in need of a vision: an epilogue

I'm generally not a depressed or gloomy person. Those who know me strictly through my blog may think otherwise, as there's a steady stream of sad notes littered about like seashells on the seashore. It's simply the case that one of the ways I deal with sadness is both by writing it and sharing it: writing it helps me gain a sense of balance, and sharing it (if only through a blog) offers a sense of relief, something akin to the guilt-laden Catholic confessing his sins in the booth. He walks out feeling a bit better, though the issues may not have been resolved. I'm known as a cheery, sincere, buoyant person. Over and over again people comment on how friendly, approachable, funny and likeable I am. My co-workers can't imagine me angry; they constantly make jokes about how I'm optimistic and positive no matter what's going on. And then you come to my blog, where things seem to strike a different note. It isn't that I'm hiding my pain, shielding it from the world, opening up only on this blog; it's that generally, I'm a happy person. I have my stress and my anxieties, to be sure; I have my dark moments, and they can be very dark moments; but I'm upbeat, the personification of "Kick Drum Heart."

There are indeed dark moments, moments when light seems to be nothing but a fading pinprick. There was a time when I was diagnosed bipolar. But the passage of time has shown that the diagnosis was almost certainly incorrect. My sinisterly dark depression had been fueled by a series of unfortunate events, circumstances wholly outside my control. I felt lost and hopeless, and brooded on the disappointments with a ferocity. Ruminating. That's the technical term: persistently, ritualistically, even religiously dwelling on distressing events from the recent or distant past. And I'm thinking that what lies behind much of these dark moments is my tendency to ruminate the hell out of the past. 

I can be having an absolutely wonderful day when a sorrowful mood strikes, triggered not so much by an event but by my interpretations and dwelling upon the event. Memories are tied together through emotional associations: so when something unpleasant happens to me and puts me in a sour mood, all of a sudden I start remembering all sorts of things that made me feel the same way. Things from years and years ago seem to resurrect, those emotions cascading through me all over again and projecting themselves onto my life. A certain pattern of negative thinking arises, and everything around me is interpreted in that light, so that I only see the negative events of my past, the negative events in the present, and all those things that could go wrong in the future. To make matters worse, rumination amps up activity in the brain's stress-response circuitry, evaporating motivation: constant rumination, going over and reliving the past and letting it affect my present and instill fear and doubt of the future, fosters a lack of confidence and commitment to those things I wish to achieve. Rumination is, really, self-sabotage: it saps the joy and thankfulness out of everyday life, washes the world in a tragic-blue hue, and erects psychological barriers to my dreams and ambitions in life. 

Four consistent patterns crop up in ruminating, and I entertain all of them. There's emotional reasonings, conclusions based solely on strong feelings. There's overgeneralizing: seeing a negative event not as an event but as part of an endless pattern of defeat. Disqualifying the positive is discounting anything good as an out-of-the-ordinary fluke, on the verge of being upended and drowned. And then there's all-or-nothing thinking: looking at events in black-and-white terms, with us or our actions generally being seen as wholly negative or bad. At the heart of my ruminating are cognitive distortions: irrational and exaggerated thoughts or interpretations of my life. 

You can't stop rumination. You can't just throw a stick in the wheel and make it stop. Rumination is endemic (and harking back to that online test I took back in 2009 telling me I'm only 20 percent a man and 80 percent a woman, most of those who suffer rumination are women); and there are things that people can do to help them not fall into the cycle. One is cognitive restructuring: every time those negative interpretations start shedding their light on everything, I can just force myself to be critical and entertain other interpretations. This lends less credibility to the negative one, and who knows: I just might find a more logical interpretation this way. Another is to practice mindfulness, a sort of meditation: when negative thoughts come, just let them pass in one year and out the other; focus on the present, void of distraction, and don't give the thoughts the foothold they need to prosper into their inglorious natures. If I let ruminating control my life, run my emotions, and sabotage my efforts, then all this "vision" talk will go nowhere (wait, isn't that all-or-nothing thinking?). If I don't regain control of the way I think, the way I interpret the world, then I'll succumb to these ruminations and find myself on the psychological hamster wheel, so stuck in my head that I miss the blessings, gifts, and adventures that surround me. All this talk about steps and efforts to achieve my dreams must be done in a spirit of moving forward not just in my life but in the way I interpret my life (as well as myself). God help me.