Depression was useful?
2022. I was depressed. There’s five months where, aside from avoiding social interaction, I couldn’t tell you what I did.
I remember wondering, “Why am I so depressed? Why are my emotions so irrational? Why is my brain so dumb?”
At the same time, most of my stress seemed to be related to social interaction:
I had been trying to make close friends and just… not having it work in the ways I wanted and expected.
I liked a girl and then never heard from her again. This happened a few times.
Whenever I expressed any kind of disapproval towards friends and family, they seemed to get mad at me.
I began to expect that I would just get hurt if I interacted with other people.
Before the end of my depression, I wondered, What if my depression wasn’t a symptom? What if it was actually a solution to some other problem?
Because when I’m depressed and low energy, I don’t want to interact with other people.
So if interacting with other people means getting hurt… then one way to avoid getting hurt is to be depressed.
Maybe I didn’t have a ‘dumb brain’ after all…
Maybe my depression had actually been serving me all along…
In which case, my problem wasn’t “being depressed”, it was not knowing how to interact with other people in a way that felt emotionally safe.
I’d try it.
Looking back now, this is my best guess for what actually happened.
Near the end of my depression, while I was hiding in the middle of nowhere living with my parents and interacting with no one, I did a bunch of somatic therapy (basically Coherence Therapy) with a skilled philosophical counselor. And most of what I seemed to learn from this was about handling social conflict better, and how to not get hurt when social interactions didn’t go as I wanted.
Mechanistically, what I think caused that growth was that I unlearned a bunch of my emotional insecurities. Basically, everything I describe in this post:
After all, social interaction can only hurt me emotionally if I have insecurities that allow that to happen.
But if I lost those insecurities, then being depressed wouldn’t be useful anymore. I wouldn’t have to avoid social interaction.