Metablog

Life is really fucking hard sometimes. Really goddamn hard. My life has been nothing but pain for quite awhile now. There are moments where it’s enjoyable, I suppose. But every time I finish an activity, when my mind has a chance to recenter for a second—even during lulls in otherwise happy conversations—it’s right back to that hopelessness, that apathy, that feeling of being paralyzed and overwhelmed and sometimes even anxious, even panicky. It’s the feeling I live with.

I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist for six months now, and we’ve tried several different medications, and none of them have really worked, except maybe for one, Lamictal, that we had to stop because of some side effects. (There are still a few options to try, though.)

I have what they call treatment-resistant depression. It’s a formidable adversary. I’m in the 15-20% of people with major depression who aren’t helped by the first few medications they try. I have a few bipolar II-type symptoms that complicate treatment decisions. I have many ADHD-like symptoms, (though a clear diagnosis doesn’t seem to be possible in my case). I have delayed sleep phase disorder. (The prevalence is around 0.15%, lucky me, though it’s much higher in the teens and tends to get better over the years, usually. I’m pretty young yet, so it could improve on its own.) DSPD is both very hard to treat and very disruptive to normal lifestyles. In fact, in the cases where it doesn’t respond to treatment, where symptoms are moderate to severe, it’s starting to be regarded as an occupational disability.

I’m also in the 10-30% of people of middle class origin (the prevalence is much higher among the poor) who have a history of anxious-ambivalent attachment with their primary caregiver. (This book has a good history and summary of attachment science, though it is a bit old.) Basically that means my mom seriously screwed me up. I also have strong avoidant tendencies (that I blame both my parents for) that make forming personal connections very difficult. (The ambivalence shows up once I’ve formed the connections.) As a result, I currently have no connections, except to my mother, who isn’t very helpful or close to me, and my therapist, who I feel bad asking for help from because she’s already pushing herself to the limit supporting her family and other clients. I have no friends. Basically, I feel completely alone.

I have trouble feeling emotions. I’m very aware of what little I feel, and good at talking about my internal states, but I repress the pain of loneliness, and perhaps the pain from my childhood, and as a result I rarely feel much of anything. I can “feel” sympathy for people (it’s really an attitude or belief rather than an emotion), but it doesn’t seem to lead to empathy. I can accept sympathy from people, but I can’t feel their empathy. Scary movies don’t scare me. Sad movies don’t make me sad. (Well, a very little bit. I enjoy both.) I laugh at jokes, but never very much. And yet I’m told my sense of humor is pretty good.

I understand myself well enough to know that I have a deep longing for personal connection. (That much about me is normal, at least.) One of my happiest memories is being in the arms of my last (and first) girlfriend. Unfortunately, I failed her, and we broke up three and a half years ago. The prospect of finding another such relationship is so tantalizing. It seems like it should be so simple. There are so many people out there looking. But no, no. I have problems. I’m not ready to deal with both my problems and the pervasive, sexism-rooted strange customs, neuroses, and flat-out schizophrenia of the dating scene.

I have a very high opinion of my intelligence and rationality. I think there’s a 90% chance I’m in the top percent of intelligence (under most conceptions of intelligence, averaging the dimensions for multi-dimensional theories (with my own idea about the proper weighting, of course)), and a 50% chance I’m in the top .2%. I’ve learned to hide the arrogance, but it’s a constant effort. It makes me feel like a fake whenever I’m nice to anyone who’s obviously much less intelligent than I am. What I want to do is tell them they’re boring and not that smart and try to go find smarter people to hang out with. Not to hurt them, because there’s nothing wrong with not being a genius, and I really hold no ill will towards them. But they just don’t have much to offer me. On top of that, I have to fight a tendency to be genuinely mean-spirited (and an irrationally strong fear that others will be so) that I got from the lovely example of a human being that is my father.

And that’s not the only problem, either. I also have a lot of very unusual interests, and very few common ones. (Movies and cartoons probably being the only common ones, and I’m not even very passionate about those.) So I’m in the position of having the most passionate parts of my intellectual life being things that almost no one can relate to. Even among people who share some of my interests, bringing up random interesting subjects to talk about is more likely to intimidate and alienate than to interest them. And when that happens, it hurts. It’s a rejection. At this point I’m not even sure there is such a thing as “my kind”. All I know is that if there is, then it’ll be among the smartest people I can find.

But finding smarter people is really hard. Well, on the internet, it’s easy. There are even a couple sites I hang out at where the average intelligence could well be higher than mine. And there are several people I know individually of whom at least a few are definitely smarter, even much smarter than me. (I can’t say which ones with any certainty, because gauging someone’s intelligence (especially ad hoc, across the internet) can’t be done without pretty large expected errors, so I can only generalize.) But on the internet, I’m even more avoidant than in the flesh, so again, I’m not really able to connect with these people. Plus, none that I know of live in my area, so for the most part there isn’t even any fleshworld potential there.

And in fleshworld? Well, I could try school. Maybe a masters program in some technical subject. But I have traumatic memories of school, most recently undergrad, and I’m pretty pessimistic about the idea of going back and being able to find a good peer group. I hear bad things about academia, even with regards to non-terminal (i.e. non-humanities, you’re not planning on teaching) programs. Also, I’m opposed on principle to so many things about our educational system as it exists. (Seth Roberts occasionally talks about pedagogical considerations. Others are societal credentialism, the ridiculous cost of many programs, the exploitation of grad students in others, and the tension between pure learning and career concerns.)

Other kinds of jobs might offer better opportunities to meet people that way. There’s Meetup.com, which hasn’t yielded anything so far, and anyway doesn’t seem to have anything that really matches my interests. (I could start something, sure, but to do that you kind of need not to be terribly depressed.)

Complicating this mess is the possibility that my perceptions of intellectual superiority are inaccurate, too strong. (I have quite a bit of concrete evidence limiting the degree to which this is likely to be the case, though.) A rationalization to ease the cognitive dissonance between being so lonely and being so unwilling to reach out to people, the unwillingness actually caused by the avoidant defense mechanisms I erected to cope with the trauma of my childhood. Or even if my ideas about my intelligence aren’t inflated, then the conclusion that I can’t relate to average people is wrong: a rationalization, and a self-fulfilling prophecy, the real cause being those same avoidant defense mechanisms.

I don’t know exactly where my depression comes from. It could be that it’s related to my lack of peer companionship, and that no existing medication will be able to relieve it. On the other hand, maybe there’s a better medication out there somewhere for me, and I could find it. It could be that changing my attitude towards people would relieve much of my depression, even if I weren’t able to find intellectual peers. It could be that finding a place with intellectual peers could relieve it completely, whether by trying to start genuine relationships through the internet or by relocating myself somehow for physical proximity. It could be that forming an intimate attachment with someone merely very smart, and otherwise compatible, would be sufficient. Continuing my therapy has a moderate chance of helping. I have become more or less unable to perform my current job due to this depression, and possibly a few other factors. It could be that a certain kind of job could improve it a lot.

It could be. But I don’t know. And right now, not one of these options, individually, gives me very much hope. Many of them, I’m not even in a place to do right now. Maybe with more therapy and medication they’ll become available. Taken together, I figure I have an even chance of seeing a start to a recovery within a year, and a pretty good chance within three.

But those prospects aren’t hopeful enough to prevent thoughts of suicide. I’ve been having them for, oh, probably about a year now. They’re not very urgent. But my life right now is not worth living. And if my estimation of my hopes for the future gets much worse than it is now—if I keep trying options and they keep failing—then suicide will be the answer. I can’t say exactly how many options will have to fail to push me to that point. I already have a good idea how I would do it.

There’s a theory in the social sciences that people have a happiness set point that they return to gradually after any change in their life that immediately increases or decreases their happiness. A striking example of this theory is that people who become wheelchair bound tend to have the same happiness level a year or two after the accident that caused their disability, after the big dip in happiness caused by becoming disabled gradually returns to their set point. If my set point is low enough, maybe I’m too broken to ever fix. (On the plus side, people as isolated as me tend to be unhappy, and regular social contact, of any kind, can permanently increase happiness levels. (In fact, it’s been found that single people with friends are no less happy than coupled people. I wonder how frequency of sex affects that.))

They say that depressed people don’t have realistic evaluations of their own hopes for improvement. That they’re irrationally negative. Well, if that applies to me then it obviously doesn’t apply in the extreme measure you see in the examples in the link. (OTOH, that whole site is pretty shoddily written.) On the contrary, there are studies showing that happy people tend to have irrationally high hopes for the future, and irrationally high evaluations of their own skill and social standing, whereas depressed people have accurate self-evaluations. (I’m not aware of studies directly evaluating the calibration of optimism in depressed people; it could be irrationally low AFAIK.) In some ways, depression, rather than “distorting your thinking”, improves it. So what about other ways? Given that I’m depressed, how much confidence should I have in the accuracy in the above evaluation of my situation? Are the extreme examples in the above link due to a combination of a separate pessimism trait with depression, and am I a more moderate, but still irrational, pessimist? I really don’t feel like I am, but that’s pretty weak evidence. Or is this irrational negativity a symptom of depression that I’m simply not exhibiting?

“Pessimistic” and “optimistic” seem to often be used to describe whether one’s specific prediction is positive or negative, irrespective of one’s overall disposition. But a pessimist is someone who is biased to predict too negatively overall, and an optimist the reverse. I want to be neither—I want to be rational and well-calibrated. (Actually, people with no net bias are probably generally regarded as mildly optimistic on average, at least currently in my society (when predicting their own short-medium-term future happiness, probably not so much when it comes to politics).)

Hopefully being rational isn’t inconsistent with being happy.

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