I've faced some daunting challenges in my life. Some people would just shake them off. Others fail for much less.
After a lifetime of slogging through my difficulties along with everyone else, I hit a "perfect storm" of stress. Suddenly it was like everything looked the same but was totally different. My responses became helplessly infantile: "No! I won't! I don't have to, I can't, and I won't!"
This leads inevitably to what I call "Cascading Catastrophic Depression", or CCD because I hate typing. As you struggle in the quicksand your life has become, you just sink deeper. You do stuff that makes it worse. Inwardly you practically go deaf from screaming at yourself, "just stop it!" over and over.
If you pick at it it might never heal, but if you leave it alone it may kill you. You try to ignore it, it gets worse. You try to treat it but that serves partly to emphasize your personal calamity--making it worse!
Go? Stay? Do? Don't? Obsessing about depression is one of its least tolerable symptoms. But analysis is key to solving any problem. To arrest your thinking is to preclude finding a solution. Or maybe not.
Every day I create a new "model" to test, to see if it will imply anything useful. Today's Special: the Perfect Life.
Like I said, I was used to slogging through it for years. I was more functional, but I didn't like it. When I hit "CCD", my functionality collapsed, eventually taking a giant portion of my life with it.
Then it occurred to me: this is so awful, I'm never going back to a compromised life again. When I can see a Perfect Life, I'll jump back in. Until then, I'm staying right here. Because I feel that if I jump back in to a compromised life, I will never escape it.
I'll leave the discovery of that irony for the pleasure of the reader.
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