and defer others so I could pay them off without going completely bankrupt, the storms passed, I buckled down and managed my time well enough to meet the deadline. Which leaves the randomly having a panic attack and bursting into tears. Well. Let's see. Date of last period? Check. Date of next period? Impending. Last emotional outburst this extreme? Hmmm.
And even that's a simplistic example for a complex series of circumstances. In that case I had to get a doctor's appointment (ten days), get a prescription for birth control and wait till I could start (three weeks) and wait for the chemicals to get into my system (two months). That's a hell of a long time to get my biologicals in order. Meanwhile I'm coping with bills, deadlines, and oh look. The dog's gone into the vet's. And a good friend of mine's disappeared and suddenly not talking to me anymore. Back into depression I go! But wait! Drugs, blessed drugs! Three months or so later, I can almost feel myself regaining some semblance of chemical normality. So why am I depressed?! Now I'm depressed and pissed off at myself! I should be getting better, dammit! Well, the dog's gone into the vet and I'm friends with a crazy person who routinely disappears and then pops up again and says hey, want to have lunch, so that will make me sad. Must make allowances.
And on and on and on.
If you haven't managed to attack all the causes of your depression at once and solve them, you're going to be depressed for a lot longer than you may have expected. And then you're going to feel guilty, ashamed, and damaged for being out of the state of normality that society expects of you. If you have managed (lucky) to fix all of the causes at once and new ones pop up while you're doing that, you're still going to feel down. And then you may feel guilty again. If you haven't even managed to find all the causes of your depression, or buy a clue as to where they are... well, you get the idea.
And all of this is still a very simplistic tirade or explanation for a very complex problem. Depression fucking sucks.
But you know what? It doesn't make you a Fallen One. It doesn't make you (to go back to jargon) a Sorcerer. It doesn't make you a bad person, a hateful person, it doesn't make you someone that your friends want to avoid.
Feelings are so rarely something we can control, which can be difficult because also, often, they're powerful enough that we have to fight to keep them from controlling us. That's exhausting. The more resources you spend wrestling for control over your emotions, the fewer you have for daily things like getting out of bed, doing laundry, making dinner (healthy dinner, because junk food day after day has its toll in so many ways) and all that jazz. Worse, we're told by a lot of people and a lot of sources that feelings should be something we can control. You shouldn't be in love with that person, they're married. And in California. And a movie star. It's pointless, give it up. You shouldn't hate that person, you should be better than that. Forgive them, and move on. You shouldn't feel sad, what's there to be sad about, it's a sunny day and you've got a terrific job, smile. Bullshit.
Feelings are feelings. They're what we feel, they have causes like just about everything else but we can't always figure out what those causes are. Sure, if you get in a car crash you're going to feel scared and hurt and upset and angry, and we can accept that. Because we can understand it. It's clear cut, A to B. But if you fall in love with someone... why do you fall in love with this person and not that person? That's A to PluralZ9-Alpha Quadrant. That's A-huh? Feelings are feelings. Emotions happen.
Your actions, now. Those can make you a Sorcerer. Which, as we all know (or at least you know now) is synonymous with bastard. Although it's not commutative. If you start lying with the truth a lot, you're turning into a Sorcerer. If you start seducing people just to snap them in two, you're turning into a Sorcerer. If you start throwing yourself off of cliffs and giggling the whole way down? You're probably dead, but if you can do it repeatedly and survive and still think it's funny? Yeah, you're a Sorcerer.
But it takes years to reach that point. A year, at least. It takes a lot of careful self-sabotage to get to that point, and it takes a lot of mistakes. And even when you reach that point, not all Sorcerers are irredeemable. Personally, I only know of one real life example. And he's spend thirty some odd years getting that way. And even now I'm not sure I'd call him irredeemable. Really far gone, at least.
Sorcerer's an easy word to toss around when you're depressed, when you're hurting and tired and you're so, so sick of feeling that way. When you know you're off balance or out of sorts, that something's wrong, and you just can't figure out what. And you think you're being self-destructive, and you think you're being a bastard, and maybe you are. People in pain lash out, we know that. Even the people who feel that they should know better. But really, Sorcerer isn't what you are. You're just a depressed Priestess. And like Tarot readings, it's not something you can do for yourself. That's why we have friends.
And after all that, if you're still reading, well, then this was a better ramble than I give it credit for. I am willing to discuss depression, Sorcerers, Priestesses, archetypes, whatever, if you want. I am not a licensed psychiatric or psychologic professional by any means, in fact, I've never taken a psych course ever. This is just my ramble based on a couple of comments that people have made. More personal answers to the comments and posts will probably follow.
Jaguar out.