Depression.

Depression’s gonna be a tough one to write about, it’s one of the reasons I’ve been putting it off. Not because of some kind of weird personal drama, although I suppose that could be the case, rather it’s that depression is like cancer in that it’s touched almost everybody’s lives at some point, if not personally, then through a loved one. As such, my usual dismissive, callous and snarky writing style may not be appropriate, as it's going to be a very personal topic for a lot of people. But what the hell! You knew the risks when you clicked the link!

The cancer analogy is actually fairly apt when I think about it, depression is self-feeding, it draws your strength away to make itself grow, it’s often something that causes alienation from those around you, and it’s often over-simplified when in fact it can be very complex and nuanced. It can also be fatal, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

For those who wonder what it’s like to be a depressive, let me elaborate for you:

You wake up.
Consider this to be a small tragedy, idly wish you’d died in the night.

Manage to get out of bed, curtains are all drawn as you don’t like to be seen, your house is a tip anyway, you haven’t found the energy to clean up and the herculean task it now represents makes you feel even more like a useless piece of shit.

Enter the bathroom, look in the mirror. A worn out, wasted, useless sack of shit stares back at you. You don’t hate or pity them though, they aren’t worth such strong emotions, you just wish they’d go away. You look at the bleach on the floor and wonder if you should just drink it.

You get in the shower, wonder what it feels like to drown, wash and brush and towel yourself off. Go and get dressed, depending on who you need to fool that you’re fine and normal today, you pick out your wardrobe accordingly. You don’t dress for yourself, you dress for others. In a way this is a mercy, nobody can judge you on your own poor choices if you’re dressing for them. Nothing you ever do, no choice you ever make will be good enough. As you wait for the bus you contemplate throwing yourself into traffic, the only thing stopping you is the massive disappointment that will make you to your family.
You get to work, you force yourself to be as normal as you can, smile your hollow smile and pretend or force yourself to eat, even though you’ve lost your appetite. Maybe later you’ll get home, realise you’re hungry and eat a tonne of junk food, and then hate yourself even more because you’re turning into a fat piece of shit.
You get home and eat junk food and feel like a fat piece of shit. You look at your filthy surroundings but find that you can’t even think how to begin cleaning. You waste your evening doing things that distracted you for a little bit, but as soon as they are over you feel like your pathetic for wasting your time when you have so much to do.

You drink heavily before bed, you’ve started drinking more and more now, it’s a useful distraction.
You lie in bed and review everything in your life that has ever made you feel small, pathetic and worthless and decide that you are small, pathetic and worthless.
You sleep.

You do the same again tomorrow.

Brutal huh? Like I said, not much to make light of, the worst part about depression is it’s your own mind telling you this, and even though the dim view of yourself is never usually true, it’s real to you, because you’re not used to your own brain lying to you.
Depression gets its strength by convincing it’s victims they are weak, and every set-back is proof of it, and every triumph is measured against the collective achievements of the world and dismissed as pathetic.

So how do you fight something like that? The annoying but often most accurate answer is “slowly.”
Re-training your brain is the work of a lifetime, and a seemingly Sisyphean task to somebody with depression. It’s trying every day to do a small thing that you have to force yourself to do, and build on that. It’s never really seeing any progress, until years later you look back at where you were and see how the journey of a tiny step every day has taken you. It can be helped by meds and therapy, but ultimately the person has to want to get better, which can be very, very tough.

Y’see depression, especially long-term depression starts to form a core part of a person’s identity, and if they start to leave it behind they begin to panic, because they feel they are no longer themselves, they are “faking it” or pretending to be something they are not. The siren’s call to simply let everything crumble and fall back into depressions toxic arms gets stronger and stronger the longer you stay away, and the fear grows that you’ll becomes somebody different, a pretend-person who isn’t really who you are. After all, the voice telling you that you’re a worthless piece of shit is your own, why wouldn’t you listen to yourself?
But the thing is, leaving that person behind is a good thing, re-building yourself takes time, and it feels difficult for a reason, but you will love the person you are building more than the person you leave behind if you stick with it, but ultimately nobody can change yourself but you.

It’s pretty dark stuff, and dangerous and deadly too. I think it’s often misunderstood, and very-often misdiagnosed (especially when people self-diagnose). But as time goes on it gets more and more into the mainstream, and hopefully one day we can trait the underlying cause instead of the symptoms. After all, it’s becoming more and more common in our society, so we’re obviously doing something wrong.

What your sexual fantasies say about you!

Sex sells! And I can make clickbait titles as well as the next man!

So, you want me to reach into your bonce and fiddle around with what tickles your libido? Well you’ll have to take a number and get in line! (ho-ho-ho I can keep this up all day, yay! Sex jokes!)

Okayokayokay, in all seriousness. Sex being the taboo subject it is in polite society, people generally don’t talk about their sexual fantasies, or if they do it’s sort of “approved” kinks, “I’d love a threesome. I’d love to be tied down. I’d love to watch a porno with you.” Not to say this stuff isn’t kinky, or even taboo in its way, but it’s stuff people are expected to say when they reveal their kinky secrets, because even the taboo has little social scripts we all follow.

So let me tell you a little bit about “Intrusive thoughts.” We all have them, it’s the part of your brain that says ridiculous things that you would never act on but you can’t help thinking them. Like “I could steal that baby carriage now and nobody would notice!” or “I bet I could push him and he’s fall down that escalator backwards, it would be so funny!” Weird borderline psychopath thoughts that we would never do! But for some reason our brain pokes them into our heads. Of course we’d never act on them otherwise society would collapse pretty fast, but we also don’t really talk about it because it’s VERY socially unacceptable to admit you just considered the possibility that you could totally spit on that guy from up here and nobody would find out!

Now let’s talk about reverse psychology, something I am sure you’re all familiar with. There is no greater lure then the forbidden and the guaranteed way of making somebody want something is to tell them they can’t have it.

So what does this mean in the context of sexual fantasies? Well, often in the grip of raging libido’s humans may have odd little intrusive thoughts, stuff that normally may repulse or disgust them all of a sudden pops into their heads, stuff that they’d never consider acting out but is entertained as a fantasy because it’s been conjured up by your intrusive thoughts and paraded around by the part of your brain that craves the forbidden. An example would be a lot of women admit to liking lesbian pornography, despite actually being turned off by the idea of being with another woman. It’s the lure of the forbidden and the vicarious enjoyment of a fantasy without needing it to be a reality.

So what do your fantasies say about you? Well… nothing. Seriously they say nothing. Just because it’s popped into your head it doesn’t make you a pervert, well no more than anyone else. We honestly can’t help what our primal brains throw at us. We all have fantasies of the sexual and non-sexual kind but very rarely do people act on them (as demonstrated by the lack of workplace homicidal rampages). So really all your fantasies say about you is “you like fantasies”. Boring I know, but not all psychology can be sensational headline grabbing bullshit… except maybe the title of this entry.

Fantasies are mostly harmless, and sadly the tiny, tiny number of people who indulge these fantasies are the ones who get paraded around as examples of why THOUGHTS ARE DANGEROUS CITIZEN! CRIMETHINK! REPORT TO THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH FOR APPROVED THOUGHT PATTERNS! But honestly? Just because somebody used their fantasies as fuel for psychosis, doesn’t mean that fantasies themselves are dangerous, any more then owning a gun is.