10 Catch 22s that make the clutch of depression so difficult to escape, and how to begin to (Part 1 of 2)

This is a vision of depression as a condition of Catch 22s: problematic situations you cannot resolve or escape from because they require you to fulfil mutually conflicting conditions or because you cannot do a thing before you have done another thing which, however, requires you to have already done the first thing. [1]

I describe 10 Catch 22s of depression (5 in this first part). There are more, perhaps many more.

The Catch 22s of depression are serious and tight. They show us why hopelessness takes over in serious cases of it.

Yet the perspective is also liberating and hopeful. Each of us has won a ‘lost cause’ or two not by strength or heroism but through ingenuity, brilliant targeting, inventing our own rules, being at the right place at the right time, a Grace ...

If we do not have our own stories, we know of the likes of David’s sling against the Goliath, Alexander the Great severing the Gordian knot, the “none of woman born” who defeats Macbeth …  Such victories are at the heart of myth, folklore and literature, then of movies based on them.

A Catch 22 is not resolved from within. The lack of a meaningful solution through following its rules makes it what it is.

You cannot stay in the backs and forths a Catch 22 sends you traversing and make things better. You need to leave its tracks; break out of its logic. Yet you cannot exit through the front door. The front doors – the formal ways of “checking out” internal to the conundrum – are illusory. You need to seek back doors.

I have called the ideas of exiting the Catch 22s of depression presented here ‘small doors’. They are ‘small’ in the sense of not being too obvious, sometimes being counterintuitive. They are also ‘small’ in the sense of requiring minimal or no effort.

Almost anything and everything in depression feels HARD. Extra effort is not what most people in the grip of it can command themselves to make.

The suggestions here are for actions which aim to ride the waves of what still works well enough in our bodies and souls, latch onto habits and automatisms, or harness something external to carry us forward. This can then start chains of events through which something positive is likely to be stirred in you, despite you.

Just as we all know of causes won against all odds, we all know of great powers held in small containers: the onion that makes you cry; the mosquito propelling you out of your bed in the middle of the night, running around the room, clapping hands and cursing; the box of radioactive material to light up a city or kill its people. ‘Small’ does not need to be weak or inconsequential.

The small solutions – small doors out – I suggest are many. What is effortless or at least possible for some would be heroic for another. Small is relative. Most suggestions may not apply to you. You need, however, only one or two of the doors to open wide enough to step out of this cursed land.

Some of the Catch 22s below apply to all or most types of depression. Others apply primarily to the depression of people who believe they made grave mistakes in their life and too much of it went wrong, both because of what one did or didn’t do and because of inexplicable forces or sheer bad luck. I wrote a first version of this as an email to a friend who, I’d say, fits the description, while also thinking of my father. He exemplifies it.

The Catch 22 perspective is mostly one of generic daily actions and inactions and of how depression entrenches itself, not what causes it. The original and deepest causes and reasons for depression may make all the difference in treating it but may also be close to irrelevant.

The difference is often a matter of simple maths. If there are plentiful causes and reasons for a person to feel good, the ones to feel the opposite recede. This piece is about breaking out of the Catch 22s which block little positive actions that give rise to little positive experiences which gradually accumulate into a growing sense of well-being. With a dose of luck or a gift of grace added, big positive actions and experiences also follow in the chains of events started.

If it would be helpful for you to understand better what kinds of readers, circumstances and needs I wrote this for, see [2]. Otherwise let’s finally get going.

Catch 22 – 1: The things that will make you feel better are things that, in the grip of depression, are too hard to do. If you start them, you are likely to fail or fail to register something being ‘better’. Then they feel even harder to go through or start at all.

The things which will make us feel better under the cloud of depression are often active, effort-taking and/or non-habitual: being more physically active, connecting with people, doing something creative, completing a task well past its due date, getting a job, changing one’s job, going for a walk, leaving a relationship, repairing a relationship, exploring a new relationship, completing a degree, cleaning one’s room, cooking a meal … down to the level of getting out of bed.

Yet doing things which are active, effort-taking and break the inertia is precisely what we have no energy or desire for. 

They feel too hard, too pointless, too complicated, too tiring, definitely not pleasurable, promising ‘more of the same’, because how we feel has come to stand for what the fabric of life is. The bigger ones are entirely overwhelming.

It is not necessarily that you cannot start them, but you cannot face persevering through them. You may trust you can get a better job but you will need to work in it when you do. And you don’t want to work! You don’t want to be under the magnifying glass of any place where you are a newcomer. You don’t want to have to learn new ropes. You would far rather hang yourself on one.

You do the receptive, automatic, habitual, going with the flow, while it is some of the active and different that will get you fired up and feeling better. If you manage the active and different, you only manage it in spurts here and there. Goodness rarely accumulates through spurts.

Small doors out of Catch 22 – 1:

To start small is a boringly familiar recommendation. It is still valid. More interestingly:  

(1a) Start small and outside of you. Start with your environment. Start with your possessions. Change the external so that it feeds into the internal. 

Clean your room. Paint its walls perhaps. Tidy up a wardrobe or a drawer or a shed; a corner of these. Start with something as prosaic as your daily bag even, and its wrappers, tissues, scrunched shopping bags, leaking pens or whatever your version of a bag mess. Get rid of what you don't need.

You will feel better. You will feel better even if your reason to tidy up has been so that those around you have less work to do when you kill yourself – if this is a part of the plan. 

This recommendation is quite the opposite to therapeutic practices leading you to a deepening of self-knowledge. It is not that self-knowledge is not vital, but it is based on a capacity to remain unbiased. Depressive thoughts are biased. They need to have diffused a little so that the light of insight has a chance to enter.

Clean the windows ahead of you before the ones of the inner world. Air and light from the external do enter the internal.

(1b) Start small and physical – unusual in the context of mental health. Honestly, start physical! Why would you prioritise repairing your thoughts and emotions by using those very same broken thoughts and emotions, even if with outer help? (Having trained as a psychologist, it felt shocking to ask myself that question.)

Better physical health invariably has a positive effect on your mental health. Use the former to lift the latter before you begin taking your mind seriously again. Start cycling again, lose some weight again, do something good for your health again.

Reach your mind through the back door of the body.

If it is not something you can do because your body’s broken, and this is one of the reasons for your depression, this is not a small door for you. Skip it, read on.

That said, when you put aside the mourning and the moaning, is everything about your body broken? If you are still alive and reading, it cannot be.

(1c) Start from where life has created steely discipline and solid habits in you. For some of us it will be to do some knowledge work – read, analyse, write … For others it will be to train physically, repair things, work the land, drive or walk even.

The type of activity does not matter (though, obviously, it better be different to what you are doing already). What matters is to latch onto discipline and habits you have been building for years, maybe even decades, and let them kick in despite you ‘not having the motivation' or ‘not wanting to do it'. You won't want to do it. You will be able to do it because you are trained or used to doing it, regardless of how you feel about it.

 (1d) Look out for what is excessively contagious in the solutions others who have suffered from depression swear by (and are not selling to you). Let the action arise if it was for it to arise.

There is a particular kind of energy of certainty, religiousness (often without the religion) and commitment of ‘this TRULY worked, and it works, for my depression’ which those who have broken out of its confines can exude. Their solution can be anything: singing, dancing, writing, meditation, yoga, cooking, cycling, gardening, tapping, a particular modality of psychological or bodily therapy, finding God …

Those people won’t be trying to sell you anything or even to persuade you to try what they have done. You will feel a “I want what they have too”.

Those people don’t come often. They come in surprising ways. I last felt such energy overflowing (it was when seeking it for another, but I trust I would have felt it if it was for me too) at the final concert of “Men are Singing”, a Falmouth-based men only choir, and half a year prior to that at a show "Dissolve" of Paul Foot, whose stand-up comedy partly told the story of him recovering from depression after no less than 28 years.

When a click happens of you + the type of person who tells you their story + the intensity of their ‘this saved me’ energy + the nature of the solution, you cannot run away from ‘I want what they have!’. The action will take care of itself if it was yours to take.

Seek out the survivors though, even before you seek the therapists.

Catch 22 - 2: Because you feel a negative, vulnerable, dark, weak, awful, etc. person, a failure, a loser, you name it, you mostly behave as one. This reinforces being it both through your actions and the reactions of others.  

When we feel awful, weak, vulnerable, dark, undeserving, unlovable, etc. creatures, we tend to behave as awful, weak, vulnerable, dark, undeserving, unlovable, etc. creatures. We also receive the attitude which such people receive.  

Some of this attitude is sweet and positive – such as utmost support, compassion, understanding, reassurance, cheerleading. 

Some of it is just as unpleasant as ours towards those others, even if it may take the complementary form.

You stonewall them. They cry and shout out of sheer frustration and helplessness in getting through to you. 

You cry and shout. They clam up not knowing how to handle the emotional volcano erupting.

You reach out with a bleeding wound. They bristle up and chastise you for your part in acquiring it as opposed to offering compassion.

In some cases, the support and understanding for our vulnerability may be the thing that flips us into a different place. It connects us to others in a deep, breathe-a-sigh-of-relief, liberating way, what was missing for such a long time. This can shoot us up to hope and action again.

But in way too many cases we receive negative responses to our negative behaviours or disempowering or invalidating, even if well intentioned, responses to the needs of a vulnerable person.

Small doors out of Catch 22 - 3: 

(3a) Act a bit more often from your better self yet do it from characteristics which are still accessible as genuine. 

Try to reconnect a bit more often – a bit more often is enough – with defining characteristics of yours which have typically served you as strengths and which feel congruent to a situation. It is a partial version of your Better Self. It is still your Better Self.

You may be depressed but still have access to your sublime attention to detail. Dry sense of humour. Professional insight. Clarity of expression. The ability to do X or see the solution to problem Y which nobody else can do as fast, masterfully and clear-sightedly as you can.

Darker emotions may even sharpen some of your defining characteristics. Perhaps your understanding and compassion for the suffering of others deepen. Perhaps it is the capacity to see through hypocrisy and manipulation or the intolerance of lame excuses.

No matter how many of your strengths fell victims to depression, some stand. Some have even been honed. Try to act out of them a bit more often. A bit more often is all that you need. Your better self is being dragged out of the shadows. It may be dragged now, but it being under the sun strengthens its bones. It will be able to walk by itself one day again if you do not abandon it.

(3b) Collect the positive feedback, then let its accumulation work on you without you trying to do anything with it.

Write down/ copy and paste the good things people have been saying or writing about you, or their words of love and appreciation (see the paragraph after next if you’ve done your part in those being almost non-existent). From now on, try to save such positive comments whenever they come. Ideally, extract them from old emails and messages. The way I started revising my ridiculously low self-esteem (which didn’t make sense even to me) over 15 years ago was by starting a document of 'positive feedback'.

The praise and appreciation may feel empty and meaningless. Keep adding it even if without feeling it, even if you feel everyone is exaggerating, being insincere, or saying something because they will soon ask for something back. Accumulation will tip the scales against your will.

If you’ve been consistently awful to others, this is unlikely to be a small door but more like the mouth of the beast. Seek another door. If you have it in you to do a brave experiment though, consider the following:

Note down the instances of people trying to help you and be kind to you, especially those who’ve done it time and time again after you have bitten the hand trying to feed you. These may be the family and friends who are still by your side, even if occasionally leaving it fuming; healthcare professionals and charity volunteers; neighbours, superficial acquaintances and even complete strangers.

No matter the many ways in which they have ‘failed’ in helping you, by doing it in ways that were not helpful to you, those people were trying. Some of them have been helping you out of a sense of duty, for the wrong reasons, or out of a hypocritical altruism that cares more about their presentation of goodness than you. Enough of them, however, have done it sincerely, persistently and at a significant cost to themselves.

The point is not to add to your feeling of guilt. You are already to the neck in its black sticky waters. It is for you to see the growing list and be hit over the head by the reality that you matter. It is to tell you that most of those who’ve kept trying to help you before are willing to help you again. You’ll never walk alone if you start walking. But the walking is yours to do.

(3d) Do a strengths questionnaire.

The best questionnaires return you to yourself with words that hit the bull’s eye. You feel known, you feel seen in a way you are not able to make sense of relative to the questions you were asked. You will also know it is objective (well, kind of, but let’s leave the debate on the limits of objectivity for now).

My favourite strengths questionnaire is here:

Catch 22 – 3: Your inner compass has been broken, not least because of an oversupply of negative experiences in the life you’ve been living. Yet to improve said life, you need your inner compass to be able to steer you elsewhere.

I use 'inner compass' to mean a set of core physiological, emotional, cognitive and motivational states and processes which tell you, in a most general way, whether something is GOOD or BAD for you. It tells you whether a thing, a place, a situation, a life configuration is something to remove yourself from, run away from, work to change, or to get more of, move closer to, engage further in. [3]  

In depression, your inner compass has been damaged. The arrow hardly ever or never points to joy, pleasure, motivation, meaning, reasons to … Whatever the ultimate ‘why’ of why this happens (if an ultimate answer will ever exist), I take it as undeniable that the totality of your life in recent times is at least a contributing factor, if not a causal one. 'Recent life' can be years, even decades.

Your life has kept supplying you with an overabundance of negative experiences, or even mostly uninspiring, monotone, dulling ones. This got your inner compass out of kilter. Many of the causes or triggers of those experiences are still in and around you. Your guidance system needs a different life to repair, re-adjust itself naturally. It needs that but it also makes you stick with what you’ve got because it is too broken to guide you elsewhere. 

This Catch 22 is tightened further if your hard or uninspiring life is very stable or very unstable.

If it is very stable, everything holds together everything else, is held together by everything else, bolsters everything else, and roots itself even deeper by the weight of the whole.

If it is very unstable, no area can support or compensate for any other area taking a beating.

When I say the ‘totality of your life’, I mean it from the big things like relationships, jobs, the physical and emotional spaces you inhabit and the food you eat, to the little things like having a low-level toothache for months, wearing uncomfortable shoes or ‘warm’ clothes in which you shiver.

I also mean the absences: what is missing from your life, such as enough time with people you love and need to hide nothing from, or service to a cause bigger than your safety, comfort and even “health and well-being”.

On the one hand, you need to break away from configurations that make you unhappy so as to cut the supply of negative experiences that feed your depression. On the other hand, this is too overwhelming to engineer. You feel trapped. You don’t have an alternative to turn to. It is too much work to seek it. Even if an alternative looks promising, you do not trust enough it won’t give in.

Worse, it is not as if you need ‘an alternative’! You need multiple, for the mighty collection of circumstances, ruts and relationships which are wrong in your life. You may need a new job, a new relationship, a new house, a new bank account, a new knee, up to a new past ideally! Where do you start and how can you hope to succeed?!

You need positive changes to your life to feed your inner guidance system different stimuli, allowing you to feel better, yet doing all the legwork of preparing the changes and making them work is too much, too complex, too anxiety-provoking for your defeated, out-of-order inner compass. Catch 22 par excellence.

An aspect of the brokenness of your inner compass is that it gives you the same negative signal both for what deserves the negative signal and what doesn’t.

Typically, out of 20 stimuli, it focuses on the 1 negative thing circulating around you and is incapable of seeing the 19 good things that accompany it. If you could, you would be well advised to make the effort to refocus your attention, ‘change your perspective’. Mostly though, you cannot. Your attention and perspective are functions of that broken inner compass.

Sometimes though your inner guidance system is damn right in telling you a harsh truth you have long failed to act on. The thing you feel awful about is awful. Your inner voice is shouting with the whole of its might in the hope of making you move away from where you are. You absolutely shouldn’t change your perspective. You should find a way to leave sooner or later, run for your life even.

But you cannot know when your guidance system is right. It is out of order. And how exactly are you guided towards better, happier experiences, feelings and thoughts when what is supposed to guide you cannot do the work? 

Small doors out of Catch 22 – 3: 

(3a) Give a chance to the idea that depression does not subvert the possibility of feeling good but, instead, subverts the way it can happen in time. Feeling good can hardly ever happen in the middle or right after experiences that were once good for you. Now it can mostly or only happen after A LOT OF accumulation of doing things that are good for you, and with a long delay.

What if we begin to think of depression not as depriving us of positive experiences but as subverting the logic of (almost) every good thing into the logic of very slow and cumulative good things: decluttering a house, getting in shape after you’ve let yourself go for years, or learning a foreign language?

What if depression has the power to make good things excruciatingly SLOW and in need of relentless REPETITION and LONG-TERM ACCUMULATION to be felt and seen, but is powerless to stop them from showing up – as inner experience and outer results – unless you give up on trying? If the depressive landscape were a parched desert, then it would be turned into arable land only by patient, daily, structured irrigation that long ignores how every drop of water is sucked into the depths of the sand and fully gone.

If the idea feels plausible (it is ok if it doesn’t, not every small door is one you can enter through) and takes root in your mind, it will be less distressing that when you do good things in the hope of feeling better, you feel the same, worse or nothing. You will take it as an expected stage in a slow process, potentially maddeningly slow.

The going will still feel hard, sometimes impossible to persevere with. You will, however, have a better chance of trusting that the good things you do for yourself work, and will be felt and seen as long as you don’t give up – just as with decluttering a house, getting in shape after you’ve let yourself go for years, or learning a foreign language. It can be slow, frustrating, as-if never-ending, as-if pointless but certain if you keep showing up for the work.

Try instructing yourself to stop expecting of things to feel immediately or very-soon good and making a big deal out of them ‘not working’.

Try advising yourself that you are in a season of life when ‘the good’ needs tendering. Long tendering. As is often said, “trust the process”. But you need to start the process and not interrupt it midway. Follow the logic of sowing seeds, baking a cake, or washing a super dirty bike chain.

Don’t dig out the seeds to confirm they have not germinated, thus making sure they never will.

Don’t open the oven door 9 times to confirm the cake is no good for eating, thus sentencing it to the bin.

Keep on adding degreaser and brushing away the grime from the bike chain, even if it feels the metal is now co-composed of oil. The moment when the black turns silver, even if rusty silver, is certain to arrive.

Continue to do what needs to be done and trust the logic of the process until the results show, until you feel good again. Continue until your broken inner compass is so flooded with goodness, so intensely feeling the magnetism of its North Star, that it has no choice of registering it.

How do you choose good things to do when your inner compass is broken though ? For a start, act from memory, act from ethics and act from attention to positive accidents.

Act from memory of what once made you feel good. Start doing the things which have, in the past, been making you feel good even if they don’t do it any longer. Your trademark things. Not other people's feel-good solutions or the general recommendations. I, for one, am happier after a (free) day in the mud of the Coast Path than after an hour of an £80 massage, after two hours of writing something, even if refuses to flow, than sitting just as long at the hairdresser’s and being ‘pampered’.

Even your own feel-good things will not make you feel good in most cases. Again, expect that, then put it to one side. It doesn’t mean they no longer work. They work, but more slowly and subliminally than your norm, as the blanket of heaviness they need to lift is, well, heavy. Your broken inner compass cannot register with such sensitivity either. 

Keep going. Not because you feel good after you have done A or B. But because you know that this has always worked for you. If it has always worked, trust it will work. The sun still rises. The rain still makes the ground wet. The logic of the world is largely the same. The sun does not fail to rise on an overcast day. What has always been good for you does not fail to leave an inner mark, even if you cannot see it because of the inner clouds.

Act from ethics. Act according to the Good you have always believed in, not the one dictated by an imposed duty and accompanied by resistance.

Act from the moral principles that were once stored in your heart, even if you can hardly find them there any longer (you can find hardly anything in your heart anyway). Yours may be love, truth, courage, freedom of thought, whatever … Act from the core of the ethics which was once truly dear to you even if it has been bruised of late, even if you cannot emotionally connect with it.

Your ethical principles may be stripped to a bare sense of responsibility to others, to one other beautiful soul. This is enough.

If it is worse than that, if your values being shattered is one of the main reasons for you to be depressed, this may not be a small door for you.  If so, seek another.

Before you move on though, may I plant a seed of a thought? You may be able to resurrect your as-if dead values by accepting that they are far harder and rarer to live up to than you believed but no less real, by remembering that nothing good is defeated if somebody upholds it. It may then be easier to be the only (wo)man standing and upholding a form of good than no longer believing this good is real.

Ramp up the positive accidents. If you somehow stumble upon experiences you cannot put any other interpretation on other than 'that felt good!', ramp them up instead of devaluing them, as your reflex may be.

Do it even if the goodness exhausts after a few repetitions. Goodness exhausts with most things even when we are well. And no, this is not necessarily sad and tragic, even if your depression tells you that it is. Can you come up with a better idea for us, humans, to be consistently driven to discover more of the good things in this boundless world (I know it doesn’t feel boundless now, or at least not in a good way) than by the logic of losing some of the good we enjoy or the joy of it exhausting?

Take it that your emotions and thoughts are broken and that you are doing the work to repair them. Stop relying on them for normal use, then every time they prove themselves broken, despair at the fact. Still, keep an eye for the moments when inner and outer judgements of ‘that’s good’ coincide.

(2b) Don’t seek your joy yet. Seek to help and care for someone or something outside of you and see their joy. A warning though: if depleting your own cup by being there for others more than is good for you is a factor in your depression, this is not a small door out of its cursed land. It may even be a trap.

If exhausting yourself by over-caring does not describe who you’ve been recently, then:

Seek to help somebody with your knowledge and skills when it is not your job or duty to do so. Make it be. Give a chance to their joy of discovering, learning, mastering, seeing something ‘work’, ‘happen’ becoming your joy. Your joy triggered by theirs may be faint, brief. But what you do for some people matters to them beyond what you can ever imagine relative to the effort you put in.

Take in a pet or a plant to care for as long as you are certain you won’t starve or kill them. They will need you and show you that they do. Depending on what you believe about non-humans, they may even love you.

Some of those you help will know how to thank you well. Others may not even have the capacity to speak but will shine their happiness unawares, put a new leaf out perhaps. Then something will be stirred in you, despite you.

The inner compass of most people and things you will help is working. It will show you that something arising in you was GOOD, and it mattered.

(2c) Admit to yourself that a cage is a cage and that you are feeling awful for a reason.

You may have registered what I wrote above that sometimes even a broken inner guidance system is damn right in telling you a harsh truth you have long failed to admit and/or act on. In some cases of depression, a key reason you feel so awful is because something you are making relatively ok, seeking the positives of, appreciating for what it is, is NOT GOOD for you.

This is not an aspect of life you came to this earth to live. You need to stop lying to yourself that it is acceptable.

Typically, this happens with life configurations which are exceptionally difficult to get out of. Otherwise we would not have the need to lie to ourselves in a way that becomes a brick in the wall of our depression, sometimes most of the wall.

Even if relevant, this may not be a small door for you right now. Then again, who knows? A minute of an impossible admission comes, and why now we may never know, which lifts years of weight off our shoulders. Maybe one of these days, maybe two and a half hours from now, the time will come for you to admit that the colour of your relationship or job is black, not 50 shades of grey with blotches of bright pink and seaside blue, as you have been assuring yourself it is.

Then you don’t need to do anything for a start. The inner doing has started and will begin to surface. Or do something very basic. Perhaps buy yourself a Rita Heyworth poster for the tunnel you are just about to start digging. If it sounded incomprehensible, that’s a reference to the “Shawshank Redemption”. I won’t tell you more. In a place of desperation, this is a movie to watch.

Catch 22 – 4: Serious mistakes from one’s past and the guilt and regret for them can have an exorbitant psychological cost. So does the work of reversing and repairing them. There are upheavals in seeking to repair damage done one cannot (and should not) face from a place of self-recrimination, extreme vulnerability and the reign of pain.

Not infrequently, guilt and regret deepen the darkness of depression. Typically, they are guilt and regret you do not repair by simply apologising and changing what you do. The past they have created can’t be repaired. The present needs immense effort to shift the future away from its tragic determination by that past. You cannot just move on either. You need to redeem yourself.

Persevering in negative choices, regrets for making them, or back-and-forth attempts to absolve ourselves of guilt or regret (God, what did I do – no, it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t have done otherwise!) demand extraordinary amounts of energy. Daily. Hourly.  

At times, havoc of epic proportions shall be wreaked and energy to light up a city needed to face the truth of our choices, the realities of their consequences, to account for time wasted, to make amends to those we’ve hurt, to extricate ourselves from what we have become entangled in.

We also cannot know for certain if any of our attempts to repair the past will succeed in the ways we want them to (any sincere effort to repair the past is transformative of both the past and the present, but some transformations are only internal). Moreover, some of our negative choices have weaved the fabric of our daily lives. Disconnecting from them will rip our lives apart and often the lives of at least some others.

The time to repair wrongs which involve others does not come easy.

It has come when you are strong enough to accept full responsibility for what you have done in the past or are committing to do now in trying to repair it. No excuses, no disclaimers, no backtracking.

The time has come when the potential lack of forgiveness of those you are asking it of cannot invalidate you believing in asking for it.

It has come when you can withstand the wrath of those who will not like the new you or the old you returning to their senses.

If that time is still in the future, start with easier reversals of wrongdoing: the harm you have done to your talents, and your frictions with institutional rules and norms.

Small doors out of Catch 22 – 4:

(4a) Address the ways in which you have betrayed your skills and talents first.

Some of our greatest regrets, whether we live under the cloud of a clinical depression or the murky feeling of something being wrong in our lives, are about having wasted or not grown our talents and potential. They are about abandoning what we were once good at, better than most others, had worked hard to become, had much promise in for the future and then dropped.

Start doing more of what you are GOOD at. Don't tell me there are no such things. Even if you have wasted 20 years of not doing something you were good at, it still lives in you. You are still better than 80% of those who pick the same thing. 98% perhaps. You feel the regret so acutely because you once knew that. You still know that.

(4b) Start sorting out the ‘life admin’ omissions which have placed you in the category of the unreliable.

Start sorting out, or ask for help to sort out, the type of ‘life administration’ where you have missed payments, submissions, have let to-be-done’s accumulate for too long, or even failed to look after assets or allowed bureaucratic injustices to work against you without objecting.

For some of you, this may not feel like a little back door at all. The dark deep waters of mishandled finances, for instance, may be where the depression gets much of its enduring strength from. State bureaucracy may be your nemesis. If so, make a pass. The suggestions here are intended to be for what is doable with minimal resistance and relatively undemanding actions, mostly self-propelling after the initial effort.

If you feel you can give this suggestion a try, you may be surprised how much help is available to navigate bureaucratic and financial labyrinths after you’ve let things fall apart, even for a long, long time. It is available both from charities and the institutions you have failed to interact with as needed. There are sensible, pragmatic solutions in place if you commit to do what is your social duty to do (if it is ‘the right thing’ to do is a separate question). Staff are chosen and trained to be supportive, empathetic and non-judgemental. Some are genuinely so.

Of course, the clear, achievable and non-shaming ways to redress social-administrative wrongs are not a given, but they are there more often than your fearful mind expects. The world has changed even from a few years ago, let alone relative to your youth if it was a few decades back.

Yes, it may take you years to complete the payment plans for your taxes or credit cards. You may only be allowed a “pass” in a university degree if you submit your thesis seven months after the deadline, regardless of it having your heart and blood and sweat in it and deserving a distinction. You may need to accept that some of the consequences of your past actions will follow you years. But if it is a step you are capable of taking, having put some of your chaotic social affairs in order cannot but lift some of the weight off your shoulders.

Catch 22 - 5: You are pushing away kindness and the people who show it to you, while you need more of those to feel better.

Under the cloud of depression, we often push away kindness, the people it comes from and the ways in which it is expressed (words of compassion, gifts, hugs, time together).

We do it because we feel we don’t deserve them.

Because they feel incongruent.

Because we don’t trust them.

Because it is easier not to hope and then not to lose than to hope and to lose.

Because the negativity which has become our default will find fault with anything and everything.

Because those things and people may be good, but they are not perfect. They often want something back. Sometimes they want us to be a certain way. Most of the time they will fall apart under extreme pressure.

We don’t necessarily push away kindness and the people that show it to through outright rejection, irony or sarcasm. Silence, exceptionally delayed or too brief responses, and the total lack of appreciation can be just as destructive. The absence of a reaction can be as destructive, at times more destructive, than a clear rejection.

Small doors out of Catch 22 - 5:

(5a) Trust your 'easy virtue' nose – the one for superficial goodness – for now.

In the grip of depression, it is extra easy to see through people’s superficial goodness – the one that comes out when circumstances are good and when those ‘good people’ have enough control, their key needs met, and important things happening their way. Whether this is what most of human goodness and kindness are is beyond the point now.

The point is not to ignore that feeling. If you try to, your suspicions will be proven right, not least because you will do your part in proving them right. That said, even the most depressed and cynical of us cross paths with good and pure souls and we also know we are meeting one. Some of them have come to this world with an immense supply of it. Others have been held against the fire repeatedly and built the character to protect their own good and the Good against all odds. As rare as both types are relative to the ‘easy virtue’ populace, they are there. They carry a light which lifts others up even against their will.

Spend some time with those people. Even if it is only the 1 minute you buy your coffee from one such soul.

Make an effort to reach out to such people.

Make the effort to be good to good people. 

(5b) Catch them if you can (the faint thoughts of gratitude and appreciation), then give them a voice.

Suffering from depression is compatible, for most people, with feeling touched by the kindness of others or with a sense of appreciation of beauty and goodness. Such experiences may be faint and fleeting. They may be coupled with a sense of loss and grief – once you had that too, now it is gone. But they occur.

If gratitude or appreciation spoke internally, try to give them a voice as an experiment and see what happens. You most likely don’t have it in you to engage with others. Make it time-limited. Pick whatever timeline you find achievable and meaningful – a week, a day, Sunday mornings only.

You almost certainly don’t have it in you to make your words inspired. You don’t need to. Saying more of the thank you’s you currently don’t is enough, like the simple ones for an email or message that tried to help or asked about you. You don’t need to engage in a conversation. You can even send a wordless emoticon in our world of lazy likes and appreciation. For anyone who is not tired of life, being thanked and appreciated matters more than we show.

And while we tend to think that the thank you’s are primarily for the other person, it is debatable. When we thank, we pay more attention to the good coming our way. Whatever we pay attention to, gathers strength. Acknowledge the good coming your way.

Try to pay a compliment if the appreciation spoke internally. There is always the risk that it falls flat. You are probably also feeling that a compliment from a loser like you doesn’t matter. It does. Sometimes not visibly enough, certainly not for all people, but it does. Too many people are hopeless at accepting compliments in the moment, yet they secretly and excitedly turn them around in their minds after the fact. Some receive, indeed, too many compliments to feel them in their heart. But there are also those souls for whom your words of appreciation will come so unexpected, so sincere, so precious, so in a moment they needed them that you will see their light explode. And it will shine upon you.

(5c) Don’t push back a hand with a gift.

Do not push back, leave untouched or return a gift because you feel you do not deserve it. Receive it as the gift it was, whether it was a hug that was truly meant to hold you, an expression of empathy, or the artisan chocolates with orange pieces I had chosen for you. It was meant for you.

Replace the image with one from your own life and hear that again. That gift was meant for you.

Thank you for reading!

To be continued ...

Image credit: Stella Levi, 2023, iStock, Getty Images

Notes:

[1] Elements of definitions of Catch 22 brought together in the statement above:  “a difficult situation from which there is no escape because it involves mutually conflicting or dependent conditions” (Wiktionary); “a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule” (Merriam-Webster); “an impossible situation where you are prevented from doing one thing until you have done another thing that you cannot do until you have done the first thing” (Cambridge Dictionary).

[2] I am mostly writing as if the person suffering from depression is you, or ‘us’, ‘we’. If you are reading because of wanting to understand somebody else, hopefully it will help you feel more of the Catch 22s as they are feeling them. Impenetrable. Irresolvable. Lost causes.

I prioritised finding logic in the illogical and suggestions for simple actions, as opposed to laying bare the deep emotional turmoil in depression. Some of it has been conveyed, of course, primarily through the experience of being trapped (which is what Catch 22s do). I do not consider typical traumatic causes of depression either.

Feeling deeper into the emotional landscape of depression and accessing traumatic events and contexts to understand and reconfigure them may be vital in some cases of depression. I am writing mostly for those people who have done it multiple times and still can’t move away from the heaviness inside or for those who resist the work of opening ancient wounds but are still prepared to try almost anything to feel better.

This perspective may not be too helpful for those who have lost physical or mental capacities, such as a part of one’s body or the familiar workings of one’s brain, when a radical change in our most basic interactions with the world is needed. What is simple to do (the premise of the suggestions for action here) is likely to have been completely transformed.

The perspective may also not be illuminating for people suffering with depression outside of the developed and relatively stable world. If your sense of hopelessness is driven, for instance, by not being allowed to study or work because you are a woman or by a war which ended life as you knew it, the actions that restore hope, meaning and joy are probably rather different. Many of them are political. Typically, they are also dangerous, at the life-and-death risk level. There is nothing small about it.

The ideas I am trying to articulate and the suggestions for actions also require sufficient capacity for self-awareness (even if, understandably, it will be going in and out with the fluctuations of depression). They are also helpful only if a person has a functional enough sense of responsibility to do something to help oneself (again in those lucid moments), as opposed to expecting to be saved by external help or grace only.

[3] “Inner compass” is an unscientific term, but for the high-level response of the human psyche and body I am trying to capture, I cannot think of a better one. Ideas warmly welcome!