However much damage the 2020s is doing to collective mental wellness across the globe, I can say I’ve lived through worse times in worse states of minds, where external excuses weren’t so readily available to substitute for dwelling on internal blame. From a life of mental health struggles I’ve learned about myself that lofty goals like “focusing on the biggest challenge you’re facing at this time and do something about it” is a terrible approach for someone who dances with executive dysfunction; the real key for me is to have many things going on of varying seriousness so I have options to procrastinate what is important with what is not, and at all times I will feel busy – or if I don’t, I will be weighed down by the pressure of too many things to do of much variety than the despair of not enough and/or all the same. Somehow that is preferable. Whoda thunk.
“But Nege, aren’t you just overwhelming yourself with stress that you could easily collapse under at any moment?” Shush. Whether that is healthy or not is quite frankly none of anyone else’s concern. Well, it’s the concern of the pharmaceutical industry who want to chime in and say “the correct way to address your depression is through the guidance of a medical professional” but I say drugs are not the answer. Well, prescription drugs at least. Sometimes some drugs like “caffeine” or “alcohol” or “having a good time” can be useful tools, but it’s wise to diversify one’s portfolio of coping mechanisms to avoid any of them turning into Your Personality. (Finding a loving partner and having a family only counts as one coping mechanism; get it together, you degenerate normies, and do something weird with your life.) And most importantly, perspective often matters more than actual quantities of things to do.
The early pandemic – you know, the one from which we have not recovered – was a challenging time for many people who had not experienced the deeper degrees of depression before. For myself, it was a relief; I was already in the worst mental condition I had been in for years, thanks to a far heavier workload and feeling out of place with a recent life change I thought was right at the time but was, in fact, very very wrong. I was immensely busy (with something I hated doing and couldn’t catch onto easily, the worst situation for my AuDHD) and resenting every decision I had made in my life up to that point. And then it stopped. It paused. I had nothing to do – in the world and at work. I was saved from the decisions of my past self, and free to cry. I cried a lot. A few people showed some sympathy, but I can see through what’s performed as the default and what is personal. It was just assumed by everyone witnessing it that it had sprung from the upheaval of the world we had all been subjected to (even though it was not) so nobody had anything comforting to say about it anyway.
I kept working at the office even without a lot of work to do, because I knew the less idle option, one that would still be staring at a screen but in a place I didn’t feel comfortable in. My misery would not become a part of my home. I trapped myself in another location, bound by the ticking of a clock, to maintain some confines to escape from: what did I have to do if I did not want to be within those walls? If I couldn’t think of enough to do to keep me engaged and find a purpose, I had to leave. When we fooled ourselves into thinking the worst had passed and it was time to start massive and maskless indoor gatherings again as if things could “return to normal” six months into a global political disaster, I had to put my foot down. I had to run away, back to where I felt underappreciated but at least I was surrounded by problems I was apt to solve, however little impact they had on the bigger picture.
The pandemic erased normal spaces for normal activity and I benefited from that, as it made it clear for me that I instead needed a weird little space for being a weird little guy. I was able to go back to a job I was good at, and provided adequate aesthetic distractions if I so pleased, but didn’t have the status or future I had previously assumed I wanted. But none of that mattered anymore. I knew it didn’t matter before, but the pandemic and attempt at a lockdown to curb it (lol, lmao) gave me something to point at and shout “SEE?!?!” as supporting evidence for criticisms of the capitalist world I’d been making for years before I tried it anyway. The interruption of life as we were told to live it was devastating to the people who felt at home with it, but it was crucial for me to snap out of the false belief that I was ever going to last that long within it – a haze of ten years where I have no idea what I was thinking beyond “if you get a normal job, normal people won’t make fun of you”.
So many households used the pandemic as an opportunity to get a dog, but I was over a year ahead of that trend. I had immensely stressful difficulty and despair in 2019 as I tried to handle having a rescue dog from the wild north now living with me and me alone in a small space in a larger building. I could not have made it through without needing to leave five times a week, so if I had followed the pandemic’s course in both timing of adoption and logistics of work, I would indeed have broken down in worse ways. But by the time I had made the career pivot, I’d gotten in the groove of things, and the routine schedule of taking my dog out was the only thing keeping me grounded in my own life. We went to the park in -40 temperatures (C or F, take your pick) in the darkness of winter, and seeing her run around with the only other human/dog pairing willing to endure those conditions did more for my mental health than therapy or medication ever could.
When everything was shut down, I still had to walk my dog. I still went to the park and saw the same people at the same time. I’m too weird to ask humans for names, but we still got to know each other a bit, and I got to know their dogs. Dogs didn’t have to follow social distancing guidelines; they could still play and wrestle and get gobs of slobber all over each other, let alone worrying about tiny droplets, as we were told to do, coming from other people’s mouths. The obligation to take the dog to the park made me have to go out anyway. There was always something in my day that I had to do, and it brought me exercise, fresh air, human interaction, and dogs doing silly things. It’s hard to see these as an inferior approach to treating depression than a more medicalized method, especially when your prescription drug coverage has a yearly cap.
I was only months into my formal relationship with nonbinary gender identity that clicked on a Utrecht patio the summer before (another essay, another time), so add that to the list of things I got into before they were cool. (Kidding; being trans/nonbinary has always been cool.) This happened before the career change did, though not soon enough – if I had realized how much my forceful push to meet gendered standards of acceptable personhood had contributed to how inadequate I felt my job was for the life I was supposed to lead, I may never have applied for the job I should not have accepted, and who knows if in that reality the pandemic would have done me any good. But as things unfolded in the reality in which we regretfully reside, the walls surrounding the confined space I had put myself in for what kind of adulthood I should aim to achieve fell in sequence, exposing the subpar construction quality of this concept of accomplishment.
And as they fell, I said fuck it.
The pandemic didn’t turn any parts of my life upside down that weren’t already failing to maintain themselves on shaky ground. That all started months before. It provided me with more supporting evidence, originating from outside my head, that all the ways I had pushed myself to try to reach standards that placed behaviours and accomplishments on the same levels as other people’s were wrong. And the person I was before stating my intent to succeed within the normal parameters was more correct. More adaptable to global crisis. And I would be less depressed if I returned to my roots of, both personally and professionally, of being a weird little guy doing weird little things – many things at a time.