I am me

There was a thought that crawled about in the mental closet during my minor essay on depression the other day. At one point, I likened depression to something that, when you come out of it, makes you wonder what was wrong in the first place. I would like to explore that thought and take it a little further: you have no idea how much you are dependent on your mind as a well functioning machine until something breaks the consistency of the brain, and changes perceptions and personality.

Sanity is precious, but I think we rarely look at sanity deeply because our internal egos want to dismiss it as something simple with the statement “I’m right,” which is the exception that proves the rule “you’re wrong.” It’s a shit rule, obviously. Most people have accepted the concept of relativity, that there is a continuum of acceptable perceptions. The problem is that we know how to behave… in theory. But when truly tested, we find ourselves failing a lot more than we would like to admit. Furthermore, there is the terrible notion that when confronted with the truth, we tend to sink ourselves further into our own biases that oppose truth. And the problem of sanity is compounded further because we don’t acknowledge it until someone has outright fucking lost reason and rationality and can’t come back, or we dismiss the experiences unlike our own.

It seems that in between the extremes of sanity and insanity is a vast expanse made of varying degrees of micro-psychoses that we engage in and then come back from, like entering into a dream before waking up. Some of these experiences indelibly mark behavior; and some are called spiritual experiences, which affect behavior in the most extreme ways. But, if we can be so easily affected by external stimuli, then what is the basis of who we are? If a depressed person takes a psychiatric drug, they are subject to a redefinition of character because the functioning of their mental machine is changed. And what about the other external stimuluses that are aspects of societal structures? How much are we truly changed by our circumstance and privileges or lack thereof?

Who we are is an emptiness that perceives reality through the filters of body and mind in a feedback loop system. Who we are is who we are in the moment.