I was thinking a little bit about what I posted last week regarding my spending habits and I was struck by how bizarre it is now to think back to how I thought about money when I was out of work. For me, it just never made sense to spend money when I had no paycheck coming in. I felt this way despite knowing that I had my finances in such a strong position that I did not need to worry about spending money. To simplify, I knew not to worry and yet… I worried. I think this nagging worry – again, one not based on my reality – speaks to how an unemployed person can develop some serious anxieties while out of work.
I wonder now if everything I worried about while I was out of work was strictly due to being out of work. The strangest thing I worried about back then was how I always expected the worst-case scenario for everything I did. I never expected to get a job, I never expected anyone to keep their commitments, and I always assumed my phone or even email was broken anytime I went more than, like, five minutes without hearing from anyone. The most bizarre part of these anxieties was how nothing about my life had actually changed except my employment status; I’m realizing now that maybe this one change was the only relevant factor.
When it’s all going wrong in the head, the facts tend to matter less and less. I suppose the catch with mental or emotional health problems is that after a certain point you can’t just think or feel your way out of them. It works a lot like a physical health problem, I guess, in the way severity of a physical injury is defined to the extent that the injured part is able to actively participate in recovery. If you roll an ankle, you can walk it off – if you fracture an ankle, you can’t do anything about it except wait.
The hard part about waiting is that the process remains very painful. I think mental or emotional health problems have a similar built in feature where the severity of the problem is inversely related to how much your own thinking or feeling can participate in the solution. The worse the problem, the more important it is to wait, but waiting is so counter-intuitive to resolving such a problem that I think the problem can be made worse simply from the active effort to resolve the issue.
I’ve always found very difficult those times when I had no idea how to fix something I needed to repair. There would always be a period of time in these cases when the lack of knowledge was a source of great stress and anxiety for me. I can’t say for sure that this is related to the wider category of mental health problems, of course, but it does seem like a common thread among all the risk factors for major depression. Having experienced a few of these risk factors myself over the past handful of years – death in the family, sudden job loss, long-term unemployment, and even a handful of not quite major/chronic injuries – I can confirm that the worst moments I experienced during these times always came back to some version of this basic issue of not knowing how to solve a problem.
If the stress or anxiety lingered for long enough, it started to feel like I was being pulled into this relentless, powerful black hole that was opening up somewhere just beneath my feet. At the time, it felt bizarre that little things led to these moments – I was expecting despair to result from more significant shocks, failures, or losses. But I think it makes some sense because being on the precipice means being only a small nudge away from taking a big fall.
