Always feeling trapped

The thing that has always frustrated me about my depression is that I can't reason myself out of it.

My Dad was an engineer — hell, he worked on missiles, so I guess you could probably say he's even a rocket scientist. I evidently didn't inherit his facility with math, but in many other ways, I am very much my father's child. We're both natural skeptics, natural pessimists, and we tend to approach problems in a highly logical fashion. Indeed, I am drawn almost magnetically to puzzles. The other day at work somebody left a little three-dimensional wood block puzzle on the counter, and I picked it up and literally could not put the damn thing down until I'd solved it. Here's the result:

Nifty, huh? Anyway, that's kind of how my mind works. I see a problem: My instinct is to find a solution.

I am unable to do this with my depression. Depression involves emotion, which is frustratingly beyond my control. Emotions flutter in from some place I cannot see, bend and break me, then scamper off to some hidden place that I know nothing of. Yet they seem to be the most important part of my life, the tyrants that rule my flesh during all my waking hours, and the traitors that can sabotage everything I seek to accomplish.

Sometimes I will sit down and take an inventory of my life. And while I am perhaps not everywhere I would like to be, and perhaps haven’t accomplished all I’d like to have accomplished, I suspect you'd find few people who don't grapple with that. They learn to deal with it. Looking at things objectively, I have no good reason to be depressed at all. My life has suffered no severe, outsized tragedies. I face no deep threats to my life or health. Financially, things aren’t wonderful  for me, but I am not wrecked or desperately hanging on by my fingertips. Relationships? Well ... from the outside, things would appear fine. I have friends. Occasionally, I have lovers. I don’t struggle with loneliness. I really shouldn’t have anything to complain about.

If I were looking at me from the outside, I wouldn’t feel sorry for me. In fact, I might find my deep, gnawing depression kind of pathetic. Weak. Ugly. The world is full of people who would be grateful to change places with me. I’d tell myself to man up, look on the bright side. Be happy with what you’ve got. Be grateful. And so on.

But if it looks that way on the outside, why does it hurt so much in here? Why do I spend so much time wishing I could die? Why do I dream of going to sleep one night and dying peacefully, never being forced to rise and face another day? Why is my rationality totally incapable of unraveling this constant feeling of self-hatred?
 
I hate that about life. I hate that I cannot crack open my head and trap my feelings. I cannot dismantle and destroy them through careful thought. I grasp them tightly in my mind’s fist, and they slip out through my fingers like smoke, reassembling themselves and mocking me to my face. And again they crack the whip.

One might conceivably take refuge in the idea that all these things we call "emotions" are lies. Since they are so powerfully resistant to the attack of reason, perhaps they do not exist in any meaningful sense. Maybe, like the shadows in the cave, they are just ephemeral garbage, the unintentional byproduct of more meaningful things; they lead us astray because we mistake the shadows for the  truly beautiful things that cast them. To achieve one’s full capability as a human is to learn to see emotions as illusions.

Indeed, I think that’s essentially the view offered by Eastern religions such as Buddhism. In a roundabout way it’s at the heart of the monastic tradition in Christianity.

But I can’t quite take that view; it seems to leave out a large chunk of what it means to be human. To define oneself into victory over emotion is a neat trick of ideas. But I’m an old skeptic who believes sweating, bleeding, crying people are more important than intricately constructed theories. I have trouble buying into any doctrine of human fulfillment that dismisses the role of feelings and sentiments. Indeed, aren’t emotions the very engine of human life? They drive the world. How much of the important work of our species has been inaugurated by the phrase, “come, let us reason together?” Very little, I'd wager. But how many great chapters have been heralded by the insistent exclamation, “I feel...” followed a passionate flood of natural emotion?

Acknowledging the validity of my emotions doesn’t really help me, though, as long as those emotions continue to hurt me. I am still faced with the fact that I am deeply unhappy. Where is the path that will lead me out of this awful pit of despair?