You make me ache

Let me tell you a story.

Clinical depression is a beast of a thing. An unique mix of symptoms and lived experience as it grinds on, week after week, year after year. It is the trenches, it is a war of pure attrition where there is no love lost. No quarter is given, it is to the death.

Anhedonia is one of the criteria for major depression. The meaning of anhedonia (French for "the disappearance of pleasure") changes along with each shift in clinical perspective. The DSM-V description is "markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day." In another part of the entry a more detailed definition is given as "Feeling less interested in hobbies, not caring anymore, not feeling any enjoyment in activities that were previously considered pleasurable, reduction from previous levels of sexual interest of desire. Family members may notice social withdrawal or neglect of pleasurable avocations." (source)

Clinical depression hides in dark corners, pointing the spear at the raw skin yet to heal. A genetic inheritance from a side of the family that knows the trenches intimately, the shells and steel barely registering now.

It means that in many situations, I do not experience joy how I think others do.

I am rather happy in this moment. I laugh at podcasts, read an endless deluge of graphic novels and manga that tug at my heartstrings. Catharsis is known to me, so is love, however infrequent it is. Happy experiences bleed out of me almost instantly. Alienation is the norm for social ties, I try to match people's energy and it just...sometimes is off. After about twenty minutes, I have to return to the dark forest, the only place I can sustain from dawn to dusk.

At times I thought I felt nothing, or at least a very muted version of emotions like joy. There is instead the ache. I often describe poetry as "achingly beautiful." Until this year I thought it was just a phrase I overused, or maybe a consistent characteristic of what I prefer to read. I think that is incorrect. Many emotions created by art, or by people right in front of me, come across as an undifferentiated ache.

The ache is the sensation that sticks for hours, days, weeks that there is something going on emotionally, however muted and difficult to parse what the heart is trying to tell me as it drowns in the undertow. It is a source of great guilt when the ache comes up when I meet someone, and there is some sort of romantic impulse that is being lost in the flatness of my day-to-day. I struggle to express how I feel; partially this is loss-aversion to a potential connection of any sort, partially this is anxiety of being vulnerable, and partially it is that I do not trust the scrambled signals being sent up to parse.

I spent a lot of last night going over and over what I want to say to someone I've known for a while. When people ask me what I want in a social relationship, I have tended to give borderline non-answers. I'm open to many things, I don't like to put a label on it, such and such and such and such. By planting an absolutely middle-of-the-road answer, I can adjust to what other people want and not feel the tension of having different goals and a different perspective on where we might be going.

That is deeply insulting to others, and to my own to my limited time on Earth. I don't get a prize like the nickel arcade near where I live, if I did some kind of magical balance in the decades of relating to people, and didn't make anyone mad. If I don't want people to move on, I need to open up and lay things out in the sunlight.

I want people to love me like I grow to love them. I cannot compel them to do that, but they should at least be told that is something that would create a good ache.

Time is short,
and I don't want anhedonia to define me.

Artemis