Flop

1.

You start to feel it coming days before it actually hits. It’s a hard feeling to describe — it feels like your brain has the flu, that it’s feverish, alternately running too hot and then shuddering with cold. You find yourself cancelling stuff, saying no to things, and after a little while you realize that you’ve lost a couple of days and some of the things that have slipped were less in the nature of occasions and more in the nature of responsibilities. A bill you forgot to pay, though you had the money to do it. A change you need to make in a project that you keep not making, though you know it would take only minutes.

Email becomes a source of trouble, and the phone. Mirrors are bad, too — anything that reminds you who you are. The bed becomes a crucible; you lie in it at night, mind swirling with nonsense thoughts, dread of your impending death, the sensation that your life has spun away from you and you don’t know how to get it back — and then when you do sleep, it’s poorly, perhaps sleepwalking or shouting yourself awake in the night, and you wake up well before dawn with a crushing feeling of being alone.

Maybe you try to cure it with booze, but that just makes it worse. Maybe you use exercise, but three steps into your jog you’re already tired and don’t care. You know that going into the world and seeing people would help, but you can’t think of a single one you’d like to see. The day unfolds silently, grayly, until after a while you go back to bed, and eventually you find yourself lying there, joylessly listening to podcasts or trying to read, and it dawns on you: Oh, you think, I’m depressed again. Somehow, though it’s happened so many times before, you almost didn’t notice it happening this time.

And you wonder how long it will last. Seems likely to be forever.

2.

One of the difficulties with therapy is, I think, that there’s a way in which therapists believe — they have to believe — that there is a cause-and-effect nature to the human psyche, that all actions are traceable to other actions, that depressions are caused by things, specific things that you’ve done or which have happened to you. And I’m just not sure I believe that’s true. Years ago I became obsessed with the idea of apophenia, or the human tendency to detect patterns in random data; it is, far and away, the most important principle to keep in mind when trying to wade through the various hobbyhorses and cognitive biases that drive most human discourse. And I can’t help but feel, on some really deep level, that therapy is just apophenia being applied haphazardly to the human brain, which we already don’t understand very well.

What happens before I become depressed? Is it caused when I finish a project and don’t have a new one to work on? Maybe it’s the advent of autumn, with its shortish gray days and dire warnings of what winter will bring. Could it be breakups? Stress? Binge drinking? Spending too much time alone? Failure to get exercise? Some chemical in my brain that just goes AWOL every now and again? I can’t tell you, really. All of those are plausible given the various events that have preceded past episodes. I suspect, however, that there may be no proximate cause at all. It just happens sometimes. My ability to feel goes on the fritz and after awhile I’m back in the bed with Terry Gross blabbing in my ear.

The one thing that therapy has done is help me to recognize when it’s starting, even if I don’t recognize the cause. I can trace this one back to last Thursday, when I made up a bullshit excuse not to go to a show I’d been looking forward to all summer, and instead spent the evening watching baseball and playing video games by myself. The next day was the brain-fever day, the day spent quaking with nameless dread over what might happen when the sun went down, and then the insomnia, the parasomnia, and the dreams. In my dreams I am always less lonely than in life.

So today I’m trying to force myself to break out of it, to adapt, and hope that by engaging in the things I enjoy when I’m not sick, I can treat the symptoms of my illness. I will get a haircut. I will go running. I will close the door to my bedroom and not go back in there until night. I will not cancel my plans this evening. And I will try, very, very hard, not to be glum, sarcastic, and mean to the people I meet. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll bring the nose up on this diving plane.