On Depression, Privilege, and Fitness to Work
Below are a series of screenshots of a blog entry newly-30 me wrote in early 2017. What follows are some late 2022 thoughts.
For folks who have trouble reading the screenshots or prefer to use text-to-speech, the transcript is below
Personal
Acknowledgement of Privilege Portion: I know I can only consider this because my parents are relatively financially secure (with enough to spare for a son in law school and a tumor of a thirty-year-old eldest daughter, who has elected to live in the single most expensive city in the goddamn archipelago). And for all of my compunctions about depending on their largesse they’re still incredibly supportive. I acknowledge the existence of that social and financial safety-net, and I am grateful for it, and to my parents. And now that I’ve established that I’m a privileged thirtysomething millennial princess failure who has failed to adult and who really has no right to whinge, I’ma go right ahead and whinge.
I work in a research center inside a state university campus. The students had all left for Christmas break (and yes, here it’s most definitely Christmas, and not “The Holidays,” as it is more correct to say in the Western areas of the Anglosphere. The Philippines is, as a friend says, a de facto theocracy. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Catholic Church, or the rapidly mushrooming Baptist/Born Again Churches spreading throughout the urban areas, the folks who claim to speak in the name of the Big G and his boy J.C. are running the show), which meant that offices on campus had to close too.
I left Manila to go back home to Bacolod for Christmas (because to not do so is unthinkable for la familia), and while I did have ample time to work on my sleeping and fanfic-reading backlog in the midst of all the Christmas parties and holiday-related kitchen duty, I still felt… drained.
And as I’d mentioned in a previous post, I’d also engaged in some work-related stuff while I was at home. It wiped me out.
And now that I’m back in Manila, back in the office, and faced with a continuation of the set of tasks I have to complete, I’m… still wiped. Just thinking about the output I have to deliver makes me want to curl into a fetal position and scream into my knees. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. (K, I do. Major depression. But there has to be more to it than that, right? Right???) This is all stuff I was excited about. This is supposed to be the kind of work I’m taking my damn MA for.
But I’m so overwhelmed.
I can’t do it.
I’ve tried telling myself that I can take it one day at a time –five minutes at a time, if need be. I’m trying to. But I’m also still freaking out. Curled-in-fetal-position-and-screaming-into-my-knees has been my default mental state since I came back. I start off trying to do my job, but I lose the thread and end up staring at Tumblr and mentally running in desperate circles, not-quite-whimpering under my breath.
I feel so lost. I don’t know what to do. With my head the way it is, I really don’t think I’m fit to work.
Should I resign? My contract for this project ends in February. My boss already told me I’m up for renewal. I don’t know if I can take it. I won’t sacrifice my studies for this (I already did that last semester, and I’m not going to do it again). And if I can’t continue working while fulfilling my academic obligations, should I inform them that I won’t be renewing my contract next month?
And if I don’t renew my contract and instead “concentrate on my studies,” while I try to fight off the chittering monsters in my brain, where will this put me? I have no savings (I tried. I really tried, but cost-of-living in Manila is terrible for someone in my abysmal pay-grade). I’ll be back on parental life support. Will I end up suspended deeper in the stasis tank of my dependence and psychiatric distress? Will I somehow eventually move past this, complete my MA, and finally become independent?
What if I can’t do this.
What if I never get out.
I want to fling myself off a cliff and swim down until everything is dark and quiet and nothing hurts.
I want to be free.
Ah, Past Me.
It’s 2022. You’re thirty-five now.
Life… doesn’t hurt quite as much anymore.
Yes, things still warrant curling into a fetal position and screaming into our knees. “The news is dark and full of horrors,” to misquote Melisandre from Game of Thrones (which ended very disappointingly, BTW.), and it just keeps getting worse and worse. And 2022 will throw you for a loop, my God.
But… you’re OK.
Maybe it’s the medicines (which you have now been taking for over five years; stay hydrated and protect your liver and kidneys!), maybe it’s the changes you’ve made to your personal life, maybe it’s a combination of all of these things, but somehow… you’ve got this.
The air around you no longer feels like blades, and you yourself no longer feel like a pulsing bruise in the fabric of space and time. And you can breathe.
But you’re not free.
You never will be.
Being alive is entanglement.
And you learn how to braid yourself through the threads that you encounter in new ways. And you learn that it can be beautiful and good.
And thanks to this, you can now learn to swim deeper into your privilege. You now have plans for how to leverage it.
There are people who are in your position — knees to their chins, numb, exhausted by the mere act of pumping blood through their veins- but unable to reach for help because they cannot access the resources. Because the world around them is built to crush them and crush them and crush them until all their light is nothing but a subterranean glimmer, like veins of iron ore or diamonds. And you now have the strength to see that light through all the atmospheric weights of soil and mud, the energy to perceive and learn about the ways our systems alienate and destroy.
You’re seeing and learning so much, Past Me.
And you still don’t have the resources for it, but you’re making plans for when you do.
You want to help create systems that support what is already there. For people like you, but who don’t have your considerable (relative) privilege. For people even more vulnerable than you.
Yes, you’re still desperately struggling to stabilize financially, but you’re finding a way to balance how your energies fluctuate from day to day. And now you have more energy.
The past five years have granted you some relief from the nonstop internal noise and pain and numbness. And you’ve admitted that what energy you do have is limited. And therefore precious. And you’ve learned — are still learning- to set boundaries so that those limited energies can be directed towards what feels good and right.
And you have plans.
You can plan!
And those plans are so full of love and deep learning. And they’re constantly evolving as you yourself grow.
Look at you! Look at that confidence, that grace! You’re doing so well now, Past Me.
No, you definitely aren’t fit to work. You are hurting so much, and you are so so ill. But what else could you have done? Work forced you out of bed. It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t necessarily good for you, and maybe under different, more prosperous circumstances, you could have accelerated your healing, but for now, you are where you are.
Hang on.
