If you repress feelings long enough, depression attacks without warning

By David McElroy · July 29, 2018

Depression sneaks up on me like a mugger on a dark and lonely night.

I can walk into a dark alley knowing the mugger could be there, but I’m still surprised when the shadowy figure steps into my path and demands everything I have and then leaves me bleeding. That happened again tonight — and I’m in a dark hole trying to crawl back into the light.

Many people have far worse struggles with depression than I do. Some people feel suicidal, but I never have. Some people are unable to function well enough to support themselves, but I can make it through a day without most people realizing there’s anything wrong. Some people get hit with crippling bouts of depression and can’t even tell you why.

But I know why I slip into that dark hole every now and then. I walk a fine line between sanity and madness. I know sanity well and live there as my native land, but I’m sensitive to the siren song that comes from the chaos of madness.

When I’m lonely, I get too close to the rocky shadows where those sirens live.

I’m comfortable in either world — the world of the sane and the world of the mad. I live among the sane — those “normal” people who don’t even understand depression — and they think I’m one of them. But when I find myself among those who suffer on the other side of the line, there’s something familiar there, too. I can understand them. I feel as though I could have been one of them if I were wired just a bit differently.

So I have this existence in the shadows between sanity and madness, understanding both and wishing each group could understand the part of me which identifies with the other.

I’m pulled to the shadows of madness — where I meet the mugger called depression, if you don’t mind me mixing metaphors — when my need becomes great enough.

I know no way to fill the need which I have, so I repress the feeling as much as I can. I pull it out every now and then and contemplate it — just to keep from going completely crazy — but I put it back into a box. I keep telling myself something will change — that love will finally come and stay.

That hope is the only thing that keeps me on the sane side of the line. If I believed the rest of life would be this way, I might slip into a very dark place for good. But I keep holding onto my faith that love is coming and that loneliness will end.

When this depression catches me by surprise, it fills me with despair and makes it difficult for me to ignore the things about this world which hurt me so much — things I’m always aware of but typically can push aside.

When I’m down in this dark place, it’s too easy for me to notice how often bright people believe crazy and unsupported narratives about politics or society or reality. In my heart, I want to believe people are essentially rational and that reason can win in the end. When I’m in this weakened state — in this dark place — I see how crazy some otherwise-bright folks really are.

When I’m in this place, it’s also too easy for me to see how much people enjoy it when their enemies suffer. People don’t just disagree with their enemies. They hate them. They react with positive glee when their enemies are hurt — and this hatred gets me down.

When I’m in this dark place, it’s difficult not to see the ugliness of the world in cold and clear terms. Seeing this so clearly makes me eager to build my own family and try to escape all this — if such a place of escape can still be found.

I hate what it feels like in this dark hole, but I can’t deny the reality of what it does when I’m pulled down into it. It fills me with fear that one day I’ll stay down. It makes me fear that I’ll never find the love and understanding which I so desperately crave — and which I so desperately want to give.

I’m lucky that I’m not one of those who lives in this dark place all the time. I’m lucky that these bouts occur only when I’m the most painfully lonely. I know this could be worse.

But when I’m feeling this way — when it feels as though a mugger has taken everything I have and left me bleeding in a dark alley — it’s hard to be grateful. It’s a struggle just to get up and move on.

I’ll pull myself out of this once more. I’ll go through my day tomorrow without anyone sensing what’s going on. But inside, I’ll be waiting for a long-needed change to finally come. I need to move away from that rocky and shadowy borderland leading to madness — and the only way to do that is to finally find relief for this crippling loneliness which stabs at my heart and tortures my soul.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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