Obligatory World Mental Health Day Post

My friend Tamora often posts things that are challenging, mental health resources and ideas. I find her posts interesting because we are so different in so many ways, yet I feel a connection to her beyond our relatively few direct social interactions. We’ve both had a rough old go of it, and our coping strategies are somewhat different. Our perceptions of the world around us are also somewhat different, and she lacks the misgivings about intersectionalism and deliberate cognitive bias (standpoint) that I do.

She recently posted this graphic, and the accompanying Youtube videos, and given that it’s World Mental Health Day and given that I continue to flouder around looking for ways to process and understand my mental health issues, I thought I’d work through this as a self-examination.

I don’t get on with self-help for the most part. Positive-thinking feels like ‘woo’, much of what is taught and done feels self-indulgent, selfish and seems to encourage those attitudes in people, while excusing it.

Letting Go

Letting things go, changing behaviour in any way, seems virtually impossible. After all, we are who we are and we fall into our habits involuntarily – for the most part.

Conscious effort is constantly and consistently required to form new habits, and that’s exhausting. This also goes for letting things go. If it is in your nature to ruminate and agonise, how are you supposed to let it go?

What People Think

No man is an island, and as social creatures we do have to care about our reputations and the people around us. This is especially true if you rely on reputation and attention for a living. This is the case, to a certain extent, for everyone these days.

To an extent it’s necessary that I care what other people think of me, and it’s a source of constant frustration and heartache. I know who I am. I spend more time than is probably healthy in self-reflection and critical self-analysis.

To have a reputation at odds with who I know I am, much of it entirely, or very nearly, spurious and fictional, is a hard thing to cope with. I think I find this so difficult because I am a professional communicator, and yet it seems impossible to communicate who I am to certain people.

I should just write them off, but it feels like the failing must be mine.

Perfectionism

Anyone who regularly watches my YouTube channel knows that I fairly commonly say ‘you will make mistakes’, buy that it is worth the effort to try and be kind, to try and steelman the positions of your opposition, to try and put yourself in another person’s shoes.

I am very fond of a series of quotes from Diamond Age about hypocrisy, even though it is one of the things that I really can’t stand in most people. I have a particular problem with hypocrisy when it comes to moral grandstanding, shaming and judgement.

If someone characterises themselves as anti-racist, but then is egregiously racist and tries to excuse it by redefining racism, I find this enraging. Small scale things I can forgive, but not in myself. It’s not so much perfectionism, as this unforgiving attitude – at least towards myself.

I feel like I am striving to do my best (and failing), but that others aren’t even trying to be consistent.

Numbing and Powerlessness

Getting numb was my survival tactic for many years. I would be resilient, stoic. I would don my emotional armour and not let anything touch me. By the time I opened up again and allowed myself to feel again (well into my twenties) it proved to be a mistake and I just ended up getting hurt again.

Since 2007 I have had a diagnosis of chronic depression, general/social anxiety disorder and dependency disorder, several suicide attempts, several incidents of self-harm and a great deal of helplessness. That cannot help but make one feel powerless.

It’s not just the state of the world that makes me feel powerless, I don’t feel like I can steer my own life. I am at the mercy of unpredictable chemical changes in my brain, a severe and ongoing depression that will either kill me or be with me to the end of my days, ruining everything.

It’s hard not to feel powerless in the face of that.

Scarcity and Fear of the Dark

I have a few powerful memories from when I was very small. I used to sleep in a room just down the hall from my parents, and quite often, at night, I would get out of my bed and creep through the hall to where they were. On the same wall as my door was a small toy cupboard, where my building blocks and so on were.

One very dark night I crawled out of bed and made my way across the floor to what I thought was the door, but it was the cupboard. I shut myself in, and in the pitch black I couldn’t find the knob and couldn’t get out. Crying for my mum and dad until they found me.

So I am, actually, afraid of the dark. The pitch dark, at least. When there’s no light at all.

That said, that’s not really what this about. Scarcity and fear of the dark refer to fears of uncertainty, insecurity, catastrophisation and mental modelling of worst outcomes.

That part I do, a lot. I churn everything over in my mind constantly and it’s not entirely unhealthy to engage in analysis and decision modelling. I do it too much though.

Need for Certainty

I think this plays into the previous section. For me it’s not necessarily about certainty, but about minimising risk. When you have a long-term, debilitating illness you can’t take anything with certainty.

Comparison

How can you not compare yourself with others? That’s a guide to figuring out how you’re doing, relative to them. Sure, success for you may be different to success for them, but as a yardstick, comparison is all we have.

I have not really had the success I want, or even feel like I deserve. Meanwhile I see people elevated for terrible work, inferior work, or because they meet the ‘right’ identity categories and it’s hard not to feel resentful. This is not a very flattering thing to admit about oneself, jealousy isn’t really the right characterisation, injustice – perhaps – is.

Exhaustion as a Status Symbol & Productivity as Self-Worth

This is more of an American problem than a British problem, and more of a British problem than a European one. My problem is, primarily that I am exhausted all the time without the being productive part.

As a result, when I do have energy, when I do anything, I feel it has to be productive and worthwhile. I hardly ever do anything that is entirely for myself. It has to make money, or hone a skill, or be a gift for someone else to be justifiable.

All I have for myself, is sleep.

Anxiety as a Lifestyle

I have anxiety, this doesn’t seem assailable in any really meaningful way. Things like ‘mindfulness meditation’ attack the symptom, not the cause. This is a dysfunction that may well be neurological, rather than psychological, so other than ‘cope’, I don’t know what to do about it.

Self-Doubt and ‘Supposed To’

I am riddled with self doubt and I find it impossible to accept compliments.

I know I have competence, am even good, as a writer, creative, Games Master and games designer. However I only know this intellectually, I do not feel it.

I need affirmation, but self-affirmation is not effective and my doubt and low self-esteem prevent me truly accepting affirmation even when it does appear. This leaves me forever hungry for affirmation, afraid to solicit it, wary of being a burden and conscious of people’s loss of patience with my constant need to be shored up.

I need something that I can’t accept, even when I get it, and hate myself for soliciting it or fishing for compliments. On the opposite side of that, every criticism, every piece of bile that is flung my direction hits hard, no matter how stupid or incorrect.

Cool & Always in Control

When you can’t control much in your life, you tend to focus on the things you can control and – at least to an extent – that leaves you with self-control.

To the same extent that I have survived by creating a layer of emotional armour, intellectualisation and distance, so I have also clung to the idea of control. It’s a way to survive, something to hold on to, and while I have torn down these walls a little in the last 13 years. I have tried to be more open and vulnerable, there’s always something holding me back because this was so necessary to live.

Cultivating

These are things that you are supposed, apparently, to do more of, as opposed to the previous things, which you’re supposed to try and minimise. I’m not sure about them, but as with the previous, it’s more about – for me – analysis.

Authenticity

I have been trying to be more authentic for a while now. To be more open about who and what I am and refusing to be shamed or guilted for it, but it’s not easy.

Sometimes the pursuit of authenticity can be contradictory. I embraced my wilder fashion choices and my ‘look’ because I was disappointed in the appearance and example of other game designer when I met them. I didn’t want to be another schlub in cargo shorts and a faded t-shirt. I wanted to look the part. So in a way, that choice was inauthentic, but it presented an opportunity to be a more authentic person and to express more of my true personality in how I look.

The fear, when you are authentic, is that people will reject and even hate the real you. You won’t have the protection of knowing it’s a facade or a mask, a false front that people react badly to. It’s the real you.

That can be insurmountable, and we all have (and need) secrets. To be authentic, and vulnerable, is to invite harm, right to your core. In the online world, much like the schoolyard, to show weakness is to invite bullies. To bare your belly is to invite a gut-punch.

Self-Compassion

Can’t do it.

I can be very forgiving and understanding of others, but the more of that I have, the less forgiveness I have for myself. If all I can control is myself, then I demand a lot from myself, besides, I ‘know’ I don’t deserve it.

A Resilient Spirit

Reilience is stoicism, at least to me. This seems to be in contradiction with earlier points. Perhaps what is better meant is anti-fragility. To grow back stronger each time, rather than to resist all damage.

Gratitude & Joy

I have tried keeping a gratitude journal, but I have so little to write in it. I did this because this is one of the few self-help techniques with real, scientific backing to it but for me, just as with CBT or other positive-thinking exercises, it had no discernible effect.

As for joy, ‘anhedonia’ is a common side effect of depression and the drugs you take to treat your depression. Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure, let alone joy.

How can I find joy and pleasure with what may well be a neurological problem, preventing me from experiencing it? I’ve almost forgotten what it is like to feel happy, or joyful, the closest I can get is mere satisfaction, and even that is fleeting.

Intuition & Faith

Intuition is poorly tuned to modern life. Our instincts are honed by biology to tribal groups of 100 or so on the plains of primordial Africa. Our instincts are maladapted to modern megacities or the Internet. Our intuitions are only useful in small-scale, human interactions.

Faith, belief without evidence, is worse than useless. Whether it’s unfounded belief in an ideology, a religion – or indeed anything else – is dangerous, almost beyond imagining.

I do not trust either of these things, and to place any emphasis on them as a guiding light in your life feels like the worst kind of folly. To me, at least, the absolute worst example of this thinking is ‘the serenity prayer’.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

– The Serenity Prayer

You don’t know what you can change until you try, it is not brave to enact change if you know that you can, and the only way to discern the difference is to try. Prayers like this, attitudes like this, encourage the bad form of pacifisn and passivity and allow less… serene people to have free rein.

Challenge, combativeness, argument, confrontation – these aren’t necessarily bad things in and of themselves, but people treat them like they are.

Creativity

My whole life is tied up in creativity and, when I can’t be creative, it is like I don’t exist. What else do I have to offer? If I’m not making something, who – or what – am I?

Rest & Play

I rest when I sleep, when my brain lets me. My play is also my career, even when I’m playing games rather than making them, it’s all meat for the beast.

I am never at rest, I always have to be doing something, partially because of that pressure and sense of identity tied up in what I do – rather than what I am – but also because if I don’t keep myself occupied my brain starts to eat me. It’s like starvation, if you don’t eat your body starts to break itself down to keep you alive. If I don’t feed my brain, it starts to devour the rest of me.

Calm & Stillness

See above. Only sleep is a break.

Meaningful Work

I tell stories and I make games.

Intellectually I know that creative enterprises are meaningful and special. That life isn’t worth living without creativity, without art.

Emotionally though, again, this doesn’t land. What I do is frivolous, undervalued. Some of this is cultural, our culture doesn’t value art or artists as it should any more (and some of that is the fault of artists). Some of it is just that creeping self-doubt, and that constant comparison with others.

Many would define what I do as absolutely meaningless. Many of the same people who spend their lives shuffling small green pieces of paper from one place to another and pocketing a commission.

Laughter, Song & Dance

Anhedonia is a bitch, and I don’t dance.

It’s important to me to be open about my issues, to help people understand them, and me, and if that means a metaphorical boot to the groin from time to time so be it.

In the end, the only person’s opinion you have to be able to live with, is your own.