Depressives Anonymous

This is not a cure. This is being okay with not wanting one. Forget the steps you’re meant to take. Forget the rules you learnt at the knee.

The first step is admitting you don't have a problem. This is who you are. Smile all you like. Put yourself in the world or swallow it whole: you are you. You cannot run away from your own legs.

Life is unmanageable. So what? Every now and then a baby porpoise is born black, and becomes a clear target for a polar bear. Your mind lacks the clear mechanics that others have in order to survive. Random variant; you were not made for this world. You will die before your time. You may take your life, aware that you are a fault.

Or you will spend that life proving that you were never the one at fault. It is the world that is at fault. In your brutal struggle, you can do your best to murder that world before it bears down on you. The self-same mutation that doomed you may have the subtle poisons within it to kill the larger, more powerful animal.

The second step is in recognising that there is a demon living inside of you, and that without you, it cannot survive. You are its higher power.

It nursed on your hatred. It lapped up your confusion. It ground the meal of the worries in your gut.

It came to gnaw at your spirit when your heart said fly, and you realised you could not do so on your incipient wings.

It is now an adult. Attempting to deprive it of hatred or confusion or worry will not help, because it will at once attempt to cultivate its own. It will expand upon your perceptions with its own thoughts, to ensure it remains fat and happy. It will attempt to drive you.

Why then, can you consider yourself the higher being?

It has rules, and it will encourage you to live by them. But you can break the rules.

The third step is taking on the responsibility of being the higher power, and warding the world from the magma burning inside your gut. Turn your flesh to obsidian. When it cracks, there is only more obsidian waiting behind. Emptiness is bottomless.

The demon will tell you that you rely on the world, and that the world will reject you, or that what you are must reject it. It is not lying, but it is revealing only a very small part of the truth.

Depression is an intrusive observer. It will present a picture of your life as a static picture, and then claim that this picture is inert. It says that no matter how you try to break free, you will return to it. In its cunning it will reveal to you as much of this picture as it can – except that the picture is moving. It does not show you this because if it did, it would reveal the full potential behind your actions. Choosing awareness of the changes we can make to a horribly flawed world is what gives us the responsibility to enact those changes, shaping the world to our variant wills. But only if you first cut it off. Cut of the depression, all the food it finds in the world as it is, all the responses it encourages to that world in order to keep it in its dormant, repeating cycles.

Armour yourself in the void between thoughts and emotions. Use it to forgive when the demon is angry. Use it to strike out when it calls you weak. Use it to have courage, when anxiety scrunches you into a claustrophobic shell. Do not be afraid of the darkness.

Use it.

The fourth step is learning everything about yourself, because in your transformation you have been unborn. Know ever inch. Know what feeds the demon, what makes it hungry.

And then forget it. It is worthless, and it is out of your control. Nothing will change. Nothing you eat, nothing you feel, nothing that is anything can help you. Swallow a vacuum. Smile widely and tell the world you don't care.

You are not what you were yesterday. The deeper you fall into the void, the greater substance nothing has, until it takes on a new meaning. Nothing will change. It is Nothing which can help overcome anything. ‘Everything about yourself’ is all that remains when you have surrendered your past, your hopes for the future, and any obligatory reactions to the present.

The fifth step is to admit Nothing. There are no errors. We are what we were made so that we may make. The past is a writhing mess of shit and vileness, and it cannot change. But the emptiness is an end to that. It is a break between cause and effect. It is saying that no matter the cause, I refuse to pass on an effect: I shall die inside right here and now, just to spite the past.

You were always meant to be empty. What came before was simply the ugly shaping of a perfect being. It led you to cut yourself off from the worst in the world. It was necessary for it to happen, just as it is necessary for it to never happen again.

Now ask yourself, what use is a walking corpse?

What use is a screwdriver?

What use is a table? What use is a pencil, or a spoon?

Nothing, unless it is placed in the hands of a user. Forget having a heart, and replace it with an instruction manual. Write a code, and live by it. The sixth step is to turn your body into a tool. Forget about what you are feeling entirely - it doesn't matter. Fuse to the shape the universe and its arcing patterns. Or exist to serve what the untransformed are feeling. Fade into their reality, if you think it good. Or set out to create your own. Or do anything, really, so long as you are the tool to do it. You have no defects. There are some things you were never designed to do – don’t serve soup if you are a fork. Whatever you were made for, now is the time to find it.

The seventh step is in perfecting your shortcomings. You cannot fade. You will always know anguish is burning on the horizon, even though you are miles away from it. This echo is your personality. It is what makes the world spin backwards.

You cannot remove emotion, but you can control it, completely and utterly. If you can't remove something, make it better. Make the agony exquisite. Live with the screams deaf inside of you. Laugh at how they terrify you. Because they are your insides. And they will stay there, in your mind, on the heart’s shore beyond that great, dead sea. Become a work of art. Embrace a life of quarantine.

Visit, from time to time. Ferry messages of love and compassion between that world and this.

But never, ever lift the quarantine.

Eight. Make ends. There are some things you will never fix. There are some things which are better off broken. Perhaps even dead. Yes, amend what you can, through the surgical application of your empty motions, but acknowledge first and foremost that not even the greatest mending will revert its subject to a former state of existence. There’s no regaining a lost childhood. There is no removing the memory of a scar. So forget it. The only way it can have a hold on you is to let it claim your actions as they are today. Break the cycle. Make an end. Grow something better in the ashes.

Step Nine is to take action. NEVER FORGET. What tore you apart was that you felt your actions worthless, too worthless to even undertake. They are not. If you can make it better, do so. If you can step in to do something no-one else has the heartlessness to do, do it. But coupled with this: remember to have learned everything about yourself, once again. Don’t go back to seeing the world as a static picture, only moveable by brute force. The means to destroy it is at hand.

Let the void be your strength.

Acknowledge what is lost in metamorphosis. Make note of the things you cannot do. Feeling is a perversion. People treat it as their highest motivator and essential decision-making tool because they have not found the means to put themselves beyond it. You have. Do not make the mistake of believing that strong impulses are a sign of bravery or correctness. Admit to yourself that you are beyond the impulse of feeling, having strung it across the void, thread-thin and bare. You have found a new way to exist.

What is more important; love as a brittle actuality, or as an intellectual ideal? Emotion serves actuality. The unchanging void serves the ideal. Actuality is what made you. The ideal will ensure that process of making is erased. It will make the intellectual breach into reality, and be that much more possible.

Admit what you are. Embrace it. Don’t let anyone – not a doctor, not a parent, not your self – dictate that anything you are is a fault, simply because it is not average or kind.

Step Eleven is a plateau.  Seek, through active contemplation and the fulfilment of your code, to channel your abilities as the higher power. Know fully the pattern you ascribe. Know that you can carry it out.

The world is moving, and you are its mover. It’s your responsibility, and neglecting that responsibility will drag you back to where you began. Become the great, questing intellect. In absence of desire, cultivate curiosity. Know other patterns, and how best to navigate around them. The higher you climb up the stairwell, the deeper shade of perilous the fall to the bottom. Don’t fall. Steady your step, so as never to fall.

Above the plateau: one last place, one last step, for those whose legs have taken them as far as they can go. You are the obsidian angel. You are cognisant, and awake. Nothing is unreachable, undoable, unachievable. Having overcome the clinging significance of pain, the harrier of regret, the malcontent of purposeless living, and the sticky slick gravity of lethargy – you are a kind of perfection.

Reign it in.

There is a danger here of becoming the god of others. The path you have taken is not an easy one. You will not be able to carry another up the steps, and expect them to survive this place. Nor should you fault them for being different to you, or not serving your code. Perhaps what you see as their faults are their strengths unrealised. Do not do to others what made taking this path so difficult for you. That is why reaching this place and staying here has been so unbelievably hard. Be better. Refuse to be a god or dictator, refuse to turn your body into a temple for others to worship. Where others are concerned, make the path easier by generating potential for choice – not awareness, but the choice to be aware.

Forget all of this.

Make your own steps,

to summit your own self.