I’m usually careful when speaking of souls because it can mean a spiritual ‘spirit’ to many and, as a strident atheist, I reject the idea of spiritualism.

I think that I’m comfortable with my emotions just now — I’m genuinely happy.



As a nihilist I’m not certain how to respond to your ‘depression has meaning’ idea. I don’t believe in any kind of meaning central to existence, so I suppose that my knee-jerk response would be, “no, I don’t believe that depression has any more meaning than a speck of sand.”

I can come across as unsympathetic to others’ plights, but I’m really a marshmallow, an ol’ softy. My rhetorical style can be infuriating to others, so dry and calm in argument I am, I am.

And yet, (warning— hyperbole ahead!) there is no one in the world so empathetic as myself!

Depression didn’t connect me with others — it forced me to flee from anything outside of my addled mind. I cannot adequately explain the darkness — the complete and consuming sense of terror and grief that I felt — the fear of others (afraid that they would cause even greater pain).

That fear resulted as mutism. That fear was overwhelming, one round of ECT followed by another and another, etc. I’ve no words (and words are my stock-in-trade) to express the shadowed existential existence of myself curled upon the floor crying. It’s not possible. Not at all.

When you write of the ‘human condition,’ I assume that you mean our innate ape-ishness, shared in common? I call the evolutionary process one individual and unique mutation after another. Everyone who breeds passes one evolutionary mutation to another mutation, and so it goes and goes. As Homo sapiens, we’ve been around for 200,000 years (I think?) but there’s no way that we can predict the next evolutionary species, 200,000 years from now. We may be killed off by a plague, a natural disaster, fire, famine, floods.

I must reject meaning in depression. Based upon my experiences if for no other reason. Some people find beauty in patterns; I find the randomness beautiful.



Sigh.

Did you see the NatGeo article that I wrote of? The end of plate tectonics? No more mountains, no more continental drifts? Beautiful. So very beautiful.