Framing Thoughts

One of the handful of counsellors I’ve seen over the years explained to me the importance of reframing one’s situation in order to gain a new perspective, and in doing so, rid oneself of those pesky blues.

I think the formula was meant to be simple:

	Age	Occupation	Health	Wealth	Relation-ships	Overall Emotional State
FRAME 1	Mid-30s oh god so old	I damnshitHATE my job and I have no time for my own business.	Flabmaster and chronic back pains	Gonna buy a flat at the end of the year and fecking worried	The sad bits of Bridget Jones	Congrats you’re depressed!
FRAME 2	Mid-30s still half my life ahead	By day, I lead a high-profile, national-level project & I’m good at it. By whatever-other-time-I-have-left, I run a small design service.	All my bits and pieces are still there, my gym membership hasn’t lapsed and I still go 2x a week.	I’ve got a steady job, I’ve made investments, I can cut down on spending and I’ll be good.	I have a great family, I have friends, some dude loves me for god-knows-what reason.	OMG I’m fucking fly!

Well, no. In this case, the whole is way shittier than the sum of its parts. The whole is a dude’s nutsack after 30mins in freezing water.

All you depressive mofos out there, you know what I’m talking about. Ain’t no amount of framing/re-framing gonna change the fact that bits of your brain have bunged off and are probably smoking and making out behind the building. And you can’t fire them because UNIONS.

I think there’s something pretty dangerous about assuming that depression is a disease that can be cured with the right cocktail of drugs + counselling. There are many types of depression, but I suspect – in my case at least – it has more to do with pre-disposition than anything else. I’ve spent a big part of my life doing the mental health fad diets, bouncing around from treatment to treatment and feeling shittier when things didn’t work out and I regained the metaphorical and literal 5kg (I’m a sad-eater).

This is not to say we should wallow around in the muck of self-pity or resignation. We still gotta ways finds to get on with things. For me, living with depression is like… um, doing a pre-recorded spinning programme on the gym bike. You gotta keep pedalling to finish the programme no matter how much you detest the perky instructor in the video screen and yearn to reach in to smack him off his bike. Well, you can’t. You gotta live with him and his cutesy yells of encouragement and just keep pumping your thighs because you get off work too late to join a REAL spinning class.

Have I lost track of the analogy? I think so. But what I’m trying to say is, maybe having a depression-prone brain is something that can’t be changed. It’s not a simple case of “thinking differently”, “gaining a new perspective”, “positive mental attitude – ye gods” etc (those could help, but it’s unlikely to cure). It’s more of a case of acknowledging that you’ve got a less-than-ideal living situation, but hey – at least you’ve kept the wheels spinning.