There's no one answer, and there's no short answer. So maybe it's not an answer at all. But by the end of knowing everything I want to tell you, maybe the question would be pointless. Because...
Why do we do anything?
Here's one way to look at why I took this bicycle trip. It's not for light consumption. And a bit rambly.
To Make a Daily Routine
One of the patterns in my depression is getting to a point where I can't tolerate my daily life anymore and I crash, I do nothing for as long as it takes to remove the unrewarding activities, school and work, from my routine.
My parents were convinced by their friends that my brain chemistry had imbalance due to a physical disability. Basically, that I was broken and had to be fixed by drugs to function. This is now the popular modern view in psychiatry, a field historically plagued by fraud and misguided belief.
I do not doubt that this is the case with some individuals, but I seriously doubt the high number they are pushing to take antidepressants have legitimate reason to. Not surprisingly, medication is encouraged by companies and psychiatrists profiting off their sales. By advertising, and through a logical fallacy of appealing to the authority of medical experts, they have convinced the American public to view their feelings of sadness, unhappiness not as a problem with their working conditions, or their society... but with themselves.
"Over the past two decades, the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed. One in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication
Experts have offered numerous reasons. Depression is common, and economic struggles have added to our stress and anxiety. Television ads promote antidepressants, and insurance plans usually cover them, even while limiting talk therapy. But a recent study suggests another explanation: that the condition is being overdiagnosed on a remarkable scale.
The vast majority of individuals diagnosed with depression, rightly or wrongly, were given medication, said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Ramin Mojtabai, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
One 50-year-old New York City woman said her doctor prescribed an antidepressant a few weeks after her husband died, even though she thought her feelings of shock and sadness were appropriate.“He told me, ‘You have to function, you have to keep your job, you have a daughter to raise,’ ”
- http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/a-glut-of-antidepressants/
In college, I pinned the reason for my crashes down to my daily needs weren't getting met. Normal things like sitting in class or standing at work were sucking the life from me, and I didn't feel any positive return from them to keep me going. I couldn't maintain any routine for long before I would crash.
I always held firm that if I could devise a fulfilling lifestyle, my depression symptoms would not show up and I would be healthy, natural, 'normal' - to me. I maintained that I was not wrong in feeling the way I did, but that my environment and my circumstances were the source of an unhealthy psychological state and I was depressed because I felt powerless to change them.
I'd stay up late into the night trying to 'make up' for the hours in the day that felt like they were taken from me. I felt like I was 'taking back' life taken from me by staying up at night. I routinely stayed up until three, four in the morning as college students are not unknown to do. But even that was not enough. I felt like I had to erase the day first with something that negated the ways the world was wrong, and then get to many goals I never had energy left to pursue.
I video gamed endlessly at Starcraft: Brood War, seeking to beat every n00b that loudmouthed and thought they were better than they actually were. Because I wanted to prove to them they were full of shit, and the game let me in a way real life didn't. Real life is not a fair competition where skill comes out on top. Society allows gluttonous, vile incompetents to win with entitled power and privilege.
I torrented every movie I could find for some message that could prove that the world made sense. For some art or ideal to believe in. I watched The Simpsons on JustinTV with other nerds and recited favorite lines off each other for hours. I brought a copy of Dante's Inferno to class one day, and my classmate told me "You're a physics major. You're not allowed to be reading any books that thick." on account that we had so much assigned work and no free time.
I took four classes each semester but didn't learn anything from them, because I refused to regurgitate information that I couldn't substantiate myself. I took out books from the library to understand the mathematics to do a proof that the class just skipped over, that they took on faith. I couldn't cram an entire semester worth of math self-study in one week before the next hand-waving magic trick show. I tried hard even though it was hopeless, because I believed it was the right thing to do. I was so frustrated. What's the point of choosing a rigorous science to study, if even they won't train us right!
There were physical limits to inadequate sleep. I couldn't wake up to go where I needed to go. I was afraid I'd fall asleep at the wheel. I felt guilty about missing work. Not the job itself, but being unaccountable. I resented that I had to feel guilty over something I opposed. I felt like I was trying to fit two lives into one reality, one that was fulfilling and natural and positive and another that was desolate, and without morals, and was what I was supposed to do.
The problem was, to fit everything I wanted to do in a day there weren't enough hours to make a schedule to fit my needs. I couldn't split my interests into little hobbies and spend an hour at a time to appease my depression. It wasn't enough. It wasn't real. I needed my life to be my source of satisfaction, not little sprinkles of artificial color and flavor atop a mountain of odorous shit.
Both my mind and my body love to be very active. I can't stand to be bored or idle. No, I'm not hyper or attention deficit. When I find something I enjoy, I am focused, deeply involved, and methodical; what I need is to be engaged and putting myself to work.
Listening to a professor lecture for an hour - another person putting their thoughts into my brain, having to swallow that while sitting still - is my version of psychological torture. I have to block out most of what the prof is saying, not to get angry, angst, outrage at the glaring omissions of information - and still maintain a level of awareness to figure out what topics were covered so I can learn it to my ethical standards later on my own. The slow pace of it too is so agonizing. Intentionally holding information back, I hate that. Just fucking tell me what we're expected to learn from the lecture off the bat and not make it a huge fucking waste of time, waiting guessing game.
An argument goes: well the class is set up for the average student, so there are fifty people in every class we can't make the education system suit everybody so most people can learn from this way. Well, sure it sounds good but talking to students it's not that the education system is suiting the norm - it's the other way around. In my experience - the way school is taught stays fixed whether it's good for the student or not, and it's the students that are popping pills and drinking themselves blank to get through the mind raping lobotomy of institutionalized learning.
There's a problem when everybody in a small class of twenty students go through the same stress, frustrations, and disillusionment toward a subject they love. Yeah physics was hard, but our difficulty was not we couldn't understand what was taught to us - it's the gaps in explanation and expecting us to assume something nobody ever talked about. Same thing with the Engineering subjects, Math, and natural sciences. Maybe the humanities or communication majors just had to show up and fill some pages with words. But that was not my experience.
By my third year of college, my brain was in critical health, intellectual starvation. To stay afloat and in an effort to reduce my excessive computer use, I went to the basketball courts and ran the full court for hours every day in pick-up games. The dynamic of the game kept my brain engaged. I watched teammates cut, set screens, the ever-changing personnel and match-ups with each new pick-up group gave me raw sensory input to digest and understand.
I got better, never to the point to be considered good, but some of the groups liked the way I played and wanted me to run with them. I always looked for ways to improve and I played with anyone. Some cliques only played with the players they considered good. They thought so highly of themselves, and would argue over calls endlessly. They were taller and stronger, and had better basketball skills. But they were such trash. All they played for was ego. It was so easy to see how to beat them.
They never hustled, they were selfish, and each one had one or two moves that only worked against a smaller defender. They were afraid of losing, so all they ever did was play weaker competition. But they were too proud to let people they thought were not real ballers to play against them. A few times there weren't anyone else to play, so our ragtag group of Little Rascals played and beat them, while they argued over out of bounds calls and blamed each other for not trying.
The courts had its cliques and drama queen bullshit from some players, but for a large part it was a home where actions had natural cause and effect, effort and skill was rewarded and where I could use my brain, spend my physical energy, feel good at the end of the day feeling like I made use of my capabilities. I interacted with many people in a way that was satisfying to me, not like social interactions that were just opening of the mouth to make noise the way young people do with nothing to say, for the sake of calling attention to themselves in the way hatchling birds cheep to be fed.
But there was a physical limit to that. I was in great shape, but the sore knees, the loose ankles, the tightness in my calves couldn't be conditioned away. And on those days I stayed in my room, I thought about being on the court so much that sometimes I'd come just to watch. And someone would tell me to play and I wanted to so much that I would say yes, even though I shouldn't and couldn't do much on the court. And the next day, I'd have to stay in bed even more and I'd think of the courts even more and the people I'd see there and I'd force myself not to go, so my recovery would finish sooner.
Playing ball was a passion that sustained me for the latter half of my college life. I felt like I could have some semblance of a normal life through it, but at the same time - the way I got satisfaction from it was so demanding. Some days, I ran the courts five hours without dinner. And after six consecutive days of it, I couldn't get up and down court without risking injury.
When I was too tired to play, the happiness I got from basketball life went away. I was alone off the court and I felt overwhelming isolation and sorrow. My basketball friends were involved in other social activities, but I was not. I thought, it's not fair that normal people can just have friends and a community around them just by doing normal things. I do not want the same things other people do and to me living that way is pain and misery.
I felt that society did not mean to bring me happiness in life. The one way I've found to work, basketball, was too small a part of life to sustain myself with - I had inflated it to be something bigger to fulfill my needs not being met by the rest of life - but it was meant to be an hour or two of activity a few times a week, not a five hours every day the way I was using it. I couldn't keep it up. I needed a daily routine that could fulfill me the way basketball did, but that was not doomed to fail. I needed an activity that would give me more and that I could reasonably suited to occupy the bulk of my day.
And that is one perspective to understand the reason that I went on a bicycle trip. I needed a fulfilling activity to do, the way basketball served me before. Bicycling exposes me to new sensory input, people etc. in a similar way that playing ball did, albeit not as interactively. The main advantage it has over basketball is I can keep it up for five hours a day. It's relatively easy, spends physical energy without being demanding, does not require a steady showing of players.
Each new city I travel through is like a puzzle that I can apply my brain to problem-solving, to figure out where to get food, a loitering spot to blog/study/work/play, a place to sleep, places to shower, do laundry. It is brain food. This is similar to understanding a new opponent, where he likes to put the ball, how their offense runs, what are the weaknesses that can be exploited. I trap the ball and get a steal, or I ride to Holiday Inn and eat breakfast. The challenge is rewarding because solving it leads to real outcomes.
For the five months of my bicycle trip, I have lived free of depression symptoms without medication or therapy. I am proving that my condition is not a physical disability. My brain is working as intended. This trip has demonstrated that I am capable of a routine, if it challenges and makes use of my physical and mental capability. I must transmute this significance of the bicycle trip into my way of life. That is one of my needs to go on daily living.
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