Being a High Minded Bum

Synopsis of a person with high functioning depression.

I learnt depression in childhood. I also learnt how to mask it in childhood (pun intended).

Trauma and struggle with mental health has never been part of economic theory. It just doesn’t exist. Which is why for high functioning people with depression and anxiety, it just can’t exist.

Note: The story is fictional truth

Ever since I can remember, there wasn’t enough. Pretty clothes were a big deal. One day my mother bought something for me that made my sister upset. My sister refused to talk to my mother, because she wanted it. I told my mother to give the fabric to my sister. My mother refused. The drama went on for a long time. That sort of thing happened often. Every time I’d feel a sick dread in my stomach and all the breath in my body would go.

I learnt to be nice to people to avoid being shouted at and I learnt how to listen to people and make people feel safe and happy to avoid being humiliated. Because I was that little scrawny kid that got scared. I learnt depression in childhood and I also learnt how to mask it in childhood (pun intended). There wasn’t much psychological safety. I learnt how to be just fine and get along, because it was risky to show my feelings. Behind the mask of being cheerful and calm, I avoided getting too close in relationships. It was easier to fall in love with narcissists, they don’t see or hear me. It is always about them. That way nobody knows. Just. How. Sad. I Felt.

The joy of life would disappear in the awful feeling that was part of my daily experience as a child. I learnt years later that it was assimilated trauma.* In the past, being around members of my family meant depression or immune system breakdowns. I hate being that person, I know my family loves me, despite the abusive patterns towards me, to the best of their ability. However, my body seems to have a bio-logic of its own. It doesn’t like feeling unsafe for long periods of time.

Economic theory agrees that resources are scarce and life is a struggle. Since resources are scarce, you have to trade. You have to trade at a profit in order to get more resources for yourself. Most economics is not about resource sharing, it is mostly about resource control and trade. I wanted inclusion, but the other person has to want it also. I would have liked to offer one of my fabric pieces to my sister in return for a happy smile, but it wasn’t possible. My sister saw me as the usurper of her opportunities. If she was a country, she would have bombed me. My body would feel like it was bombed as a child. Being actively hated for just existing is a familiar yukky twinge in my stomach. My genes are programmed to respond to hostility with a freeze/fawn response. My nervous system and immune system get dysfunctional around conflict and aggression. If someone abuses, criticizes, humiliates or yells at me I feel drained and miserable.

Of course if I said this sort of thing in a Psychology class, it would be analyzed in clinical terms. My colleagues who use jargon like a dictionary on autoplay would say, ‘developmental trauma in childhood.’ Basically, trauma gets assimilated. Parts of the brain believe it is still happening. Ergo, I don’t feel psychologically safe around control, manipulation, blame, humiliation, shouting, criticism and shame. Ergo, I get triggered. Ergo, I get relapses. Ergo I can’t tell anyone because I am not supposed to feel upset, because it is happening in my head, it is my problem, because they love me. Ergo, I avoid people.

I have a million ways to calm and soothe my brain. I can fool my brain into thinking it isn’t depressed for long periods of time. My periods of depression have high creativity. It is an old friend, a not so horrible demon in my closet, who is fed with cheesecake, yoga, tears and a few friends who know. But going near the people who caused my trauma means drinking poison, a poison that slows my brain, makes me cry at the weirdest things and generally feel exhausted.

Of courses the men I have fallen in love with are loud, resentful, angry and very broken, who use me to take care of them, then dump me when I ask for something back. For a long time, people could barely hear me when I spoke. Developmental trauma. Yes. I learnt that I must have enough money to shop. Nice stuff meant survival. I was miserable. But well clothed. With a nice home. Trauma and struggle with mental health has never been part of economic theory. It just doesn’t exist. Which is why for high functioning people with depression and anxiety, it just can’t exist.

An Economics student or anyone who studies business walks away with the idea that we are here essentially to exploit the planet, get rich and die. Science or rather technology is also part of the same mental paradigm. So humans have to work like robots or else be replaced with them. After all robots can’t get Coronavirus.

Most economists would shudder at the idea of having any kind of ‘ideal’ or ‘moral’ other than free market economics. Never mind that people aren’t actually free or rational. Economists believe that they are rational scientists who study the flow of goods and services, not play God. Yet human behavior isn’t rational. I wonder about the actual behavior of people during and post pandemic, given months and months of uncertainty.

Perhaps our collective, global narcissism is the religion of our times. Our obsessions with our self image have made us blind to the consequences of our behavior. The way we cope with big stuff is by thinking, “It is somebody else’s problem” . We can’t help it, it is in our biology :). Maybe I want to stop working so hard, but my life would be meaningless.

Work is my baby soother. My addiction. My meaning. The only difference between the 16 year old who sacrificed herself to be who her mother needed, and this woman is that I know that my depression will never go away, not completely. I just know how to cope, so that I function. If I had known that at 18, I’d never have joined business school, instead I’d have studied Psychology and Journalism. I’d never have tried to have more money, because more money meant the same unfreedom as less money. Because my enemy isn’t poverty. My enemy is depression. My enemy is part of me. My enemy is me. My enemy is assimilated trauma at an age I could do nothing about it. My enemy is my destiny.