It starts out bad and, second by second, it gets worse. You know the kind of night I’m talking about, where you’re so tired you want to lie down right where you are, where your legs are so heavy they feel like they’re sinking into quicksand, yet you can’t close your eyes, you’re so twitchy, anxious, worried about dozens of things that might not ever happen, but they could, and you’re just waiting for the axe to drop.

“Wired & Tired” they used to say after a music gig. “Wired and tired.”

There’s a thin film of sweat all over your body, and a general malaise, nothing definite, nothing you could point to, but SOMETHING is bothering you, making you tremble, sweat and shake.

A feeling of impending doom falls on your head, and you can’t shake the thought that something dreadful is about to happen or may be happening right now, just outside your circle of awareness.

Nothing seems to help. You lie there, waiting for sleep to come, but it never does, not when you’re like this, it doesn’t. Finally, in desperation and writhing discomfort, you struggle up out of bed and somehow dress yourself in something not too uncomfortable, but warm enough to help with the coldness, the biting chill, that eats at you from all sides.

Now comes the guilt, the worry about being anxious and depressed, the horrible fear that you might either be anxious, or you might BECOME anxious, the realization that you’re in a deep depression, and that nothing you do will bring you out of it anytime soon.

“I should not be anxious. I mustn’t be anxious. I have no reason to feel anxious.”

You’re quite right, the doctors will tell you that you mustn’t feel anxious, that anxiety is bad for you. There’s nothing bad happening, nothing horribly wrong, nothing going on that hasn’t been going on for some time, but now, tonight, at this hour, you’re anxious, and this makes you depressed.

Then you start thinking about all the reasons you might be depressed, trying to find some logic in it, some rational reason why depression is indicated, and somehow, you always manage to find at least one reason to be depressed, and you land on that, then zoom in on it and peer at it from all sides, which makes you even more depressed.

Things look awful, dreadful, horrible. All your efforts are futile, everything you do will someday crumble into dust, your friends are moving elsewhere, finding new interests or getting stuck in old ones, or simply dying off, leaving a “High School Reunion” effect on you, where you’re looking around the room, wondering where everybody has gone to.

Well, the fact is that most of them were never there in the first place, merely figments of your imagination, in the sense that what was really going on inside them was nothing like the picture you built up of them and robotically maintained, in the face of new data. Continue reading →