This post contains information about the plot of The Good Place, which may spoil the experience if you have yet to watch.
For this reason, I strongly urge you consider watching for yourself before you continue.
This post contains sensitive content that may be distressing to some people. Reader discretion is advised.
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- Mental health
Dear friend
I don't want to be here. I don't want the pain. But it's all I know.
No one wants to be depressed, it's not like any of us actively chose to step into the darkness. I certainly didn't ask for this and it's certainly not something I'd wish on my worst enemy. No one should have to live with pain, guilt, loneliness, and constant anxiety.
But one thing I don't think is spoken about often enough is: how anyone who's been here long enough will tell you that after a while, it becomes… familiar. You eventually reach a point where “recovery” is synonymous with “goodbye” while “relapse” becomes a greeting to an old friend. You forget what it is to be happy and you learn to survive in the darkness. You develop survival instincts that help you navigate it. You dress it all up in a label we call “hope”. But in reality it's just learning to suffer without making it as big of a deal than it truly is.
I've been thinking a lot about why it takes me so long to change bad habits, to adopt new healthy routines, to learn to be happy with myself, and critically to accept the advice and support that my friends have so often given me when I seek it. Because I don't want this. I don't want the pain; give me therapy and medication any day. Yet I also don't want to admit how terrifying it is to imagine what else there could be beyond this. To imagine and live in a new state of being that I'm struggling to comprehend - being happy and healthy.
In fact, there's a quote from The Good Place that has particular relevance here.
I'm upset because for hundreds of years I've had a job. First, it was finding a better way to torture humans, then helping them. Then, proving the system was broken, then teaching the demons.
I had to roll a rock up a hill over and over. And then it kept rolling down, so I had to do it again. And then Vicky comes along with this rock-lifter thing and just lifts it to the top of the hill.
Pushing the rock up the hill gave me a purpose. Who am I if the rock's gone?
Me too, bud. Me too.
I of course understand that in this scene, Michael was talking about how his purpose is defined by always having a goal to achieve. But if we take a more poetic interpretation, it's not hard to imagine how this relates to what I'm expressing. If I'm to not be depressed - if I were healthy and happy and strong - what would that even look like? Who am I, if not someone who is in so much pain, silently screaming for help against a loud and vibrant void?
I fear happiness not because it's inherently bad, but because it is so inexplicably alien to me. The thought of not being here in some form is… inconceivable to me. Literally. I cannot imagine what that would be like. And that scares the shit out of me. At least here, in this pit of familiarity pushing my own rock up a hill, I know how to survive. I learned how to survive it rolling back down, for I had to. Genuine happiness, strength, and resilience? I have no idea how to survive that. The survival strategies I adopted don't work when there's nothing left to survive anymore.
I don't want to be here. Pushing the rock up the hill is so painfully difficult and exhausting inside and out that I'm so unbelievably tired. It's hard, it hurts, but at the same time it's so achingly familiar. This is what I know. This is how I learned to be. Without it, I fear I'm to become an inauthentic and vacuous shell, complicity nodding and playing whatever game I'm meant to be playing in this quest for a “healthy adulthood”. If the pain vanishes, do I vanish too?
Who am I… if the rock's gone?