Sometimes I experience a kind of mental disengagement. This correlates with my bipolar depression. My depression takes different forms, sometimes a proneness to irritability, sometimes a slowed-down mind, sometimes an increased openness to despair or giving up, sometimes fatigue.
All of these either now or in the past have taken on blatant, extreme forms. For instance, in an extreme mental disengagement spell, I can't focus the best, can't work on things. My eyes might go somewhat blank, and I might find it difficult to pursue lines of thought or to recall words.
If my disengaging depression is mild enough, I don't sense it as being something that should not be. A strong depression is obviously a problem, something to fight and not something to trust or build your life around. Instead, you want to separate yourself from it and what it tells you, and get back to normal. Fortunately, having bipolar disorder means my depression spells go away more or less on their own. I think it would be harder for someone with clinical depression that had no mood cycling. But for me, I can write off strong depression as "not me" and then wait it out so I can be in the mood that reflects my real values, something euthymic, or less depressed, or whatever.
But a mild depression can trick me sometimes, and make me feel like I'm experiencing normal -- a new normal. As I grow, I experience different flavors of depression, some of them for the first time. I am uncorking the mellow wines of older age, perhaps? Maybe I like these mild depressions? There's something seductive about a sufficiently mild depression.
(In a disengaged depression, I may feel like nothing matters, because I can't engage with reality. But it isn't really true that nothing matters, it's just my mood. Or I may feel like I'm not interested in working to engage with reality. I can choose whether to identify with the disengagement or lack of desire to work, or to reject them. But in the moment, it's telling me that I'm a certain way, and external reality is a certain way, and what it tells me covers my mind.)
Feeling bad doesn't bother me -- at least, it doesn't seem like a real threat to my ability to do what matters. But being slowed-down -- mellowed out -- with a relatively positive hedonic "flavor" is pretty dangerous, exactly because it doesn't feel dangerous. The danger is that I get caught in a habit of being disengaged. My mind can't do heavy lifting, or see things sharply and clearly in these mild depressions. So, I am less able to do what I need to do or even to witness the truth. I can go with the flow of my culture, but I have lost my purpose. I am indexed to the flow around me, and I no longer am indexed to God. I am no longer myself, I cease to exist on some level, and that's actually not a good thing.
My different moods are like being plunged underwater (or hypomania is like some kind of opposite equivalent, like being stuck in the sea of air, flying 10,000 feet above the ground). So I don't expect to be able to do too much to control them, since they are what they are and have their power. But I still fight them, and maybe if I didn't, I would stay in them longer. And maybe milder moods are more within my power to fight effectively. At the very least, even if moods like this are persistent until they "decide" to leave, I can learn to identify when I am drifting, when I am disengaged or unable to engage, and see this psychological state as being other than me, instead of attaching to it, as I sometimes automatically do. Hopefully then I can get out of that state as soon as possible.
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How does rest play into this? Disengagement and rest may necessarily correlate.
Most people go on vacation without worrying about whether they will choose to go back to work at the end of it. But imagine if when you went on vacation (maybe to a beach resort in another country), you were concerned that you might not be able to tear yourself away from it to get on the plane to go home. If you stayed there, you would lose your job. Maybe in that case, vacation would sound like a bad idea.
Maybe with my life, some rest is relatively safe, and some of it is dangerous. If rest is something that will reliably lead back to work, then that's relatively safe. But rest that takes on a life of its own, and cuts me off from doing what I need to do, is dangerous.
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