The Twin Paradoxes of Depression, As Told By My Pile of Convenience Store Lunch Boxes

How formidable these 7-11 Busog Meal boxes look on my kitchen counter. Layers upon layers of empty processed cardboard that used to house my favorite convenience store sisig and tuna omelettes form this great fort. I see about 15 boxes here and it's not even Friday. It is a fort of sorrows, one that also houses my delusions of change. This makes up the shell of my former self in a way. Christ. This is the second time this month that this has happened and the second time I've told myself that things were going to be different. And here I am again. I was supposed to learn something from that hoarding episode the first go around. I apparently didn't. I missed the garbage man's call again yesterday and I guess this fort is here to stay for the weekend.

At the very least, these boxes have been licked clean. Not because I liked the meals, but because I know these to be fair sources of sustenance. I know what I'm getting with each package: a box of a Busog Meal Sisig has about 420 calories, and contains 63 grams of total carbs and 30 grams of protein. It's a reliable meal with just the right amount of disappointment that I can live with (they look better in photos, but hey, doesn't everything?)

I always get the same thing out of habit. Any sane person knows that he shouldn't starve himself, after all. Three of these in a day would mean I've had a sufficient day for feeding. Just enough to keep me from going hungry. Just enough to keep me alive. Just enough to tell my mother I'm doing okay.

I know. Nobody who is okay would allow this to happen. On the third or fifth day, you start asking if this is too much. The moment you do means that it is. True enough, it has. The power of these 7-11 Busog Meals seems inescapable, but so was the divine right of kings once, to borrow a metaphor from the Ursula K. Le Guin lexicon. In place of the struggle against the imperial guard and the great divine, however, is a pesky self-inflicted sadness. How brittle the struggle of this time is. Our ancestors used to fight feral beasts in the wilderness and here we are with our petty grievances and our fool's parades. And here I am with my trash. Boo. Hoo. We have become spectators to our own demise and whether we want to admit it or not, we think we're interesting because of it. Christ, how we romanticize defeat.

It can be annoying that way. To be so self-aware that life's meaning is obscured. Be depressed long enough and it begins to make you feel like a disturbed baby on a flight who doesn't know what he wants. Minus, of course, the crying. When the wailing stops, the blah begins to unravel. Nothing feels of value anymore, not even taking care of yourself. Not even the decency of having a clean kitchen without any Busog Meals in sight. You see the depression coming from a mile away. You know it when you see it. But the more you look at it, the bigger it becomes. Absolutely blinding, how the dumb double paradoxes of depression operate in their obstruction of purpose.

Dr. Gregg Henriques, a professor of psychology at James Madison University, says that the twin paradoxes of depression are two of the sickness' great burdens. The first is the "paradox of shutdown." This happens when your emotional instincts are giving you the signal. You are depressed, child. The signs are meant to warn you. They tell you to withdraw while you can. Retreat, they say. But then you get backed up into a corner. Then you feel alone. Then the Busog Meal boxes pile up. Then the niggling shitty feeling comes about. How dare you be depressed at all?

ALSO READ:

In Korean Celebrity Suicides, the Spotlight Shines on the Country's Institutionalized Tragedy

This Is What Google Shows You Now When You Type 'Suicide'

The more you avoid this behemoth, the more you feed it. What happens then is a cyclical bargaining that leads to some semblance of breakthroughs. Okay, maybe I should try something other than stock sisig or microwave omelettes. Maybe I should start cooking for myself. I ought to get some groceries this Saturday. There are easy solutions on the horizon. It's about mindset, as TikTok sigmas say. Any of these would surely do something for me.

Misery loves company. That brings us to the second paradox of depression. Henriques calls it the "paradox of effort," where the only way to get out of a shutdown is to do something. But that's the thing: To get out of a depressive episode, you need to be able to do things. But the thing is, you're just too depressed to come out of it. This all sounds like such whiny bullcrap. It's because it is, which just makes it all the more irritating.

In may case, the clutter these boxes occupy is just debilitating. Maybe I should play a game of how many boxes I could collect. At least have fun with it somehow. See, you need to exert effort when the energy just isn't there. There's an absence of feeling. You just can't find that shot in the arm, so to speak. The littlest thing seems like a chore of the gods. We fall into a sort of calculated incompetence, like how we don't take out the trash when we really can. 

That acropolis of healthy habits and positive attitudes that's taken you years to build could fall down like a house of cards, just like that. The sadness creeps in somehow and it stacks up pretty quickly if you don't prepare for it as thoughtfully. Every depressed person knows this. Or at the very least, should know this. Nobody wants to be the loud depressive type who wreaks havoc on defenseless people's timelines too early in the morning.

Hey, at least it's just a bad week. It's not a bad life. I still have my curiosity, the attitude of wonder someone recovering from depression should possess. We are never going to understand everything. But perhaps the beauty in understanding is in the attempt. I may be delirious with paradoxes, but I am a sane, logical man if I have to be. The fact that I wrote this means I am engaging with the adjacent ideas related to this condition. The fact that I know means that I can and will know more eventually. Sometimes, it just takes a pile of cardboard boxes to snap out of it. Most of the time, we are simply delirious with paradoxes. Everyone always tends to look for a resolution to these things. But the logical man knows that there isn't. Much like life, depression isn't interested in a resolution. We are not entitled to resolutions.

Except for this time. There are the garbage bags. That's a good place to start. How very sane. It's high time to tear this fort down anyway.