Chapter Five
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick . . . “
~ Proverbs 13: 12
These cycles of guilt were a less-than-effective way of figuring out what exactly was happening in my head; the more I felt guilty, the less I cared about finding the solution. For a long time, all I wanted was a reason. I wanted there to be a cause. But there was no cause. At least none that I could ascertain. The more I searched, the less I found, and the less I found, the more I stopped caring. I got tired of not being able to explain any of this to myself. I started to go numb. I was so sick of the negative emotions that my depression caused, I just decided to tune out all of my emotions. If I can’t feel anything, I can’t be sad, right?
This numbness brought with it a growing feeling of apathy about all the things I seemed to care about so much in the beginning: trying to figure out what was wrong, trying to get through it, trying to fix it. I stopped caring altogether. The pain didn’t matter anymore. I simply accepted it as part of who I was, and moved on from there. I went through the motions of life doing just enough to keep me alive and relatively healthy, just enough to keep me from failing school. A meal or two a day if I felt especially hungry. Maybe a homework assignment if I had fallen particularly behind in a class. Maybe a game of racquetball if my roommate could convince me to head to the gym—which wasn’t hard since I was just going through the motions anyway; it really didn’t matter much to me if I went to the gym or not.
I do remember that during these games of racquetball, my competitive side would still manage to reach the surface. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to beat him. It was more I would get severely upset whenever I messed up on things I should have been able to do easily—simple kill shots and the like. I would get extremely frustrated and hit the (borrowed) racket against the wall and shout out my frustrations. It wasn’t necessarily healthy, but it was the only emotion I had really allowed myself to get out in a while, so I guess that it was a little therapeutic.
The problem with trying to become apathetic was that it just wasn’t true. I still cared. I still wanted to be able to get through this episode or whatever it was. I wanted to be healthy again. I didn’t want to be so down all the time for no reason. I wanted it to make sense. So I started hoping that something would go wrong. Perhaps that’s why I liked racquetball so much; when I messed up, it gave me a small reason to be upset. It gave me hope that maybe, underneath all the confusion, there was some logical reason behind everything I was going through.
