The fact that I've barely had a chance to start this is to be taken as a positive sign. Travelling continually for over a month isn't something I've ever attempted before but (as any sufferers can well attest) having a busy schedule is a moderately sure-fire way of preventing the melancholies from setting in. One absolutely guaranteed way to ensure they do hit hard is to take a stopover on your flight out in Hong Kong at the height of the season known in the local tongue as "Smog". Turns out there's nothing better than walking around a crowded, dirty, malodorous, ugly city for several hours to make you run through the whole gamut of self-doubting questions or criticisms you worry about when first planning a six month trip. Things like "Why did I do this?", "Maybe I should cancel this whole thing", "Am I going to be this down the entire time?" et al. Thankfully the first 48 hours haven't been representative of the rest of the trip, on average, and so such feelings have generally abated. So What HAVE You Been Feeling? Eesh... that's... a knotty question. Honestly I'd either expected to feel consistently better or consistently more depressed than back home but the reality is much less catchy. Overall my mood tracker looks like a sort of jagged rock vista with no consistency and some worrying spikes of sadness, most notably around the Train of Misery®. This slice represents the month I spent in Aus. Notable dips down (representing better days) include three days in the stunning Hunter Valley watching the kangaroos hop across the landscape and tasting wine, a 3 day off-road camping trip to Fraser Island (properly called K'Gari until white people came along and diligently ruined everything), and reef diving on the Whitsundays and the outer Barrier Reef. These experiences were... unforgettable. Really that kind of trite garbage where I should've taken a bunch of filter-laden selfies with inspirational quotes over them about living life to the fullest and sprayed them all over my social media like so much pseudo-intellectual garbage to be fawned over by cretins. The obvious downside to all these ever-so-amazing experiences is the bits in the middle. I've been incredibly conscious of any down time: particularly where I'm totally lost for things to do. Here am I, thousands of pounds poorer, on the other side of the world in... some beach somewhere watching the waves and the (clearly photoshopped) rich blue sky stretching to the impossibly wide horizon and my overriding feeling is "melancholy". That's the start of a ridiculous downward spiral which I will here illustrate in the least subtle manner possible. (In case you don't get the Blob)
Because what the hell am I thinking? What a beautiful amazing place and all I can feel is melancholy? How selfish of me not to be literally overcome with amazement and wonder and break down in tears of unbridled joy: but instead I get to look upon this breathtaking vista and the best my pathetic dopamine-deficient cortex can manage is "pensive sadness". The preposterously illogical form of this little logic exercise might be familiar if you're a sufferer of mental affliction as it's pretty typical of how people can get into such unrecoverable misery from unassumingly small beginnings. But there you go: I've found that—maybe predictably?—being in such amazing surroundings and, in particular, in such amazing surroundings where people expect you to feel amazed and happy the little bumps in mood can take a real dive if I get into thinking about how much more grateful others would be to have the opportunity I've had. That being said, you people saying you're "jealous" do realise you can just save money and do this, right? I mean... that's what I did... This has already run on too long. I'll come back with some more thinks shortly. Probably later this week, but this has been on my mind for a while and—for what it's worth—this has been very cathartic. So thanks for that. Have a biscuit.
2 Comments
Azaria
8/12/2016 09:10:36 am
I have to say I've re-read this one a couple of times as it's been pretty grounding to hear (well, read) your experience and how the expectation of happiness leads to deeper depression. I hope you know how helpful it is just to see that depression is completely invariant under frame transformations, your blog is amazing!
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Author28 year old computer scientist/physicist with major depressive disorder, a need to write, and a deep-rooted mistrust of beetroot. Categories
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