You're Allowed to Feel like Garbage

Edvard Munch knew the vibe.

Even people who experience depression and anxiety can personally subject themselves to the stigma toward depression and anxiety.

I apologize for singling out one stranger, but one post in particular showed this stigma loop to me clearly. This person said (paraphrasing) that they were beginning to feel that maybe their depression and anxiety were right after all.

Of course they are right. The only person expressing the idea that their depression and anxiety are irrational emotions is… the person saying they are experiencing them.

Self-stigmatizing perpetuates the demonization of simple, value-neutral negative emotions. This applies at all times, but at this particular moment, it is essential to understand this divergence between stigma and reality.

Let’s be simple about what is happening: Americans are watching the dismantling of our government systems by a lawless president and unelected plutocrat in the precise ways we were indoctrinated to think were impossible in this country.

Even worse, the methods on display are specific to our time and abundance of technology, but the tactics are not without precedent. We’ve seen this type of seizing of society in other countries and regions. Those scenarios were and are deadly for common citizens. Pick a dictator for reference, it doesn’t really matter which one.

So, we’re watching the destruction of our government and have an informed hypothesis about what is coming. This is incredibly, incredibly scary.

If you are a remotely informed left-leaning person in America right now, why wouldn’t you be experiencing depression and anxiety?

Maybe anger is an alternative emotion — it’s useful because it spurs action. Hopelessness? Disillusionment or fear? Perhaps your emotional center simply freezes and shuts down. Or, if you’re lucky, maybe one or all of these feelings propel you into meaningful action.

But these emotions — every single one of them — are value-neutral. A stimulus happens and your body responds. We make such a huge deal out of emotionality, but it’s biologically simple. You’re a fleshy computer.

It’s ok, but to fear the presence of emotion is a subjective decision — subconscious (common) or not.

It is an American tradition to treat emotions and mental illness as the signs of a defective person. Aberrations from what has been deemed acceptable models of thinking and feeling have been a convenient separator of social classes.

If a person is already from a marginalized community or has nothing left but to sleep on the streets, they are even robbed of their humanity to serve as political cudgels or abandoned altogether.

Consider that in an unequal society such as ours, people are nearly always seeking class ascension as a form of security. “Mental defects” become one of the many ways that people with upward ambitions distinguish themselves from a lesser milieu.

So it might be time to ask yourself: Have you, through this centuries-long propaganda campaign against emotionality, absorbed these judgments yourself?

Do you feel them towards others? Or worse, are you applying them to yourself? Further, are you doing this so regularly that anxiety and depression feel inappropriate even when the danger is right in front of our eyes?

The most interesting part of the phrase “self-hating depressive” is not the word “depressive.”

It’s not disgraceful to be depressed. It’s not shameful to feel anxiety. These are tools your body uses to tell you that you are in danger. The clock tells the time, the weather app shows the likelihood of rain, and your body uses emotions to give you information.

And right now, Americans — especially queer and trans people and immigrants — are in danger. Depression, anxiety, rage — whatever — are entirely, one-hundred percent, certifiably appropriate responses to the current political situation.

But maybe what you’re feeling toward these feelings isn’t necessarily judgment, but a frustration with their nature.

These emotions in particular have a tendency to create a mental paralysis. The doom loop goes around and around, but circuitous thinking doesn’t have a natural off-ramp. Instead, this loop is where the hopelessness sets in, and the discomfort with the debilitating emotions themselves.

Then, the scary stimuli keep coming in, even when you don’t know how to deal with the information you’ve already received. You can try to harness different emotions — indignation, or something — but it doesn’t negate that anxiety and depression are already appropriate emotions.

Denying them their space in this experience will not let you escape their grasp. It is likely that nothing will release their hold on you short of the external circumstances taking a turn toward the impression of social safety and resilient systems. The project, instead, is to find a way to live with these emotions while finding an outlet for them.

Maybe that application is participating in badly needed labor organizing. Maybe it can be temporarily abated by creating art, which creates a visual record of how Americans processed this experience as it unfolded. Maybe the outlet comes in the form of writing prescriptive screeds about the moralizing of emotions as a tool of the ruling class.

Maybe though, the depression and anxiety do keep you from taking action. That is, after all, what these feelings were designed to do. But please let them live without judgment. We are facing much bigger enemies than ourselves.