Treat yo'self with a little bit of self-harm today! For a blog named in part after my favourite way to consume a poison, there has been shockingly little talk of the inspiring object and its act here. For this reason, I figured it was time that I honour the pipa part of El Té Y La Pipa.
It was 8.17 on a Tuesday evening, and I was sitting in my chair with a glass of bourbon and a briar pipe full of black cavendish tobacco. I imagined the ethanol seeping into my blood and finding a home in my liver, and the nicotine being absorbed through the roof of my mouth and into my brain. Despite the mind-addling chemicals, I could still think clearly enough to reject the notion that I was self-medicating. We know all too well that lungs full of tar and drunken stomachs are ailments, not antidotes, yet most of us continue to poison ourselves every Friday - or, in my case, Tuesday - night. What makes this behaviour so intoxicatingly attractive (see what I did there) is not the attempt to remedy something about our lives - this lie of "self-medication". Rather, it is the enjoyment of indulging in the act of doing something so counter to our biological imperatives that makes intoxication appealing. There are few other species (see koalas and eucalyptus) that will consume toxic substances as readily and regularly as we will crack open a beer at the end of a long day. Furthermore, it is not only the long-term effects of toxins in these drugs that are harmful and possibly counter-intuitive when we assume that the basic imperative for humans is to survive long enough to rear children. The immediate effects, too, can have dangerous and lethal consequences, most obviously in cases of drunk driving. So what is it about the light-headed buzz I get from smoking tobacco, and easy laughter my friend Maddi experiences after a glass (or bottle) of her favourite Marlborough sauvignon blanc that raises its priority level above mere survival? Perhaps it is the fact that humans have now come to a place in our development in which we are conscious of death and its inevitability. Why spend your limited years trying to run from the inescapable when you could spend them just a wee bit tipsy? Or perhaps it is the idea of "mere" survival that does it. As terrified as we are of the unavoidable, a life of prolonging its arrival is just not enough for us. I remember very clearly one of my uncles ranting about how we could all live so much longer if only we would stop eating sugar and replace it with apricot kernels like the Hunza tribe. I must only have been about ten, but my immediate reaction was to wonder why I would want an extra decade if I wasn't allowed sweets in it. I'd like to think that my views have since matured a little - they are certainly less focussed on the importance of candy - but the theme is the same: a good life trumps a long one every time. Now, I don't claim to know what a good life comprises for all people, or even fully for myself, but I am reasonably certain that the occasional pipe smoke on a Tuesday evening and glass of red with a friend is part of it. There is a luxury in the act of poisoning oneself for pleasure that looks death in the eye and says "you'll have me either way, but you won't stop me from living while I can." Note: This is in no way an endorsement of self-harmful behaviour or a negation of the risks associated with smoking and drinking, especially within the context of addiction which is an entirely different beast. What it is, is an exploration into why we continue to engage with these behaviours.
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Today marks the second day of Depression Awareness Week (or - as I prefer to call it out of a sick sense of fun - World Depression Week) and I wanted to write something about my experience. However, as Tim Lott has already taken on the task of describing the sensation of being depressed here much more eloquently than I could hope to, I decided to have a go at looking at it from a different angle. Here I talk about the change in self-definition and identity that occurs in conjunction with mental illness. Or at least, how it occurred for me.
For most of my life, depression (and mental illness more broadly) was one of those really sad things that lot of people who weren't me unfortunately had to deal with. Kind of like having unreasonable parents, or living somewhere really cold, or having acne. Then, around the same time as I took the picture above, I started waking up sad. Every day. The emotional rash had broken out on the oily skin of my psyche, and I had no Clearasil Ultra 5-in-1 Acne Exfoliating Lotion to hand. I'm almost sorry for that metaphor, but hey - it's my blog and I'mma do what I want. Anyway, the transition from a perfectly mentally healthy person to an already imperfect and now somewhat mental person was a rough one. In some ways, that transition was harder for me to deal with than the depression and undefined eating disorders that followed. Having to reinvent your own identity is never an easy thing to do, but undeniably there is an added layer of darkness when the new definition involves words like "victim" and "sufferer". Even the amorphous "survivor", a word many of us who have experienced sexual assault use to describe ourselves, seems harsh. In fact, anything that reminded me how much of a struggle each day had become seemed only to aggravate the pain that these daily exercises like making breakfast had become. Years ago, I went to a few of my sister's first-year psychology classes at Auckland University. Among the memories of unnecessarily cruel experiments on monkeys, I recall one class in which the lecturer spoke about the diagnosis of mental illness. She spoke about the apparently random ways in which definitions of different disorders were tweaked year-to-year in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, and how patients responded to being diagnosed. Some patients experienced relief in finding that all their terrifying symptoms were, in fact, diagnosable illnesses, while others filled their diagnoses out, collecting new symptoms to fit more neatly into the parameters of their specific illness. Nowadays I am grateful for this definition, but that wasn't the case at the time. I am thankful now to have the language to talk about my experience, and relate to other, yes, sufferers. However, I do still wonder whether there was not something in the act of becoming conscious of my depression that solidified it in my mind, as a part of it. A sort of cogito ergo sum, but for "I feel depressed, therefore I am depressed". Because up until the day I said out loud that I wasn't ok, it was just me being sad and not really feeling like life was worth it. Not pleasant, obviously, but actually not as scary as being Someone With Depression. Likewise, when I felt myself dipping back into that pool of emotional tar almost a year later, it was not the waking-up-crying that made me want to run away, it was the thought that I was returning to the Big-D. (Click on that link, I dare you. It's Dumbledore. You'll enjoy it, I promise.) On that note, I'll wish you a happy World Depression Week! I'll also add that there are a million resources out there for people who are going through something and don't think that talking-therapy or drugs are what they want. CBT is one of many options, and anyone can get in touch with me through the contact page if they have any thoughts or questions. |
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