Content warnings for discussions of mental health and therapy, including suicidal ideation as a side-effect of obsessive-compulsive disorder and non-specific misery.

Today, the day I’m writing this (a week ago at least for anyone reading this), I spoke with my therapist about the things I learned about my past only as an adult. None of this stuff is the “I never realized this was happening!” type stuff that people usually mean when they talk about this kind of post-experience discovery. I was pretty well aware of everything going on in and around my life since that was one of the most important tools in my survival kit. What I lacked for most of that stuff was appropriate context. I was so young and inexperienced with the world that I wasn’t able to appreciate things the way I can now, both positively and negatively. This is a problem that has plagued me my entire life, if I’m being honest, that I’ve often described as losing my sense of scale. After all, I grew up in a miserable situation. I learned to survive and even live in one. It should not be surprising that I’m fairly comfortable with the idea of being miserable in a way that many of my peers and even my siblings, who experienced much of the trauma and misfortune that I did, just aren’t (partly, at least, because of how much I managed to shield them from). Being made miserable by something is not a deterrent to me. I don’t go looking to be miserable, of course, at least not intentionally, but I’m not one to avoid doing something simply because it will make me miserable. I grew up a miserable child, was a miserable teen, and even an often-miserable young adult. It’s an emotion that it is unfortunately more familiar to me than joy or happiness (which I don’t mean as edgy or emo as it probably sounds).

As my therapist and I talked back and forth about this idea, it struck me that this is probably the answer for why I don’t struggle to resist the suicidal ideation that is a common part of my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, even during the worst of my depression spirals. I don’t expect to not be miserable, so when things are going poorly and I’m feeling my worst, it is not compounded by the expectation that I should feel any other way or that things should be different. This is not some fact of my life, a strange quirk bourn from a life of suffering or anything like that. I spent most of my childhood, teens, and college years trying to push back against what felt like the injustice and rank unfairness of the world, often to the degree that I’d make myself more miserable than I already was because it all felt so unfair to me. Instead, this was a choice I made during my twenties. I managed to get through my life before then because I had just been so constantly miserable that any moments of not being miserable shone so brightly that I couldn’t help but appreciate them. In my twenties, thanks to a relatively joyous senior year of college and mostly good two years out of college, I actually started to expect to feel neutral to positive most of the time as it seemed like most of the problems of my life were disappearing.

Then everything started to fall apart as I felt the echoes of my childhood return in the rise of the first Trump administration, I started to realize I didn’t much care for any of my family members, and I realized that I was mostly just a useful tool in a lot of people’s lives, meant to be discarded whenever they didn’t need me. It was a rough year and, as part of changing things following that one awful summer, I got a new job, resolved to ditch my shitty roommate, and changed my life philosophy, at least as far as my own personal feelings were concerned. I would expect nothing. I would work to accept whatever happened. I would roll with it, whatever it was, and take the time to feel my feelings without believing that they might last forever (or even longer than the moment I was in). This took a few years to put into full practice and only really become “perfected” during that first year of Covid when I was forced to abandon ALL of my expectations about my life, my future, the people in my life, and even the world I lived in. Anything could happen and fighting the currents of existence and the passage of time would only serve to make my life worse.

If this sounds similar to a subset of non-European religions or philosophies, I’ll admit that I was heavily influenced by the bits and pieces I learned in some of my philosophy and religion classes in college. Some of the stuff my professors said in those classes stuck around enough that I was able to build a framework that worked for me. It’s not really tied to any major religious or philosophical systems since I don’t really adhere to any creed’s lines of thought in that kind of totality, but it works for me. There’s space to feel joy but no expectation that I will feel any particular way on any given day. I have no need to struggle my way out of misery and no need to desperately grasp at joy or contentment when they arrive. I just roll with what is going on and keep myself oriented on my beliefs about what is the right thing for me to do in any given moment. Which means I sometimes spend thirteen months feeling absolutely miserable as I continue to take a medication most people stop after six months in pursuit of what is (hopefully) best for me. It is easy to stay miserable, after all, much to my detriment. I probably should have stopped the medication earlier and might have if I didn’t expect to not feel miserable every day.

These days, as everything is happening or that has happened (I do write these a week ahead of time, so there’s no telling what might have happened by January 27th, 2025 from where I stand on the 20th), it is cold comfort to know that I’m at least mentally prepared for whatever is going to happen. I am as girded, emotionally and spiritually, against the future as I can be. Hopefully that will help me and those I care about get through however long this period of the US lasts. I genuinely hope it won’t be long. Four years and done. But I also genuinely hoped it wouldn’t come to this even as I spent the past two and a half years preparing for it, so I’m not going to be holding my breath. I just hope it’ll be enough.