Mental Differences.

Depression can make you feel really out of place. I notice this as I’m listening to Spike Jones’ The Man on the Flying Trapeze, which adds emphasis to the point really. Don’t get me wrong here – clearly this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed. I was just thinking about the points at which you do pay attention to this fact.

Mostly I notice it socially or rather in my lack of inclination, even when well, to think of myself as a social being. I also notice it around the way I approach life’s problems or the way I’d look to solving my own. Some of it’s just individual differences but some of it’s also the aftershocks of a life lived struggling to approach normal velocity. For so long I couldn’t keep up, couldn’t count on my own stability for any length of time so I learnt different ways of doing and thinking and being.

Then there was school, of course which was essentially just one long total disaster from my point of view. If I went at all, which was rare then at best I’d feel awkward socialising. Mostly I hung out in the library or at a computer, which didn’t help. But it wasn’t so much what I said or did that was so different, I don’t think but who I was. And the more I felt the difference the less I spoke so the more different I probably seemed.

My solution to this awkwardness wasn’t to get confident all of a sudden and talk until someone listened. My solution was to attempt to blend in with the colour of the walls, to sneak off to the bathroom for the whole of break and torture myself for my inability to see whatever it was I was supposed to see. It was like other people were speaking in code, and I could never quite get it. Every time I’d think I had the answer it wouldn’t be exactly right no matter how close it might come to being a perfect replica.

“He floats through the air with plates full of cheese.”

There are neurological differences between people with depression and people with ‘normal’ brains but you can hardly pin that to your forehead and walk around describing which area of the pre-frontal cortex isn’t up to the same psycho-social tasks as your peers. No, you just walk around feeling as though you’ve got a dartboard between your eyes. It works either way – by which I mean it suffices to tear ragged the edges of your self-esteem.

And it’s not like it goes away. That feeling of difference sticks with you.

“He said did you put the cat out? I said I didn’t know he was on fire.”

The difference is now I know that lots of people felt that way growing up, or feel that way still. For some people it’s family secrets that weighed them down, for others that one body flaw that constantly trips them up, some people stutter, some folks have ADD or Bipolar or were whatever they were. What acts as a disability when you’re growing up doesn’t necessarily remain so. For some people I know normal eventually turned into a liability so it’s not the difference itself that’s the problem.

Depression doesn’t make you stupid, though it can feel that way sometimes. Neither does it make you lesser than anybody else, though again that’s pretty well bound to be how it’ll make you feel at some stage. There are actual mental differences that happen with depression but they’re not generally permanent and besides which they don’t have to mean you can’t function. Surely they make it hard but that’s not the same thing.

Our brains show a high degree of plasticity so even though I still feel the mental difference of depression that doesn’t get in the way of my functioning like it used to. Different brains, means different abilities.

“He’s the man on the flying trapeze!”

At least these days I can be pretty sure I know when I am looking for the answers in the right place. And the differences I still feel aren’t experienced with such depth of lack because I know I’m not the only one living on the edge.