Among my old notes, I found this piece from 2020 Ronja, sad and locked in under lockdown. She wrote straight from the heart about how we need dreams and play for fighting against depression.
Okay, so you already know that I’m depressed sometimes. There is a neat, clinical way in which I could talk about this, maybe think about it as “you get depressed when your needs aren’t being met”.
And then, I could list my needs, including things like exercise, human closeness, financial stability etc. Or I could think of it in terms of the chemical balance in my body – low serotonin levels and whatnot. I could look at my thought patterns and do exercises that help me think less catastrophically, question my negative thoughts…
Well, you know what: I am so fed up with this.
Thinking about myself in those terms might have been useful at some point, to recognise what my needs might even be, to do some simple things that can change quite a lot. I don’t regret having tried antidepressants, for example. They did help, for some time.
And now? Now I cannot bear being a bundle of categories any longer, I do not want to be a problem to be solved, or a bunch of constraints within which to optimise. This mindset keeps me alive, I guess, but it doesn’t let me be alive. This is the difference between surviving and grabbing life with all my hands and throwing it up in the air like a bunch of freshly plucked flowers.
There are few things that allow me to feel alive these days, but one thing has transpired and worked whenever it happened. I am able to feel alive as long as I am able to dream, and entertain crazy, silly, outrageous ideas. To do things that make no obvious sense at all. For example, there is this tradition in Oxford of getting up early (or not sleeping at all) to hear the choir sing at 6am on May Morning and then dance on the streets, among sleepy and colourful people as drunk on life as you. Obviously, this didn’t happen this year, but, oh, I got so excited about arranging a call with my friends to listen to a recording of the choir… yes, at 6am. I nearly couldn’t sleep all night, such was my excitement. And of course, dancing alone in your living room at an unreasonable time is kind of underwhelming in comparison to being among the throng of thousands of people in the morning light. Still, it was the only thing that made me feel alive in a while, and that was just the idea of it. I concluded that I need those crazy ideas and dreams to strive for.
They come in different versions: sometimes, I love just spinning thoughts around “But wouldn’t it be fun…” without any intention of doing so. Like “Wouldn’t it be fun to do yoga on the roof?”, “Imagine throwing colour bombs onto passersby far down in the street”, “I’m just gonna take my bike and cycle in one direction until nightfall, just to see where I end up”, or “I’ve got my tent, let’s just start walking”, “do you think we could hitchhike to Vienna in 36 hours?”, and, last week: “How about buying a village in Galicia/Portugal/Sicily and establishing an intellectual community there? (We could offer writing retreats! We could hold a festival each summer!)”.
When I started writing these, I thought it was just about the fun in coming up with unlikely scenarios, like when you do role playing or come up with a story a la “Imagine Bob Dylan in a space station restaurant – what would happen?”.
And I was gonna say “they come in two versions, one is just this game, and the other is more serious”, but actually it makes no sense at all distinguishing between games and “serious things”.
Gosh, my whole point turns out to be: play is a safe space to imagine things I wouldn’t allow myself to think in my serious mode. Part of my mind, the “serious”, “reasonable”, “grown-up” (ugh) me just can’t deal with the boundless possibilities and opportunities for joy. We did walk in one direction with the tent, and by nightfall reached the forest at the edge of the valley, and we ate soggy salad and were happy with it, and then woke up and walked back, and someone gave us bottled water when we asked to fill our bottles, and then someone else needed water and we gave them one of our bottles and they insisted on giving us money in return, and then we used that money to buy asparagus from a tiny stall in the fields. And, that other time, we did make it to Vienna, only one hour over the 36 h threshold. Who knows – it might not be beyond me to establish a community in my wish to get out of the city and flee my tiny household that can’t give me the community I need.
Maybe these ideas aren’t actually so crazy. They might just be very healthy indicators of the life I want, and I’d better listen. Any crazy out-of-reach dream tells me something that is important, and I can understand that message even if I can’t act on the thing directly. It can give me ideas – maybe I don’t need to buy a whole village just yet, but could do house-sitting with a group of friends and get to live for free in return for maintaining the place. There are always options, and they typically only surface when I am open to dreaming.
Reasonable thoughts and plans are not what get me out of bed in the morning. “Good morning, Ronja, today you get to apply for a moderately interesting job, in which you can write business reports and pretend it’s all tremendously important”. Not really. Or more like: Really!? Is that what life has in store for me? Why is anyone surprised that a huge chunk of me just goes “no. I will not get out of bed for this. Screw you”. And then, I can’t, and I am miserable, and then people give me tools to modify my thinking. Until now, it just hadn’t occurred to me that the problem could also be that I just want a different life. Maybe nothing is wrong with me for being unhappy where I am. Maybe it’s not my problem.
Maybe I just need an escape.
ronjalutz.com 