Great. Now I want to be depressed. To clarify, I want someone to tell me I'm depressed. But that would require going to my doctor. And telling her about my constant feelings of inadequacy. And how the thought of leaving the house is exhausting, forget dealing with other people. I've never been great in social situations, but lately the act of interacting has become especially mentally and physically draining. Jokes seem less funny. I'm more irritable, and my tolerance for other people's shenanigans has dropped. Am I just becoming a humourless old man at the age of 23? Or is this just a phase, a dark moment that will soon pass?
The internet says I may be suffering from moderate depression! Success! There is a test for everything online.
Here's where my doubt stems from: it's a catch-22. Literally, like from the book, where Yossarian can't get out of flying missions precisely because he has the presence of mind to not want to fly missions. If I can step back and say, hey, maybe I'm depressed, how depressed can I really be? Self-awareness is a bitch. But also: I generally lack the courage of my convictions. It would take a lot for me to stand up and say definitively, I'm a guy with depression. Because what if I'm wrong and I don't? Then I'm just a whiny first (rhymes with worst)-worlder with too much time to stew in my own bubbling juices.
(Side-bar: I feel like my growing humourlessness has been a thing for good long while now, and I'm going to blame David Foster Wallace, who presented to me an example of a guy who was at times achingly sincere and poetic and beautiful and who let whatever comedy there was in his situations flow out organically. For a guy like me looking for some way to move past cheap irony and jokey-jokes in his own writing, DFW was like this shining paragon of what a sincere writer could look like in a post-ironic world. DFW was also massively talented and so my ability to synthesize some version of what DFW has come out uneven and probably tilting too heavily to one side. I seem to have come away with the idea that sincerity can be a powerful thing in an insincere world, and that humour can spring from it as well, but with no tangible idea of how to actually go about that. So that maybe I come across as over-serious, as no fun or a buzzkill. I don't want to be a buzzkill. Have I mistaken sincerity for a stale bread form of rationalism? Does that even make sense?)
Other thoughts: I say "I don't know" a lot. It prefaces most of my sentences these days. I think it started out as a false humility thing, as in, "I do know, but I don't want to seem like a know-it-all" but now it's more of a disclaimer. "What I'm about to say is of little value, please feel free to ignore/dismiss it at your leisure." Maybe it's just my way of lowering expectations, my way of making sure I don't disappoint any one. I know I've written elsewhere, probably on this blog but who knows, a defense of the phrase "I don't know." It felt radical at one time, an admission that I didn't have all the answers and that's ok too. But it's a crutch now. It's become a proclamation of total ignorance, rather than partial.
Back to sincerity. The more I think about it the more I realize I screwed up somewhere. I mistook seriousness for sincerity. And not a good seriousness (there is a time and place for itobviously) but a humourless, can't-laugh-at-himself brand of seriousness that I find kind of off putting in abstract. I used to be a lot more self-deprecating, I think. But that requires a certain level of confidence to pull off. If I were to self-deprecate now it would only come off as sad and the desperation would be palpable. Not because there is nothing inherently funny about my situation, but because I don't know how to find the comedy in my situation. I don't find my present circumstances very funny. I might one day, but somehow I don't think that will happen. (I can barely muster the conviction necessary to write that). I feel like a poor judge of what is and what is not funny. I am confidant of that much.
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