Our Collective Depression

 When life was cancelled last spring, and I speak in general terms here bc I frankly was not paying much attention and cannot give precise dates, I did not care. Actually, I was relieved. Quarantine created an outer symmetry to my inner life. At the same time that I wanted to retreat and hide from reality, I was told to retreat and hide from reality. It was a relief to not have places to go, people to see, kids to shuttle, questions to answer, life to face. 

My inner life consisted of feeling that every major decision point of the last year had been catastrophically wrong and I wanted to simply disappear. We left our home in Houston, seeking to escape from what I could now see was straining at a gnat in order to now be faced with swallowing a camel. We were expecting a baby whose entrance into our lives would change everything, permanently. I knew enough to understand that we don't always rise to all our challenges. Some will just lay us low, and I had no energy for climbing.

In short, I was ok with the world being cancelled because I felt my world already had been. Or I wanted it to be. It was comforting to be told to do what I wanted to do anyway.

All of this is simply Depression. It is as if someone with depression was put in charge of making the rules. Of course, those making the rules for the rest of us have not been abiding them personally. But those of us who placidly obey at this point either have depression or Stockholm Syndrome. I count responding to our current scientific understanding of this virus as being less dangerous than seasonal flu to everyone that isn't elderly with "well, we don't know about the long-term affects yet," as a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Anything that people say at this point to justify current conditions that could not have been used last spring to justify the initial reaction is a variation on Stockholm Syndrome, aka the politicization of disease. 

Well, we should not be surprised. All our emotions can be weaponized against us. And every situation can be (and usually is) exploited on all kinds of levels, certainly politically. Thinking you are immune is the first warning sign.

But we need to recognize things for what they are. I am upset at myself for slinking under the call of my life, sleepwalking through my days, refusing to shoulder the work of involving myself in my own life. Living like that did not begin for me last spring. When we moved to Houston, I tried to cope with being new in a new city where I neither knew my way around nor had friends was to retreat deeper inside myself. I could do this comfortably by living in an awesome house. Before Texas, I had to get out each day and interact with the world bc staying cooped up at home was even more stressful and unhappy than leaving. Maybe if I had not been pregnant in 2014, maybe it hadn't been 100 degrees with 100 percent humidity when we arrived, maybe if I had all my kids in school, living friendless in a new place would not have feel so overwhelming to my instinct to connect within my community that I yielded to lying down. But I found it much easier to relax in my new beautiful home where my kids had plenty of space to stay out of melt-down zone than I did to venture forth and live. My need for connection was satiated by my podcasts and social media. It is not unlike how porn can satisfy the sexual needs for men, but since the replacement is so disordered, it leaves its users disordered, as well. Too satisfied to be driven to find the real thing, but not actually nourished. 

I wish I had not done that. Talk about turning blessings into curses. I know I am probably doing that again now: squandering the opportunities that pass by me, using one form of comfort to lull me into deeper discomfort. Too tired to live becomes a downward, self-perpetuating spiral, one we often don't even notice.

It is wrong to beat people down into being too tired to live, and that weariness is what sets in when humans are put into isolation. It is wrong to boil "living" down to a simple biological state. It is wrong to weaponize our instincts to be good neighbors, liked, respected, cooperators, against us to stifle dissent, questioning, and having basic freedom. We are all so close to ourselves we can't even see ourselves for what we are and how we operate. How we can be manipulated. 

It really does come down to: do we believe that the things we filled our lives with matter, or don't we? Do kids need friends? Do adults need companionship? Does education matter? What about livelihoods? Is the Eucharist the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ? Is there purpose in gathering in faith communities? Is there really life after this one? If everything is expendable in order to claw at avoiding an illness, then I do not see how we can say we do. For ten days, ok. For ten months, no. And here we are, no end in sight, even with a vaccine.  

How far the goalposts have moved. How different the justifications are today. How little people are even aware of either change. How little they care when it is pointed out. But depressed people tend not to care very much about things. So long as they are comfortable, or afraid.