Different ways to live with dark thoughts

This essay talks about depression. It dives right into it with no preamble. If you’re struggling, this might not be the piece for you in this moment. But know that people are here to help:

• Lifeline (Australia): 13 11 14.
• 988 Lifeline (USA): 988.
• SANEline (UK): 0300 304 7000.

Personally, Lifeline was there for me when I needed them. Make the call.

The thought “Well, I can always kill myself” pops into my head once a day. On average, I mean: it might not come to mind at all, it might spin on repeat all day.

For a while, I wanted to not have the thoughts at all. Nowadays, I try to fight them less.

The things I’ve learned from Zen Buddhism are some of the major ways I approach depression. They aren’t the only answer – medication, a strong support network and mental health pros are huge too – but they’ve helped.

No-self

This is probably the single most helpful one for me: there’s no unchanging “me” to be depressed all the time. I’m a mix of interconnected bits and bobs.

And that includes my thoughts. They’re not me. They’re not “true”. They’re just mental objects I can observe like any other object. They don’t have to direct my actions any more than, I don’t know, a tree or my cats.

I like writer Michael Singer’s framing in his book The Untethered Soul: imagine your internal monologue is a friend. How seriously would you take them?

If a friend interrupted me while I was talking and said “Cory, you can always kill yourself”, I doubt I’d invite them to dinner again. Same goes for the voice in my head. I can hear it, acknowledge it and choose to not spend time with it. Even if it keeps knocking on the door, over and over again, all day.

The same applies for all the bleak thoughts I have during a depressive episode, all the rumination and self loathing. There’s a lot more to depression than thoughts, of course, but they’re an important part. For better or worse, our thoughts help frame our existence: they’re how we sift through meaning, understand experiences, explain our choices.

And, when you’re depressed, it’s easy to start viewing all of those things in the worst possible way.

To help shift gears, I find that consciously thinking or saying “thought, thought, thought” helpful. It re-centres my awareness. (I’ve started doing it a little sing-song voice. I don’t know why.)

Impermanence

There’s some overlap here with no-self, given that it boils down to “everything changes”. But the changing nature of, well, everything is worth highlighting in and of itself.

To be clear: “you’ll feel better soon” is all too often used to dismiss the weight of things like depression. I mean, yeah. Obviously. I’m well acquainted with the rhythms of my woe, thanks: it’ll feel worse in the morning, level out in the arvo and I’ll start to feel something-like-normal again at 9pm, right before bed. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The problem is that, when you’re in it, the depression feels interminable. Reminding myself that everything is impermanent – not just my feelings but me, the whole of me, and everything around me is fleeting, changing and will, inevitably, end – helps ground me in the physical reality of my life.

When my cat, Tim, almost died, I was in a state. One of the things that helped was a meditation on impermanence. It includes the refrain:

Everything is impermanent. Through impermanence, everything is possible.

I go back to that weekly. When I feel so impossibly done that I start digging my fingertips into the points of my keys because it hurts just enough to bring me back to my body, I breathe in (everything is impermanent), I breathe out (through impermanence, everything is possible).

So long as I keep breathing, I’ll keep changing. That’s possible. That gets me through.

Mindful awareness

This brings us to mindful awareness: a purposeful, non-judgemental awareness of your perceptions. Mind, body, feeling, anything and everything.

At its heart, mindful awareness is about grounding yourself in the here and now. Your body, your feelings, your mind and all the mental objects that make up your perceptions. (For a full breakdown of developing mindfulness, head to this Satipatthana Sutta explainer.)

I was standing in the shower a while ago, spiralling. Just beat after beat after beat of self loathing and cruelty. So I looked at thoughts I was having and took a breath. I, with a steady purpose, brought my awareness to the water hitting my back, the steam, the tiles in front of me breath by breath.

My thoughts slowed, steadied. I still felt the heaviness of depression in my body but that was okay.

This approach – this awareness – helps me take a step back and look at my thoughts, my feelings. I get to ask “Okay, what’s your deal?” Because they’re often trying to tell us something, right?

Here’s an example. I was on my balcony a while ago and asked myself a question: “how would I respond if I found out I had cancer?” My response: I’d be relieved because I can stop. That is, obviously, bleak. But it’s also my body and mind telling me that I need a break. And that’s something I can work with.

To a hammer, everything’s a nail. To a depressive, everything’s a reason to nail yourself against the wall. Mindful awareness adds new ways to see things.

Dukkha

Dukkha is often translated as “suffering” but it’s bigger than that. Depending on context, it can refer to everything from unsatisfactoriness and unease to pain and aching.

You can think of it as working at three levels:

1. Obvious pain, like illness or injury, grief, depression.
2. Change, like good things ending.
3. Conditioning – the suffering baked into our very being by virtue of existing as and in dynamic systems.

By craving things that are permanent, or wishing for transient things to be less damn transient, we experience suffering.

Thinking about dukkha in totality is the macro part of all this. It’s, honestly, kind of useless when I’m in the thick of a funk. But, the more I internalise it, the more fundamentally helpful I’ve found it.

It’s the second arrow image that pops up in the Buddha’s teachings. It’s from the Sallatha Sutta: the pain of suffering is the first arrow, thwack, right in the shoulder. The second arrow is our response to it.

Again: not helpful in the deep well of dourness. Never say “have you tried changing your relationship to your depression?” to someone. But it’s a useful practice to prepare yourself for those moments.

Suffering exists. There’s little to be gained in always wondering why.¹ Internalising this view of suffering has helped me no end – especially when deciding what action to take.

I’m much better at understanding I’m feeling depressed, articulating that and then, if asked why I’m feeling down, looking within and finding out. More often than not there’s no reason. There’s no particular thing attached to the feeling. I’m just down. And that’s okay. If there’s a reason – if there’s something attached to it – I can start looking at that.

It also helps me understand when it’s time to take action. When you’re in a depressed state, sometimes you need to make it stop. It’s a medical condition. Left unchecked, it can be disastrous. The Zen Buddhist approach to suffering can, at its worst, romanticise or trivialise pain.

Having a clear eyed view of suffering has helped me decide when it’s time to call Lifeline or when it’s time to just let my woe ride.

The difference between knowing and believing

Here’s a cheeky bit of “theory of knowledge” I need to set up: there’s a difference between knowing something and believing something.

• Knowing: an opinion built on facts.
• Believing: an opinion held despite the absence of facts.

I know the sun will rise tomorrow (pending a dramatic change in facts). I believe my cat Tim is the most handsome man around.

I’m bringing this up here for two reasons. First, it speaks to the limits of language, which is a useful but flawed way to describe the world. Words can never capture the world as it is, feelings and their whys included, even if it’s the best option available.

Second, that distinction between knowing and believing – and my belief in it – is important to understand when I say this: I know I’ll die unhappy. I know I’ll die unfulfilled.

I know it. And I know that, by my own definition, it’s a belief but, damn, it feels like knowing deep in my gut. It’s faith masquerading as fact but my body doesn’t know the difference.

The conviction is real. No matter what changes I make in my life, the same deep-seated unhappiness will creep and crawl up from my feet. I’ll just want to stop. That’s the wish underlying all my worst imaginings, really: I just want things to stop.

And I know that I’m capable of feeling sincere moments of happiness. I know the satisfaction I feel when I bake something delicious for my friends, or play soccer with them, or design a session of Dungeons & Dragons for them. I mean, running games and building worlds for my friends is all I really want to do.

I know – truly, actually know – that I’m loved. I know that I’m cherished. And I know that people who love me will read this and want to remind me that I’m loved but there’s no need: I know.

And yet. And yet and yet and yet.

It all helps

None of this stops the thoughts or feelings, of course.

It’s not designed to: trying to stop them would be trying to control them. Trying to control them would be trying to hold them, to try to enforce some kind of permanence – even if it’s a permanent absence.

And therein lies the craving. All things are impermanent, both the peace we seek and the things that disturb that peace.

Dark thoughts and heavy feelings are objects of mind. They’re important; they have things to say. I can acknowledge them for what they are with compassion and then let them go. And, if I can’t do that, I can recognise that I need help and start taking steps, however small, to getting that help.

Again: that’s not to trivialise anything. I can’t overstate how seriously I take my own depression. And, honestly, it’s kinda frustrating how much the deep inner work of figuring this out resembles the blithe dismissal of all of this.

Like, “they’re just thoughts, get over it” and “they’re thoughts, mental objects that do not accurately resemble reality and taking them too seriously or clinging onto them can cause undue suffering” are both saying “they’re just thoughts”. (Fuck.)

This is just my experience of depression. And this is just the way Zen – along with medication, a great support network, and talented mental health professionals – has helped me. And it’s helped me learn how to look at my feelings, my thoughts and try to understand them.

Even at their darkest. Even then, I can reassure myself, without being reductive or trite, that they’ll pass. They’ll pass. They’ll always pass.

Trust me: I know.