The Mood Line

There’s a line graph I’m looking at. It’s running in a web page. This line represents an experiment I did where I had an app ask me six times a day how I felt on a scale from 0 to 100. Roughly a month ago I hit zero for the first time and I’m looking at all these other sections of the line because there’s surely a pattern in here somewhere.. I finally caught it! I caught one of my suicidal thoughts in its most raw and natural forms with tons of preceding data.

I really didn’t know what to make of all this data. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t have a therapist that I could show this too. It’s too personal to show to my friends who work in statistical research. I was stuck with the only thing I knew was safe: trying to make sense of the data myself.

Again, I’m no expert but a few things have become evident the more data I collect and the more often I come back to the line

1. Suicidal tendencies don’t just approach immediately. They come only after a few weeks of sharp zig-zagging between highs and lows. I think that means that I could feel the depression coming on, I tried to fight it, and for whatever reason I started to fail to beat it. Failing made me feel worse so the next low was lower than the last low. Then i get scared, get serious, get more determined and try to beat it again. Then I fail again and the process repeats. This is how I hit zero.
2. It’s going to keep going. The rise and fall nature of the line will keep going on. Absolutely normal healthy people do it. If a week goes by and I can say to myself “that week actually was pretty decent and normal” it still has plenty of highs and lows.
3. The trick to not reaching zero might be to be in a lower energy state. Keep trying to be more stoic. Just as much as I work on not being so down, perhaps it’s okay to also not try to be *so happy*. Since it’s all relative, one moment of gaining 2% happiness is still progress. 60% happiness on average isn’t great, but greatness isn’t actually normal. Stability is more important than highs. Giving up on highs means less disappointment that I’ve hit a low. Buddhism teaches this pretty well: desire generates suffering.

It’s unbearably hard to not talk to anyone about just how messed up I’ve felt. Normally I’m able to get out of a slump in a few weeks, but this one’s been going for about four months. The waves now come with headaches — those are brand new — and unlike bouts with depression I’ve had in years past, now I experience both vague and planned suicidal thoughts. I’m legitimately scared.

But I’ll tell you something else, the highs that got me here were so amazingly high. I didn’t start recording the line because I felt deeply tormented. I started the line because I was swooning, heavily sedated with dopamine, more in love than I’ve ever been in love. Before The Line I would have dramatically said “and then it was all downhill from there” but that simply isn’t true. It was a lot of zig-zag from there that averaged out in a downward trend that rose again about four weeks later and then plummeted again four weeks after that and touched zero and stabilized six weeks after that…

I’ve given up on love. In turn I gave up on maintenance of my everyday. In turn I gave up on friends. Oddly enough, giving up can be liberating. That’s the part I find really interesting: No part of your brain let’s you give up on making your heart beat. No part of your brain let’s you stop loving someone. Loves are perishables. In the heart of someone uncontrollably saddened by the world around them, love doesn’t survive without constant checking. The fleeting feeling that love is subsides in us all eventually.

It just sucks when love is directly converted into heartache. It’s like riding the wave of being in love for months on end except it’s totally inverted. It’s not just this one relationship that fell apart. It’s a whole decade of ruined chances.

Anyway… I don’t think I’m better yet. I think in fact I’m severely in danger of it coming back. But it’s great that I found this site. Just reading some of these posts makes me already see I’m not the only one. Fingers crossed I don’t totally lose it. Every day it’s so hard to not fall apart, become catatonic, jittering uncontrollably, and wish for an early end.