This essay lands at a critical moment in my project. It was March 2023, and things were going well. My essays were getting better. I was expressing myself honestly, for the first time, about an important person in my life. Acceptance was a key feature in my personal narrative.
And then I had a brief fling with someone I probably should have avoided, and everything blew up. It directly affected the project, but I quickly destroyed all the essays that addressed what had happened. A few leftovers—this one included—remained. I also wrote one about sex that was out of order for the project and it’s terrible. It’s unreadable and cringeworthy and I still have it. I need to make it disappear.
I put all the Substack essays behind a paywall and stopped copying them to my Ghost blog.
Later on, I erased all remaining Substack essays — that meant 22 essays lost. It got worse, because I ran into email server issues as well, so the copies that were saved via emails sent automatically by Substack evaporated too.
Maybe a subscriber out there somewhere has those essays in their email box, but I will not ask for them. I consider them collateral damage from my project gone awry. And I believe I have an obligation to pick up at that point and try again. But not in a one-essay-a-day manner. I’m done with that.
So, consider what follows to be an artifact of a mind in distress. All things considered, I think I held it together ok, at least for this one.
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The title provides all the setup necessary for this essay, and I’m going to leave Montaigne’s words alone this time. What concerns me is the ways we talk about mental health—both to others and ourselves—and the detrimental effect it can have on our psyches.
It’s certainly true that when people are hurting, they need to find the words to ask for help. I sat through nearly a year of group therapy and came away knowing that it’s probably my biggest weakness—I eagerly chime in with advice and support for others, but can’t bring myself to ask for help when I need it, and often feel like I’m taking up other people’s space. I assume their needs are greater than mine.
But there’s an interesting paradox about putting words to feelings: it’s necessary, but if done the wrong way can also be destructive. By that I mean, if you engage in self talk about your mental state and call yourself depressed, you are very likely to become depressed. ‘I am’ statements are extremely powerful, both positive and negative, and when these words turn into belief, they can be self fulfilling prophesies.
So it’s ok to say you are sad or upset, but to take it the next level and apply a diagnosis is to invite that malady. Montaigne wrote about a similar phenomenon, where people who pretended to be blind or disabled soon ended up in the same condition. Such is the power of the mind.
Identifying feelings and reframing them isn’t easy, however. We often fight our history every step of the way. At this moment, I’m feeling a little glum and defeated as certain life patterns seem to play out in my life and wonder why I keep letting myself fall into them.
I am completely aware, however, that I don’t have to interpret recent events this way. I can reframe them in a completely positive light if I wished and feel everything that happened to me as empowering and evidence of increasing personal appeal I can keep applying if I’d like.
It all comes down to how attached we are to our most comfortable stories. We feel drawn to the stories that feel most familiar. Comfort, in this case, doesn’t always mean safety. The line from Nirvana’s “Frances Farmer will take her revenge on Seattle” is instructive: “I miss the comfort in being sad.”
This comfort has a heavy price. It’s hard enough to reach and understand other people. When we let other people’s choices affect our self image, we surrender our ability to live to the fullest. We both depress and reject ourselves. What other people do is their business. We should reserve our self judgment for how closely we align to our values.
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