I recently had a somewhat depressive episode for several days and it was a reminder of how important it is to be proactive about mental health. I have gone a long time without any issues but then suddenly I spent days crushed by the weight of the world.

It was everything all the time and nothing to be done. I felt disconnected from the world around me and as though I was just drifting through space. In some very real sense, I understand that I am doing that as we all are just random collections of molecules that happen to have some form of complex consciousness. But this was a reduction of this complexity into only the worst possible thoughts and feelings as my standard mode of operating. It was all-consuming and seemed to be endless.

Only there was a limit, and I’ve found my way out of the dark again. My attempts to look back and learn from it are fruitless, as there is nothing to see any more. In this normal state, it seems the depression is in my blind spot, forever there but out of the reach that understanding might give me.

I believe the culprit was money and that makes me sick to consider. But when I completed an assignment and got paid, I felt some immediate and noticeable relief. The depression did not go away, but it seemed to loosen the grip it had on me and allowed me the chance to breathe. The evil that we’ve deemed necessary as a society got the best of me again and this time it cost me days of feeling true despair.

Our self worth gets so tied up in our bank account balance that we lose sight of what is truly valuable in our lives. But if we focus entirely on the things that we derive value from, we are forced to reckon with a world that has zero fucks to give and never stops asking more of us.

I hate the world as we’ve made it and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to alleviate myself of this hatred. My attempts to extricate myself from this set of societal shackles have helped immensely, but there is still so much work to be done and only so much time in a day. No matter how much progress I feel I’ve made removing myself from the world, it continues to test my patience in the way that it always has.

Just as there are only so many hours in a day, there is only so much patience. When the well runs dry, I retreat into myself to replenish my stores. These retreats may appear as a silent brooding to outside observers, but if I truly move into rumination, it is experienced as a deafening silence. The kind of silence only experienced by astronauts in the void of space. And I’ve yet to leave the planet in body, mind, or spirit, and I have no intention of doing so any time soon.