Picture it: Sunday in sunny California, a young man lies near-catatonic on a couch that is 70% cat fur by conservative estimates. The young man is watching a YouTube video by Ro Ramdin. The young man is me.
The video was a top 10 (ish?) list about learning how navigate depressive episodes. When depressed people refer to spiraling, they generally mean their tendency to follow circular, negative thoughts further and further down into the darkness. It is an obsessive and lonely tendency that tends to alienate them from both friends and family, on top of causing them lots of distress.
Cause me lots of distress.
Ro’s video is a guide to resisting the spiral. She offers up some great advice, some funny skits, and just really spectacular eyeliner. I liked the video, but it got me to thinking. None of this was a revelation. I know what to do when I’m spiraling. I’ve been told over and over again my by neurodivergent and neurotypical friends and my paid mental health professionals.
And yet, when I’m soaking into the cold, dark, waters the last thing I want to do is follow their advice.
Grant me a metaphor. Your mind is a vehicle. It takes you where you need to go both physically and conceptually. It’s vital to your day-to-day activities. Having a good Car Brain is a good quality to have, although there are certain negative cultural stereotypes about people who have really good cars/brains.
Imagine you’re experiencing car trouble. The oil needs changing, the wheels need rotating, the transmission stutters and sputters, when you make U-turns you hear an uncomfortable creaking noise, and the other day your car refused to start. It turned on—you are still alive—but it didn’t go anywhere. No exhaust. Just dials and lights.
Put a pin in that.
I have lots of friends and many of them are very active. One of the most common pieces of advice I’ve received is this: when I’m sad, I should go outside. This is great advice. Humans need the sun to bolster our serotonin levels. We are as plants, watered by our food but needing a little light each day to keep ourselves from going mad.
“You should go for a walk and get some fresh air,” he suggests. I spent Summer 2021 walking nonstop. I lost some weight, I sweat a lot, and I felt really good about myself. It’s good advice.
“You should take your car to the mechanic,” he suggests. Mechanics fix vehicles. They can change oil, they can rotate tires, and they can probably diagnose why the engine refuses to turn.
But…how will I get there? The car won’t move. How can I—
And there’s the problem. You only have one brain. Your motivation, your reason, the light inside you that guides your self preservation instinct…it’s all on E. How can you do what’s best for you when you are the problem? The brain needs light, but it has already decided that my legs are too heavy, and that the dark is too comfortable.
It isn’t impossible to take your car to the mechanic. The world has tow trucks and I have the physical ability to move my body. But the logistics are different.
Call a friend.
But I’m embarrassed. Embarrassed to need help again. I have nothing new to add. The old problems compound on themselves. Still insecure. Still envious. Still bored. I don’t want to. This sucks.
Call the mechanic.
But I don’t know what mechanic to go to. I don’t know the number. I don’t even know how I’m going to get my car to the mechanic. And besides, they told me last time to change my oil and I didn’t do it. I’m embarrassed. I’m—
Staying busy, exercising, making art, going outside, seeing the sun, calling your best friend, getting out of your comfort zone. Loving yourself. Learning to love yourself.
The car I’m driving is broken. The whole point is that I can’t make it do what I want, even though by all accounts it should be capable of doing what I want—it could do it yesterday. It may even do it again in a couple weeks. But today it will not turn on.
In high school psychology class, we learned about an external locus of control, where a subject believes that their agency is not theirs, but belongs instead to some outside force. The world prevents them from this, their parents prevent them from that. “I can’t do anything right because I was just built wrong.”
I acknowledge that I sometimes think of my own brain and body as outside of my control. I often feel like I’m just along for a ride, a puppet on strings. Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True taught me about a modular model of the brain, where the brain was not one thing but several core component systems that interweave and work together to produce thought and action.
In this model, the brain doesn’t so much produce thoughts as have thoughts produced for it by its separate, fragmentary but interlocked pieces. These thoughts then parade past our consciousness, or rather what we might call out consciousness that arises from these fragments, and then we can either latch on to the idea, or let it pass us by. Wright’s conclusion—and Buddhist philosophy—would say that we should not let our thoughts lead us, but rather let go of them. Detachment.
I read this book more than a year ago now. And yet I cannot apply the lessons, because even though you can intellectualize what you should do, practicing these strategies relies on having a brain that can be controlled and disciplined. That discipline is not made overnight.
My love, it’s all good advice. I encourage you to do these things. But the truth is it won’t be easy, because the thing that needs help—your brain, be it one consciousness or many modules—is the very vehicle by which you make your own destiny. And it tells you it won’t start.