The Joyous Duality of Thought, and the Realization of an Absent Loneliness

As an angst-ridden high school senior, I despaired. Woe is me, I thought, to never have an original creation. After all, isn't it likely that whatever I thought, had been thought before? And of course, there was a vicious cycle of self-perpetuation in this. Seeing all of the other pissed-off and all-knowing teenagers around me did little more than reinforce what I had already realized: I wasn't special.

Ah, how the cynic's mind is clouded.

There is a certain joyous duality to thought, I realize that now. Although my thoughts may not be original, they are self-discovered, unmotivated, for the most part, by any singular outside source. And I may take solace in the fact that there are others like me. There is a thin line (if there's a line at all) between being unique, and being lonely. The virtue of uniqueness that so many aspire to can quickly turn despotic, toxic in its tendency to render one completely and relentlessly isolated. After a while, with no one "worthy" of comparison, you may end up lost, or worse, unidentifiable. That's where depression rears its ugly head.

Depression itself is a fascinating beast. It's not so much sadness, like many people think, as much as it a high-pressure numbness. There's this disconnect from the world. That leads some people to say that depression lends itself to a complete apathy, an unconscious lobotomy of sorts. I suppose that is the case part of the time, especially for those pissed-off and all-knowing teenagers. But sometimes, it's an ambivalence, where the fear of rebuilding surpasses the relative knowledge of isolation. It's not a reflection of weakness, to be afraid of rebuilding. After all, a single person is the sum of so much complexity that to try and take it all in is akin to trying to process the whole of the Hubble's Deep Space Field.

Rebuilding, then, becomes the name of the game, and I hate to denigrate such a monumental process to summation by a single word, but it provides a springboard from which to begin. For me, that rebuilding began with climbing. For others, it could be a myriad of things. A change in thinking schemata, a new hobby, a new friend. Anything that you can assign meaning to in turn assigns some meaning to you. And so, the slow process of rebuilding begins with a painful, tearful reintegration to the world around you. Eventually, the realization may dawn. That although your individual thoughts and actions aren't unique, the order and way in which you present them are. You share commonalities with the other 7 billion minds on this planet, but in each and every one of them, a unique story, an epic, is unfolding. This realization is the retraction of loneliness, and in it exists a kind of joyous duality in thought and being.