Swimming in molasses: depression and how to stay afloat

Also: Gladiator, Kendrick, and that Cormac McCarthy piece

Weekly Rockfoils #16: Nov 18-24

Hello! Welcome back to my weekly newsletter of Things I Loved, Things I Didn’t Love, and Little Wisdoms I’ve collected over the past week.

Continuing my experiment from last week, I’m starting this post off with a mini-essay on how to keep walkin’ when depression comes knockin’.

In my feelings // On a visit from depression, my old familiar friend

My skin looks like shit and I need a pedicure. There are two day old dishes in the sink and my new apartment is covered in a thick film of dust, which unfortunately I can’t do anything about since my vacuum is on the other side of the world (in my car). I slept for 12 hours and I have a crick in my neck from doomscrolling for too long.

I’ve been intermittently sad throughout the week, but sadness is different from depression. You get sad about sad things that have happened. A sad thing happened to me recently and I’ve been processing it as I do, lingering on it, moving on, lingering some more, crying a bit, feeling much better after. I don’t know how your brain works, but my ~neurodivergent~ mind loves to swing wildly and rapidly between moods , and I’ve grown accustomed in sobriety to riding the wave, accepting that I might be bawling in my bed at 2pm and then bouncing off happily to meet a friend at 2:30.

I’ve been sad on and off for a week, but not depressed. I’ve felt a bit behind, but really I’ve gotten quite a lot done, cleaning and moving out of my old place, seeing lots of friends, watching lots of movies, working out five days in a row. I’ve been sleeping a lot but I figured that was exhaustion from the last month just catching up with me.

This morning was different. I awoke at 7, then at 9, then at noon. From 9 to noon I had a vivid and unsettling dream, of a kind I’ve scarcely had since I was a child. I left a friend at a party and then I kept trying to get back to them and they were farther and farther away, and I tried to hide some cocaine and my mom found it, and one of my teeth was falling out, and then I was walking through an intersection in Georgia and there was moss and fat palms and old Savannah buildings but the earth behind was Nevada, gray rippled mountains near on the horizon under a bright and bleak sky filled with light like a punishment from eternity. Anyway, not reading into all that. Moving on!

As soon as I awoke I could feel it. Oh no, not this again. I don’t have time to be depressed; I have so many things to do. But depressed I am. Another blessing from the chemical idiosyncracies of my brain.

Sadness and depression can coexist, and often a sadness can set off a depression. But depression can exist without sadness, at least for me. I have experienced depression on and off throughout my life, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, and in my late 20s, for years. Since I got sober from weed in 2022 and Got My Life Together the bouts have been less frequent, but I’ve still had one or two depression eras per year, usually lasting for 1-3 months.

Depression feels like swimming in molasses. Everything is thick and heavy and the saturation of colors gets turned down. Small mounds become medium sized hills, and if you don’t climb them fast enough they turn into giant mountains. When I’m not depressed I sleep for 5-7 hours and nap in the afternoon; depression means sleeping for 10-12 hours and feeling exhausted about everything all the time. And the most annoying thing is, nothing is wrong. It’s chemical, seasonal, who knows. Uninvited but unavoidable.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about suffering. Everything in American society is oriented around encouraging us to escape suffering. Distract yourself with this, entertain yourself with that, and if that doesn’t work, here’s 100 coping mechanisms for you, take your pick. We see suffering as an enemy to be avoided and/or defeated at all costs. Suffering is the enemy of good feeling, we tell ourselves. And so it is not to be borne.

A few years ago I was reading a lot of ancient philosophy in my attempt to unfuck myself from a life of misery. Eastern philosophies have a very different view of suffering than ours do. Suffering, they say, is not a thing to be avoided, nor our enemy, nor even a value-negative thing. It is simply an inevitability, like the fact that we will die and the sun will rise tomorrow regardless. I think it’s from Buddhism or maybe Seneca that I discovered the idea that suffering always ends: either in death, the ultimate relief, or in life through the passage of time, as the thing that is causing us suffering ceases to do so, or our bad feelings about it subside.

Learning to suffer correctly has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. Before I learned, I was always running away from it, angry about it, sad about being sad. Drowning myself in coping mechanisms to dull all my senses, because when all you can feel is bad, an obvious solution seems to be to try not to feel anything at all. But of course it doesn’t work in the long run. Unresolved suffering cannot be suffocated. It will fester within you and wrap itself around your soul like a parasite, and feed on your vain attempts to strangle it in the darkness.

I excised the misery parasites of my soul by learning to make peace with my suffering. I looked inward to myself and was honest with myself about the deepest beliefs and experiences of my life that were causing me such lasting misery, and I decided to acknowledge my experiences and work to change my beliefs, and learned that I could react differently to my feelings. Now when I am sad, as I am still very often, I do not fear it and try not to get angry with myself about it. I acknowledge it, allow it, and tell myself that it will pass. And it does, and usually fairly quickly.

But depression is not sadness. Sadness is like an ugly hat, placed on your head by a sad event. You might try to take it off and find it’s quite stuck to your head, and look at it and feel bad about it and wish it would disappear, but at the end of the day you know it’s just a hat, and off sooner or later it will come.

Depression changes the texture of your hair. The hair will grow out eventually, but you’re stuck with it for now. So what can you do? For me the answer is, unfortunately: not much. The only real cure for depression is patience.

After I confronted and resolved all the inner turmoil that had plagued me throughout my life, I found it quite annoying to discover that I could still become depressed. Nothing is wrong!!! I’ve never been happier! WHY is the sky less blue?! But that’s the nature of all that brain chemistry bullshit, I suppose. Thankfully, the tools I learned to help me through the worst times of my life and to help me through my day to day mood swings have also helped me through such very irritating depressive spells as the one I seem to be entering now.

Swimming through molasses: step one. Get out of bed. Put down the phone, perhaps groan very loudly or yell at the ceiling, and stand up.

Step two: wash your face, maybe. Perhaps even brush your teeth. Look at the roll of paper towels you’re using because you’ve run out of toilet paper and decide that’s a problem for later, and that’s okay. Eat something. Maybe even stretch.

Step three: Start Doing Things. This is the hardest part. Everything is annoying and hard and unappealing. The bed and the doomscroll and the coping mechanisms beckon to you like flame to a moth. You must look away. Think of a thing you would do very easily if you were not depressed, and start to do it. For me today that was going on my patio and writing this essay. I love sitting on the patio, and I love writing these posts. They come easily to me usually, and bring me joy. It was overcast through my bedroom window. It took me half an hour to pack up my things and make the trek out the door and down ten steps. But now I am here and the sun feels soft on my shoulders and the words are flowing, if ever so slowly. I invited someone to come and sit with me here even though I didn’t feel like it, because I had promised him yesterday when I wasn’t depressed, and I didn’t want to break a commitment. An accomplishment.

Step four: accept that you are in molasses, and be kind to yourself about it. I had so many grand plans for what I would accomplish this weekend; I was so excited to get back into the swing of things with screenwriting and developing my next short film this week. I have a whole apartment to unpack and set up and a social life to tend to and books I want to read, and so on. But I am in molasses. Everything will be harder. I must find the balance between staying out of bed and Doing Things, and accepting that I will move slower, and spend more time in bed, and Do less Things than I would like. The balance is key: you must keep trying, and doing, while being kind to yourself and knowing that it will be harder.

Step five: remember that it will pass. Suffering always ends: either in death or relief. It will pass more quickly the more you can Do Things, and not give in to it. Bed and isolation are the enemies of relief. Try to accept, not to cope. Listen to Elliott Smith and find comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone. Rewatch Singin’ in the Rain and try and fail not to laugh and smile. Text a friend and then don’t feel bad when you can’t answer their call. Try again tomorrow. Look at a tree and see that it is not so beautiful as it was yesterday, but that it is still beautiful now, and some day it will sing to you in its proper radiant glory soon again. Life is beautiful and full of love. Practice gratitude.

My friend is coming now. The mountains are beautiful and the wind is gentle and cool. My pink patio chair set is very cute and comfy. I am grateful to be alive. The suffering will pass.

~~~

Ok, back to regularly scheduled programming. We’ve got Gladiator 2, a 90s Jane Austen adaptation with a stacked cast, a solid election post-mortem, and bonus Soda Pop, among other things.

Things I loved

• Kendrick Lamar’s surprise GNX album drop. MUSTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRD.

  Also dodger blue, squabble up and tv off, so far.

• In my ongoing effort to watch more horror films, I saw Smile 2 this week and was surprised at how fucking fun it was. I haven’t seen the first one but found the sequel to be really well made—the performances across the board were especially great—and absolutely terrifying. There were four or five moments where if I’d had popcorn in my lap it would’ve gone flying; I jumped so hard it had me crying laughing after. Delightful, horrifying, a real worthwhile cinematic experience. Catch it in theaters while you still can.

• I also saw Sense and Sensibility at Vidiots at

  Rebecca Lynne Loftin
  ’s suggestion. I’d seen it ages ago and almost bailed but then looked up the cast and had to be there. Kate Winslet? Emma Thompson? Hugh Grant??? ALAN RICKMAN??!? So many laughs, pure joy, and man does Ang Lee know how to make the English countryside sing. Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice is a better film in my opinion (and I think the best Austen adaptation, and possibly the best 19th century English novel adaptation ever), but Lee really nails the look and feel of England better than I’ve almost ever seen. I’ve walked many miles through the English downs and rarely seen it so well put to screen. Beautiful.

• I went to a fabulous Beverly Hills estate sale where I sadly could not afford anything but I did peek into this very cool mirrored bathroom. So glam!

• It’s been out for two weeks but I finally read this widely shared article by Gabriel Winant, Exit Right, an election post-mortem. I’ve been plodding along slowly at my own take on what plagues the Democrats, and found Winant’s analysis to mirror much of my own, and with a lot of other smart things I didn’t think about thrown in.

• As I begin to settle in more to my new place I had two delights this week: Soda Pop discovering the ladder to the loft, and the way the light hits the trees on the hills at golden hour in my neighborhood. That’s that LA magic, baby.

Things I Didn’t Love

• Ridley Scott, you have broken my heart. The original Gladiator was a foundational cinematic experience for me as a teen (not in the least because I experienced lust for the first time in the form of Russell Crowe); it’s a movie I’ve seen a thousand times, and still love. It may be corny but I don’t care, Maximus Decimus Meridius is my man and I stand by him. So of course I had to be there opening night for the sequel. I was rooting for it so hard: I love Ridley Scott, and he’s been cooking at the top of his game as recently as 2021’s the Last Duel, an unsung masterpiece. I love Paul Mescal and thought he was a perfect choice. And Denzel??? Baby I couldn’t ask for more. Tragically, Gladiator II failed for me on every front, and in fact pissed me off so bad I walked out after the first hour. Shot for shot rehashes of the original in every other scene, a leading man working with a completely uninspired script and directing that failed him, costumes that look like they came from Spirit Halloween, and I swear to god, some CGI monkeys that were genuinely an affront to god and the concept of art itself. Have you ever seen a medieval painting from an artist trying to convey an animal they’d clearly never laid eyes on, like an elephant or a lion? But they have no frame of reference for what it looks like so they sort of just draw based on vibes? The CGI monkeys were like that, except it made me mad instead of endeared, because truly where the fuck did this budget go. Anyway, maybe I’ll give it a chance and finish it when it’s on streaming, but unfortunately what we do in life echoes in eternity, and the disappointment I felt with this film will haunt me to the grave, and to the after if there is one.

• Some 28 year old bro who was a little too high on his own supply took a firestorm of shit this week when his profile of Cormac McCarthy’s muse hit Vanity Fair. People have been yelling at him all week for a litany of offenses, and look. The writing…is not good. Major oof vibes. But I’m not really mad at him even though his prose is cringe and his ethics are questionable. Mostly I’m bemoaning the fact that a piece this poorly written could be a major VF story. Writing standards are in the tubes, man, and that makes me sad. Also, I find it quite yawn inducing that people are trying to retroactively cancel Cormac McCarthy. A 20th century male American novelist behaved in an unethical way in relations with a teenage girl? I’m shocked, SHOCKED I tell you. But The Road was my favorite book in high school, and I stand by that. Might be time to read it again.

Little Wisdoms

Speaking of estate sales, there is a book I often encounter when perusing the bookshelves of the recently departed, and always buy when I find it. That book is the Prophet by Khalil Gibran, perhaps my all time favorite written work. It’s a short collection of poetic prose chapters, little sermons from the titular prophet to his people, touching on every fundamental element of the human experience, from Love to Marriage to Friendships to Self Knowledge to Joy and Sorrow, and many others. Here is the chapter on Pain, which I’m finding solace in on this blue winter evening.

~~~

PS: Soda Pop says…idk what the mind of Soda says this week but she’s so fucking cute look at her ^_^ meow

Have a nice day :). See you next week for another list, and check out my intro post if you want to know what the deal is with me and this newsletter.

And like this post, comment or even share it if you want to help me grow this little Substack. Thanks, I love you.