Day 6597 | Day 6750 | Day 6757
The Custodian wrote about this in a much more eloquent way than I could hope to but I'll add my own ruminations.
Rushing for a fraternity is a very extensive process for most of the men who choose to join one. Hours are spent at the frathouse getting to know the guys, setting up for the parties, attending the parties, and cleaning up after the parties. Half of my rather limited circle of friends were given bids when they came out in January. Now, if I were to draw a Venn Diagram with my male friends in one circle and those who got bids to rush in another circle there would be complete overlap. It's also worth mentioning that a third circle containing my other friends always seem to end up hanging out at the frats anyway. Understandably, this has created a sudden excess of time alone in my life and I've decided to use it for some quiet introspection.
In my entire life I have never been to a party with people my age. Sure, there was the odd birthday party in elementary school, a Bar Mitzvah or two in junior high, but I always found myself most comfortable at the holiday parties of family friends, talking with my parent's friends two and three times my age. I went to prom not because I wanted to but because I feared regretting not going later in life. After high school, I chose to go to a college in a small, midwest town where the only entertainment is that which the students create for themselves. I was quickly introduced to the true days of the week on a college campus: Messed Up Mondays, Two-shot Tuesdays, Wasted Wednesdays, Thirsty Thursdays, Fucked Up Fridays, Schloshed Saturdays, and The Sabbath. With the party culture alive and well, I quickly defined myself by not going to the frats multiple times a week and by having a clear recollection of my weekends.
Because of my friends and because of my choices so far, I am constantly pressured to go to the fraternities. This is also, in part, because people enjoy my company (for reasons I truly do not understand ). And so I broke down and went this week—it was not an enjoyable experience. That's not to say that it was unenjoyable, only that I would have had more fun spending the time alone in my room reading E2 or watching TV. All the people I told this to were shocked by it and are still convinced that I 'just need to be brought out of my shell'.
Fuck. That. Shit.
I mention all this as a roundabout way of saying that I've spent a lot of time brooding over what makes me so different from so many people i.e. my introversion. The statistics would have us believe that two thirds to three quarters of people lie on the extrovert side of the personality spectrum though at times it feels like far more. I am sure that I am not alone in saying that us introverts get mighty tired of being told we have no social life and that we're living our lives wrong ("why don't you ever go out and have fun?"). So I got thinking; the extroverts and introverts are equally sure that their take on the matter is correct and yet both cannot be true. And as I contemplated, I started forming this (most likely unoriginal) idea:
In my experience and what I've read about other's experiences, depression and loneliness always seem to include a cognitive dissonance at a basic level. Each of us has two senses of self: our own personal sense of self worth (I'll call it SW) and the sense of our perceived worth (PW); the way we think others see us.
For most people, one dominates the other. You have the independent, often eccentric members of society who don't give a damn about others—these people are dominated by their personal sense of self worth. On the other side you have the gregarious and often outgoing people who, while prone to obsessing over things such as popularity, typically manage to surround themselves with sycophants. You would probably identify this latter group as the "popular" kids in high school and, while some people grow out of this mindset, others don't.
At least for me, depression begins when neither SW nor PW are dominant but rather when they are nearly equal. This leads to a very dangerous form of cognitive dissonance. For some it starts as a deep seated frustration with society where the SW is fairly high but the PW is fairly low. People in this situation tend to see themselves as good, perhaps even exceptional, people. However, there may also be a general sense of being rejected by society. The dissonance is in feeling oneself superior or worthy of society while at the same time holding the belief that one is generally inferior to society. This frustration is metastable and depending on dozens of factors can be tipped to the more stable arrangement of dominant SW or even dominant PW.
Depression itself is most similar to complete apathy. When SW and PW are both equal and they're both zero. When you're told that people care about you and you're only thought is that they're lying. It's when, late at night, the idea of suicide isn't so much a question of why as why not.
I ate lunch with a friend of mine yesterday. I trust her. It's funny how one idle comment can turn into an overblown discussion: she suggested that maybe I should try to change. In high school she was bullied a lot because of her race, her glasses, and her bookishness. So one day she decided to change: she cut her hair short, she changed her clothes, and she got into theatre. She says she wouldn't change again for the world.
It was one of the saddest stories I'd ever heard.