Melancholy

I’m feeling a deep sisyphean melancholy today.

These moods are always the hardest for me. They permeate every atom of my being and are persistent beyond reason.

I have suffered chronic depression for a fairly large chunk of my life. I was different in ways imperceptible to myself which caused me to be the target of quite a bit of bullying from both kids and adults. As I grew, I found that my gentle nature was taken advantage of in ways that I didn’t completely understand at the time. Who’s surprised that I was depressed?

When I was in high school, we read the book Wuthering Heights and I remember thinking just how much I hated Heathcliff but found his melancholy to be relatable.

These days, the horrors beyond my comprehension that drive me to madness feel less personal in a way. People are not taking time out of their day to target me specifically nor am I personally bullied in any sort of way as an adult.

Instead, I’m just witnessing dehumanization and burnout on a global scale while simultaneously watching the rather unchecked rise of a fascist and genocidal state that is currently targeting a demographic that I am a part of.

Meanwhile, businesses continue as usual.

Many of them will acknowledge your pain, the true horror of your situation in one breath and then ask you how you can increase your productivity in the next.

“How can we do more with less?” they ask – less time, less focus, less people, less humanity. But why are we always trying to do more? What’s that actual purpose? Why aren’t we asking why it is that we have less of everything to begin with?

Personally, I think we should do less with less. Let people do fewer things so that they can rest more. If businesses are overstretched, let them shrink to an appropriate size for their employees to be healthy. Let things truly fail when they need to.

As a society, I think we’ve lost the emotional maturity that comes with grieving.

We’re too afraid of death, too afraid of pain – both things which are completely inevitable. These fears rule over every part of our society and drive everything from our extreme desire for convenience to the way we allow ourselves to exploit others. If we could get to grips with those fears and really come to terms with the fact that reality is messy and difficult, perhaps we’d be appropriately motivated to make things just a little less difficult.

Maybe.

I like to think that but the reality might be quite different. I lost faith in humanity during the COVID-19 pandemic. I wanted to believe the best in people but witnessed people being so absolutely obstinate that they refused to even try to help one another during a real crisis. Not everyone, of course, but a much higher percentage than I would have liked to believe.

I think this disconnect between what feels logical and understandable and what is represented in the world is at the deepest core of my melancholy. Fundamentally, I just don’t understand other people despite all of my best efforts. Because of this, I don’t really feel safe or like I belong anywhere despite finding many people who seem to have very similar experiences to myself.

My heart aches.

It’s worse than the fear for me. I absolutely fear for myself and my loved ones (and everyone else if I’m being perfectly honest). But the pain I feel is the grief and heartbreak that we’ve just let it get this bad. We were given the option many times over to create a better world, one that prioritizing caring for one another, and collectively we chose this. Generation over generation, we chose exploitation, unnecessary competition, and hatred.

And for what?