Development and Depression

So today, I’m taking a break from my external experiences and focus on my internal experiences, which means that this blog post is about something that I have been thinking about and living in for the entirety of my time here in South Africa, and as many of you probably know, I have been dealing with (tolerating, trudging through, etc. etc.) depression/anxiety for about 5 years now. Over the years I have had varying degrees of success coping with this, and since I’m not dead yet, I can say I’ve been largely successful in doing so (not even physical scars!). However, it is very difficult to explain what it means to live with these two diseases day in and day out, because you’re basically hosting your own worst enemy in your head 24hrs a day for 7 days a week, and that’s during a good day, let alone a bad day.

One of the largest problems centres on piling on guilt and self-hate over the most trivial things; forgot your notebook for work? Wow, you are the fucking worst, why do you even bother? Deep down you know it’s absurd, but you still can’t stop yourself from thinking that. But what does this even have to do with working in development? Well it goes right back to the irrational and absurd sense of guilt that I give myself day in and day out. Perhaps the most common form of this line of thinking goes something like this: seeing the circumstances that the students grow up in and then hating yourself for having a mental disease when things are so much better for you back home. Absurd, right? It gets even better when you beat yourself up constantly for thinking that way and rarely have a day where you don’t spend most of it chastising yourself for hating yourself. Which leads into perhaps the most frustrating part of this internship, since (according to my supervisor) a string of personal and professional successes, and yet all I manage to focus on is every single failure, hiccup, stumble, and misunderstanding; it’s holding yourself to an impossible standard.

So at the end of the day you’re exhausted, because I spend almost all my energy on maintaining some semblance of normalcy, with some days being better than others. Which means that the last thing that I want to see at the end of the day are more people, which results in withdrawing from people simply to recharge for the next exhausting day. I also get this way (again, it’s absurd) about learning. Take isiZulu for example, it’s not because the language is so different from any language that I knew growing up (it is), or that it’s my first time on the continent (it is), or that I’m also learning a completely new culture (I am) but it’s because I’m a lazy piece of shit that can’t be arsed to learn the language or really try. So each and every time that I miss a phrase I thought I learned, or a few words that I thought I had down, the cycle renews itself (which, let me tell you, is just bloody wonderful).

You might be reading this and thinking, well damn Bryan, we get it, it really sucks having a mental disease, but what does this have to do with working in development? It goes back to the feelings of guilt that I mentioned, where it can seriously impact my work if I let it. Coming from a reasonably well-off background by Canadian standards coming to poverty-stricken townships, under-developed schools, and impoverished rural villages, it makes me wonder why I have what I have going on in my head. It is because of these thoughts and feelings that it becomes increasingly easy to justify working in a field that doesn’t present these kinds of challenges to a diseased mind.

This piece is mostly for my own introspection, but hey if you found it useful for other people in your life that have depression (or any other mental illness) that’s also pretty awesome. But yeah, it’s been an experience to work without passion in a passion-filled field.

So let me know what you think, how you feel, etc. etc. etc.