Considering the past, I’m largely filled with horror and regret and disappointment. Considering the future, I don’t expect anything better, and if I spend any time thinking about it the mere act of contemplation is so sickening and terrifying that I would rather imagine my life ceasing to exist. My greatest hope is to just not kill myself and be perfectly miserable and dysfunctional now, today. To keep living and be able to live with my existence.

I suppose that’s a pretty extreme emotional stance to take. But I wonder if a lot of people aren’t actually doing exactly that. Just trying to live with themselves and be somewhat happy in the moment and make it through today. I just allow myself to face and conceptualize it unusually clearly because I don’t allow myself the comforts of drugs, alcohol, or any other major numbing or distracting vices. And I’ve always been a bit more willing to look distressing ideas in the face (mentally, if not in life).

I can’t really think about where my marriage is going, or our country, or our church, or my life in any of its dimensions, because all my own thoughts and feelings are too awful and depressing to consider. The tolerability of life often seems like an illusion you’re just hoping to enjoy until the day it finally comes crashing down. Eventually it will. Disaster will come on slowly or suddenly. You just hope to forget about that and have an ok time in the now. Life, in all its dimensions, or my life at least, seems like a mirage I’m hoping will last as long as possible, a shiny bubble that will one day pop and reveal its substance was mere illusion.

It goes without saying that I see a lot of appeal in existentialism. I find it terribly convincing. It’s hard to form any kind of workable approach to life that isn’t completely arbitrary though, and terribly disheartening and dishonest.

So I never know how to answer the sort of questions my wife asks me, because they’re all predicated on the assumption that I’m doing something other than hanging on to life and sanity by my bare fingernails. That I’m not on the edge of complete nervous collapse. That I have any hope or efficacy or happiness left in me. That I think our country or church or marriage or my life is anything but a momentary illusion of stability that’s heading toward inevitable destruction, chaos, and dissolution.

Depression is difficult to quantify, because it’s fundamentally a reaction to a perception. And we label it as pathological either because it’s harming us, or because it’s not accurate to the real facts. But that’s a tricky thing to evaluate. Depression can often be the correct response to the things that have happened to some people. It’s an accurate marker of the kind of distress someone should feel given what they’ve gone through. So it’s hard for me to say whether my thoughts and feelings are what they are because I’m depressed, and that’s how depressed people think, or whether my thoughts and feelings are in fact quite appropriate for what I think and know and have experienced. Quite possibly, my evaluation of the underlying situations is factually accurate. It may not be exhaustively accurate, but I have some pretty good reasons for thinking what I think. I didn’t get to them based on my natural prejudice, I got there reluctantly, based on what I saw and learned and concluded. And other intellectuals have concluded similarly to myself.

Lord Byron said “Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.”

Bertrand Russell said, in a long, eloquent passage on materialism and existentialism, “Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

Solomon said, “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”

Hemingway said, “Happiness among intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

I’m not saying that just because these famously depressed smart people said these things (and this is a cherry picked sample, not a random one) that they’re necessarily true or right. As a smart person, it’s easy to organize the evidence behind your theory. To me, my depression and fear seem quite understandable, quite reasonable, completely justified. But I could be wrong. It certainly doesn’t make me happy if I’m right. I certainly don’t wish to be right. I’ve just been unfortunately proved right again and again. And being right about things you wish you weren’t right about can be pretty depressing.

Lately I’ve been trying to to think, not to use that part of my brain that gets into those subjects. Because my intellectual mind gets my feelings so depressed, I’ve been trying not to use it. I’ve been keeping my eyes closer to home. I’ve been coming and cleaning. Doing things for my wife and kids. And that’s all great. I can’t help but feel that I am avoiding some things though maybe even some things that I should be confronting in my life. But some of the best advice I’ve been given, as someone struggling with depression, is to set my sights as low as I need and work on that. Build up strength, build up confidence, create a pattern of repeatable successes. And chip away at life and build myself up until I can lift the heavier loads I had to give up.

My kids have been what’s gotten me through it all. My youngest especially. I think because her needs and desires are so simple. Not a lot of complex talking or explaining. Just love and play and care and a bit of guidance. She’s only six. And her world is small enough for me to control and improve and make a good place. I’m still big enough to be really big in her world. And that makes me feel good. And she’s so affectionate and appreciative and trusting. Comforting her after a nightmare, wrestling with her, tickling her, holding her, pretending to be animals with her, reading to her, all these things impact her in such a big way. It’s not possible to overstate what that has meant to me. It’s kept me sane, kept me alive.

Sometimes I wish I could just make the world smaller. Let go of and get away from all the big complex relationships and responsibilities and endeavors in life and just narrow everything down to just me and my kids and taking care of them. I feel like I could be happy doing just that. But I don’t know, I don’t think it would be good for them; I don’t think it would make them happy. It’s a selfish thought, and would be about fulfilling and protecting myself. So I sacrifice for them and decide to keep living and moving forward in the world for their sake. I don’t really want to, but they force me to contend with the world, if I want to make it better for them.

Sometimes I wish it would all just come down. That my business would just be taken away and ended, that my wife would leave me, that my family would write me off, that the country would descend into chaos, that the church would just collapse, that it would all just be over so I wouldn’t have to worry about it or carry it or dread the future any more. To just have an end to it all would be a relief, in a way. To have the prophecies come true.

I suppose, like a doomsday prophet, I feel that temptation to wish for the end of the world. Not to fear it, even though you know it’s fearful, but to wish for it. That is desire it. To just see it done and fulfilled so the anticipation can be over. So much of pleasure and of fear is in the anticipation. And sometimes you wish for the simplicity of the actual arrival. Then, in that crisis of passion or pain, you only have to deal with the present. I know that to wish for pain and ruin and instability and chaos is bad, so it’s an instinct I try to fight. And it’s an end I fear more than anything, that paralyzes and depresses me enormously, so how could I desire it? Maybe I just desire an end to the pain, or to the pain of anticipation. But I know, deep down, that that wouldn’t be the end of the pain, but a new beginning. And so I resist the urge to hasten the day.

Considering how much time I’ve spent being afraid and depressed and thinking about self harm and suicide, why don’t I ever take any steps to end my pain, either negatively or positively? If it’s really that bad, wouldn’t it be worth trying to make things better and confront the problems, rather than hide from them in the moment or hide from them in extinction? Surely that’s a better option? I’m pretty sure even Tom Hank in Joe Vs the Volcano made that argument.