Depression - Observational Overload

There are several ways how to experience depression. One of those that I experienced was my relegation to a mere observer of my own life. I do not speak of highly vivid mindful observation that people seek to practice with meditation. Nor do I speak of the sudden artistic flashes, when you sit in a bus, daydreaming, and suddenly talk and noise and colors and movement and time mix together in such a way that I could think myself set in a Tarantino movie.

That would be great. It’s not that kind of observation.

It’s instead the experience of being a marionette of known-boring circumstances, looking at myself from a nondescript angle behind myself, seeing stuff, seeing what stuff will happen, not caring a moment about anything. I get up. I observe the person that is me is doing stuff. After painfully long hours I fall asleep. That is good, because observing the same boring white wall for hours on end is really tiresome.

In such a situation I would still feel pain, and I would still talk and react in not all too unnatural ways. Think of a movie from the perspective of a character, where you hear all the thoughts, and feel all the actions, and know, because it’s you, the inner state of the mind – but all of the thoughts, the smell, the sound, feels disconnected, captured with a deficient microphone, pressed onto a 50 years old platter, and played back to you. In slow motion.

As my feel for color diminished, and taste became just a word, and through eternal repetition the connection of desire, decision, action, consequence was broken, the acceptance of my life being irrelevant, and the (now I think: invalid) conclusion of the impossibility of any meaning of life was not even defeat. It was a matter of fact. A sad matter of fact, but a fact nevertheless. Also, sadness had lost its meaning anyways, so who cares? Also, now is the time where I observed that I typically go home to eat. I observe it again. Wow.

Such nonchained experience can, sometimes, a little bit, lead to the illusion of a calm temper. But what it did to me, after bearing it long enough, is that after chipping away at all my positive emotions, memories, feelings, goals, day by day, just a little bit, I found myself trapped in a place which was dominated only by dull pain. Inescapeable. Incomprehensible for anyone else. And deserved; deserved in a universe where morality does not exist. This is when living another day became having to endure another day of psychological torture.