Thaumaturges

You're scared, scared to chase success, because you think that doing so will invite chaos into your life. You innately believe that a desire for success leads to failure, because you remember the Big Failure of Art School. One some level, that failure is closely connected to your sense of yourself as a gay man. At least, you thought, if you could be successful, they'd have to be proud, despite your queerness.

But you failed, and what followed was pure chaos and pain.

The golden boy, transformed into the ultimate failure; failing in every way possible and letting everyone down. But this narrative is deeply flawed. While you had no control of events at this time, due to your utter lack of self will, which was wholesale owned and controlled by others, you were still partly responsible.

You reaction to events was destructive, angry and vicious; do you remember that? Do you remember how you gave up control, and decided to live your life on the edge, "Who gives a fuck?" as motto, better to destroy yourself than live with your failure and shame? But I understand all of that; of course you felt this way, how could it be any different?

You can't blame yourself any more than you can blame anyone else. But you're not that boy anymore. Your entire life has been lived as a spiritual warrior and, since those tender, painful times, you've learned profounder lessons than failure or shame. You know this, the ineffable thing, the connectedness of everything and the only real and true purpose, which is to live out your true will.

And you're putting it into action; I'm putting it into action. Despite all of your failures and disasters, you laid the groundwork, even at that young age, for me to become the man you always hoped you would be. Despite trial and pain, you did the work, and I'm continuing it.

There's only one thing holding us back now, and that's your fear. Fear of success and fear of failure, linked and indivisable. It's time to let go of that fear. All of the hard work we've done has been despite these fears; imagine what we could be if we weren't afraid? What a life that could be!

And look, why fear success when it's on our terms? We have nothing to prove to anyone, no need for validation; all we need is the ability to manifest our will, free of obstacles and oppression, and to become the best person we can possibly be.

So, here's my challenge to you, young 'un. It's time to recognise that every single thing we experience right now is the result of all the decisions we've made up to this point. For good or bad, we create our own karma out of the way we handle our experiences. We have a choice; to face the future bravely, knowing that it's the future we created, and so make better decisions that will affect our future karma, or to be afraid and still keep going, which just makes the future a struggle that we sometimes don't have the energy for.

Listen: good things are happening now, and that's down to you. That's down to your tenacity and, yes, will, even through those tough times. You've come through the fire and of course you still hang onto the effects of those chaotic days, but you never gave up, never put your head down and said "Just let me burn..." Instead, you kept going, a step at a time, even when it felt like you were carrying all the sins of the world on your shoulders. You. Never. Gave. Up.

And here we are. I couldn't have done this without you. But it's time to give up your fear, and trust that the adult you created has the skills and experience to get us through this next chapter with joy, wonder, excitement and love. Flawed fear response and anxiety doesn't change the world around you, it just makes it harder to get what you want. So, as an experiment, how about you put that fear on hold? Let me make the decisions I need to for us, let me do the work required and know that I've already put so much work in that it's time to start reaping the rewards.

Let me walk bravely into the future like the spiritual warrior we are, knowing that we manifest our future and that we can choose to enjoy it. And know that if you do that, if you lessen your fears and allow me to do the work, that I will always have you; I carry you with me all the time, and I will always nourish and support you, for every single thing I do is in service to you, my 18-year-old self, and all my other selves who still walk a difficult path, who are still struggling in the fire, who are still afraid in the face of struggle and pain.

I will carry you, because you deserve to be carried now. You've already done the hard work, and it's time you were rewarded for that. I will carry you, because I love you and you deserve to be loved.

(This post originally published on Medium.com on Oct 10, 2017)

 

I’m lucid. That’s an easy thing to write, but it’s a hard-won feeling. I’ve spent the better part of the last 4–6 weeks in the pit of depression. I’ve experienced depression for the vast majority of my life and, while I’m feeling lucid right now and think I’m making good progress, it’s something I’ll likely experience in some ways for the rest of my life.

It’s not what you think, depression. It’s not sadness. It’s not ennui. It’s not laziness. Although all three can be experienced as part of it. It’s a complete lack of willpower and a total shutdown of the higher self, brain and nervous system functions. A system-wide crash.

When it comes, it’s slow and very subtle. That’s why it’s incredibly difficult to find appropriate coping mechanisms. It comes on so gradually that it can lull you into ignoring it, not seeing it, not being ready. Before you know it, you’re in the middle of a prolonged period of no energy, no willpower and no higher thought functions; just a busted tape loop of negative thinking and the numbness and passivity that is the old tried-and-trusted method of coping with that.

Sometimes it bursts through in expected ways; when the passivity fails and the brittle numbness fractures and you find yourself overwhelmed. When this happens, depression usually has some lessons for you. Those lessons are thus: you are a failure, your life has no meaning, you will never be happy, you brought this on yourself.

When you haven’t experienced this, it’s hard to know. It’s not those moments we all get when we let ourselves down and give ourselves a hard time. No, this is a skillful, practised voice that has always been with you, gathering ammunition from your current situation and environment to prove that what it’s saying is right.

When it does so, it’s often at a time when there is no willpower or energy left to fight it. Instead, you’re bombarded with this negative content; battered and broken by it. It plays with you, lets up a little to give you time to breathe, only to slam you back into the dirt with greater force.

It’s highly manipulative too; it will give you a thousands reasons not to tell anyone how you feel, then it will whisper bitterness in your ear: see? You are alone. No one is here to help you because no one cares.

It forces you to rob your support network of the ability to even try and help you. It isolates you, trapping you in the place where it can do most harm.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably realised a couple of things. 1) I describe depression in fairly florid ways and 2) I talk about it as “it”.

On the first part, one of the most difficult things about depression is that as soon as its hold slackens and you begin to feel more lucid, your memory of it is lessened too. You can only describe it in incomplete ways, in ways that might read as if you’re being deliberately evasive or cryptic, or that is lacking in a certain amount of “realness”. As the memory slips, so does your ability to describe it. [Edit: I recognise on proofreading that this whole part might be self-effacing, which is itself a function of depression…]

This has a couple of repercussions. It makes it difficult to talk about it adequately, and it also means that by the time you are talking about it, you’re probably more lucid and trying to distance yourself from it, and that in turn means that you’re very likely fronting.

Fronting, for me, is pretending I’m capable. Together. Functioning. Because depression often keeps me from talking about it while I’m living it, when I do talk about it afterwards, it’s usually in the following terms: “Yeah, I really struggled for a while there, but I’m feeling much better. I’m doing X. Y and Z and it all seems to be working well.”

This means that those around you rarely get to experience the full weight of it. The people who do are usually partners, and that tends to impact on relationships.

It can also make it difficult to tackle it in therapy. If it’s only ever memory you’re discussing, that’s flawed, at best. At worst, depression, which doesn’t really go away in those lucid periods, just takes a back seat and allows you to drive your meat-vehicle for a while, but is still most definitely sitting there watching, works its manipulative magic and encourages you to downplay it, even to your therapist.

I’ll come back to why that’s damaging and also why making sure you get it “in the room” is important.

The second thing you might have noticed is me describing it as “it”. Through working with my current therapist (who’s very action-oriented, which is working for me), I explored a lot of Parent-Child work, visualising earlier versions of myself that were effectively “trapped” in faulty responses to traumatic experiences. You, the Adult self, your actual high-functioning self that has, nevertheless, managed to learn, grow and evolve, talks to and parents that younger self, offering it compassion, empathy and support.

We tried that approach with core depression. It didn’t work. Sure, it allowed me to have the discussion, but it was manipulative and evasive. My therapist and I quickly realised that offering this thing compassion was the wrong approach.

As we discussed it further, and as I worked through this on my own, I came to see depression as a dark singularity; a negative black hole, comprised of all of the things I’d never allowed myself to say, or experience, or express, for fear of hurting other people, of having people not like me, of having people see me as broken and weak.

All the stuff throughout the years that should have been accepted, experienced and expressed was instead held onto, compressed into a tiny ball of negativity. At one time, maybe, that mechanism was designed to keep me safe, but it was flawed. Deeply so. Meaning that instead of learning to become an assertive, wilful adult, I was often fronting, pretending.

I aped competence, faked mastery, pretending to be all the things I thought I wanted to be and, crucially, all the things I thought I was supposed to be. And all of the stuff that didn’t fit that? It got pushed down, compressed, into this singularity.

But as the singularity grew, it needed more fuel. So, instead of being a coping mechanism that helped me to survive, it instead became a monster, Choronzon, the “dweller in the abyss”. Instead of helping me, it would find ways to validate its existence.

Every little thing that went wrong would be reflected in its obsidian surface, and it would say, “See? This is just like that time, and that time, and that time. With all this evidence to prove just how flawed you are, how can you deny it?”

And that voice grew more subtle and manipulative with time, until its irregular emergence would leave me paralysed, unable to combat it. Until it was big enough to take over control of my nervous system, causing a system crash and leaving me with nothing to combat it, no armour to protect myself.

If all of this seems like it’s ripped from the pages of a Grant Morrison comic, well, there’s probably a reason for that. And it’s important to note here that I’m not saying “Depression IS”.

I’m saying that, for me, at this point in time, I’ve finally found an adequate way to describe the collection of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that manifest in a way that can be described as depression.

And naming it, describing it, has given me power over it. To an extent.

Allow me to loop back around a bit, back to when I talked about getting it “in the room”.

I’ve recently realised that therapy will only go so far unless the thing itself, depression, is encountered during the therapeutic relationship. If you’re high-functioning, that is, you’ve adapted to front very well, therapy can be tricky. For me, I’ve often found that I’ve gone into it presenting myself as, yes, having all these issues but also, being highly self-aware and having a good handle on things, so I’ll lead, and we’ll sort this out.

I imagine that’s common among people dealing with depression. It’s part of the trick. But recently, I had a session that was slap bang in the middle of down period. So much so that it was visible, obvious, to my therapist.

And he said, “This is good. It’s in the room with us now.”

And that was a threshold moment. Describing depression as I had done, as this blind, raving but manipulative singularity meant “othering” it, distancing myself from its flawed mechanism. Having it “in the room” meant, basically, that probably, properly, for the first time, someone else experienced it too.

We were able to “belittle” it; to talk about in terms that were withering, diminishing. And we were able to talk about coping mechanisms.

If the dark singularity is a Morrisonian antagonist, well then, a Morrisonian protagonist would be required to combat it.

So I used Hypermaccus, the sum totality of all my experience, past, present and future, who I could call on for help when things get rough. Think of ‘Final Crisis’, and the giant Superman statue standing in wait before the Orrery, ready to save the multiverse.

One simple command/request is all that’s required for Hypermaccus to step in: “Emergency.”

Even writing it my hair stands on end. Using Hypermaccus made me realise that I had never developed any positive coping mechanisms that could cut through the singularity of depression; head it off at the pass. All other mechanisms were band-aids, or weaker, not really big enough to tackle a flawed operating system that has had years to perfect itself.

Hypermaccus came about because of a simple revelation. Having done Parent-Child work with my therapist, when we had depression “in the room” with us, he asked me a simple, elegant question:

“Where do you go when this takes over?”

I had no answer for it. Me, fronting, functioning and self-aware, at an absolute loss for words. Where do I go? I certainly don’t feel like I’m in the room. It’s why I’ve lost days, weeks, months and, yes, years to depression. It’s why I’ve lost work. It’s why I’ve lost friends and lovers; because there have been significant periods of time when I have no longer been driving this vehicle. I’ve popped out, gone on vacation, and let this negative devourer take over.

That’s not just a good realisation, it’s also a very hard one; one that forces me to accept the reality of what my experience of depression has caused over the years. And, while I still don’t really have an answer to “Where I go”, I don’t necessarily need one.

All I need is the ability to send out an “Emergency” signal, and have the totality of myself, including all my higher functions, come rushing back in from the metaverse to claim my body. The entirety of me is large enough that it leaves no room for the devourer, and chases it away.

A disclaimer: this is all very recent stuff. I’m out the other end of my most recent low period, and have discussed with my therapist the possibility that this is just the natural end of a phase. However, I’ve been using Hypermaccus to good effect; I remain on guard, and when I sense the rumination take over or the negative slew of thoughts start to encroach, I shout “Emergency!” in my mind, I imagine Hypermaccus (a Kirby-esque cosmic god) fill up my cells, and I pause to try to be mindful in the moment. And it seems to work.

But there’s a lot of work to do, and new avenues to explore, including realising that depression, this dark singularity, is also at work in my lucid periods. That it is the thing that bounces me out of the low period into episodes of unreasonable amounts of work, a full diary of social events and the fronting; that the dark period is over, and Peak Garry can return.

It’s realising that there is no such thing as Peak Garry, nor should there be. That me, in control and overcoming this thing, might just still be a grumpy, cynical, slightly-misanthropic being shot through with moments of humour. And that’s okay.

And who’s to say what will happen the next time Choronzon comes sniffing around? Will Hypermaccus be enough to actually prevent me from entering one of these debilitating low periods? Will it merely make it less harmful? Will I find myself in the middle of a low wondering how I managed to forget Hypermaccus?

I don’t know; there are literally no answers when it comes to this stuff. Every single one of us who experiences it does so on our own individual terms, in our own ways. Because that’s the nature of it: it uses our own personalities and experiences against us.

So what works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. There’s no self help book that will every really work for depression, that’s my honest belief. I will say, though, that therapy is crucial, and that without medication, I wouldn’t be capable of going through therapy, so combination treatments definitely work for me.

And the point of this article? It’s World Mental Health Day and we still don’t talk about this enough.

It’s important to recognise that throwing open the shutters and letting in the light of enquiry and scrutiny can go a long way to helping people to cope with mental health problems; one of depression’s most subtle devices is to tell you that you’re on your own.

A problem shared is a problem halved, after all. And the more we talk about these things, the less space there is for it to hide. It thrives in the dark, lonely corners of the soul, those places that feel isolated and misunderstood, and it doesn’t want to be discussed, not really.

So, this might be pouring out of me just now because I’m lucid, but I’m writing it to shine some light in, to talk about it, to let others know that I experience this and that perhaps we share something in our experiences.

I’m writing it as a reminder; that when things get bad, shout “Emergency!” and take control again.

“You have some queer friends, Dorothy,' she said.

'The queerness doesn't matter, so long as they're friends,' was the answer”

Welcome to the very first journal entry of my new Dreamwidth account. I just happened to see it mentioned while I was browsing through someone's Twitter page (thirsty or not thirsty? I'm not sure there's any distinction between those two...).

I used to use Journalspace way back in the day and tried to make the move to Livejournal when it died, but I never took to it, probably because that was also the advent of social media, which had an allure and practicality all of its own, but which seemed at the time to make the journal obsolete.

However, over the last couple of years I've been niggling at myself about my social media use: how much I use it, sure, but also how. And I've increasingly been thinking about a different platform, one that had the old journal feel, not the new Medium format which has its place, but which is utterly, utterly commercial. Most of the popular folk on Medium are currently web and social media gurus, self help folk and journalists.

I wanted a place like it used to be; anonymous in the way that Twitter can be over, say, Facebook, but with less of the fast tit-for-tat that's common there at times. Somewhere I could take my time to write something, and where I could follow people with similar interests, building a legitimate circle (or cluster, I like cluster) of intelligent, interesting people from around the world.

It remains to be seen if Dreamwidth will become that, but I reckon the best way to engage is to just write and see what happens. This is the first step, writing this post. What might you expect to read if you follow my journal? I'm a comic book writer and artist working in indie books, currently working on my first graphic novel, AION. I'm also queer, and both my work and my presentation of myself are becoming more so over time.

Partly, that's down to therapy. I've also struggled with anxiety and depression for most of my life, but I'm currently treating it. I'm on meds, and went through a fantastic therapuetic relationship last year. This year, I'm learning how to build on that work, by systemtically attempting to discover and break down the last bonds that have been applied to me by other people throughout my life, as well as my own faulty estimations of what those expectations actually are.

That's manifesting gradually as an increased acceptance of my own queerness; for a whole host of reasons, which I'll talk about in this journal, I'm sure.

So that's what you're getting; art, queerness, self discovery and mental health chat. If you dig that, follow me and feel free to send me a comment or message. I'll check out your journal too, if you have one, and if I like what I see, I'll follow you! I should note, though, that I'd like to fairly heavily curate my cluster on here, so please don't feel bad if I don't follow you back: it's highly likely that it's not a reflection on your value, just on how likely I think we are to get on as individuals based upon our shared values and interests. Simple, like that; building a group of friends.