From hole I’ve fallen into today, world is a very alienating place

By David McElroy · February 17, 2018

I’ve fallen into a hole today. Call it alienation. Call it depression. Call it longing. Call it whatever you want. There is loneliness in this hole. There is bitterness. There’s hurt and anger.

I need to stay away from most people today, because I’m not my best self when I’m in this hole.

In a private letter, the writer Edna St. Vincent Millay once gave me this metaphor. She wrote, “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”

I woke up feeling this way — as though I had fallen into a hole during the night — but it was hours before I was conscious enough of it to realize what was going on.

When it was time for lunch, I drove around from place to place, confused about what I wanted. Any time I have this much trouble deciding what to eat, the food choice isn’t the real issue, which I wrote about just a few weeks ago.

For me, depression is always a situational thing relating to unmet emotional needs. It’s in those times when I act in ways that I know are dysfunctional, mostly related to “self-medicating“ with food. As I thought about this at lunch, I realized that I really did fall into this hole last night, because I ate more poorly last night than I have for a couple of months.

Many people have no idea what it feels like to fall into such a hole. When I describe it to them, I get a blank look in return. Others know exactly what it’s like and freely acknowledge it. Yet others recognize a time in their past when falling into such a hole has almost destroyed them, so they prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist.

So we have an odd situation in our culture. Those who fall into this hole feel all alone — and when that happens, we’re painfully aware that hardly anybody else wants to hear about it. Almost everybody else prefers to look away, either because they don’t understand or because they understand too well.

The sense of aloneness is overpowering in this hole. The alienation from the world is profound. It’s not that I think different things than I normally do when I’ve fallen into this hole. It’s that I admit things to myself that I would prefer not to admit — because they’re things that scare me.

I always feel somewhat alone in the world — and I’ve always lived with the feeling that I was an alien among humans — but I normally make myself believe that can change. Maybe it’s just for the sake of my sanity, but I typically believe that there are people like me and that I’ll find them some day — that they’ll understand me and that they’ll want to hear what I have to say.

But when I’m in this hole, I come face to face with the knowledge that hardly anybody wants to hear the things I consider worth saying. I know how to attract a large audience by telling people things they want to hear. When I did that five or six years ago, I had 30,000 readers a day at my highest peak. But then I quit saying obvious things that they already agreed with. I started writing things which were far more personal to me — things which I consider far more important — and I’m lucky to have 500 readers on a good day. Hardly anybody cares.

I’ve become quite pessimistic about the possibility of people — even well-meaning and bright people — ever being able to agree on much about objective reality. Part of that is that we all have our subjective points of view, but a good part of it is that there seems to be some degree of insanity and irrationality that’s built into every single one of us. The thing that makes me feel truly crazy, though, is that almost all typical, normal, stable people assume their version of reality is objectively correct. When I’m able to see different people’s points of view and understand that multiple ones seem reasonable — and that they can’t all be true — I’m confused about why that isn’t obvious to everyone.

And from down in this hole, I also face my worst fear — that I’ll always be alone. That I’ll never find a partner who wants what I have to offer (and who also offers what I want in return). Most days, I can convince myself this will change. In this hole of alienation, she no longer exists.

I realize this isn’t interesting to most people. Maybe there’s absolutely nobody who really cares about it. (Probably, come to think of it.) I realize I’m indulging my need to talk about my fears. I’m down at the bottom of this dreadful and lonely hole and I’m shouting into a void. I honestly assume no one’s listening — and I don’t blame you.

I know I’ll climb out of the hole. Maybe tomorrow. Surely by Monday. I have plenty to get done, so I won’t have much choice. But I’ll just be numbing the feelings temporarily. I’ll just be pushing forward to do what must be done.

What’s worse, I know that until something changes — if it’s even possible for something to change — I’ll be back to avoiding the hole as much as I can for days on end. But I know I’ll eventually fall into it again and I’ll feel depressed and alienated and angry and hurt.

It’s my own personal version of hell in this mortal realm — and I don’t know how to escape it.

Share on Social Networks

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Related Posts