Depression is insidious. For me, when its not overwhelming sadness, it’s self destruction. It’s eating too much. Spending too much. Pushing too hard. Overcorrecting until people are sick of it. Or staying up way too late even when I recognize that I’m tired. Even when I’m falling asleep in my chair.

And the thing is, things aren’t bad. I’m anxious for a trip I have to take for work. Basically because there will be a ton of people there and I won’t have any social cover or retreat. Other than that, I’m good.

But still I push past endurance. Still I do this. Self destruction. In service to nothing. And, while I’ve gotten better down the years, I’m still not well. I don’t even know what well looks like. And it baffles me that there are people out in the world who have no idea what this is. They never feel like this. And if they do, they shake it off. Like it’s nothing, like it’s easy.

To me, they are aliens. I can’t relate to that frame of reference. I don’t know what it is. So we are aliens to each other. Describing the indiscribable. And getting lost in the words we can’t share.

And I wonder, how many dichotomies are like this? How many fundamental schisms of perspective are there?

We share this world, but I don’t think we live in the same one. And that is the hardest thing to accept and convey. The reason we are so fundamentally divided is that we have codified our stances as fundamental parts of our being. And so, every deviation is a existential fight for identity with no person or group able to give ground. Lest we are forced to redefine our self as other.

I despair for humanity. Not because I think we are doomed but because I see the downward trend. And I don’t know if we’ll make it out. I hope there is some angle I’m not seeing. Some truth that lays fallow and unknown waiting to bring forth life.

But still its late, and even now I procrastinate.
I can still get a couple of hours of sleep, maybe.
I can control me. And maybe that’s all we could ever do. And maybe that will need to be enough.