That Spiral of Depression

I'm not a particularly emo fella.

Overly emotional boys who break that seemingly inconsequential nail, then start spiralling into a whirlpool of despondency where dozens of other unresolved issues start getting sucked into the woefully potent mix? Honestly I find these boo-hoo boys baffling - though I'll admit there's always this near irresistible urge to give them all a hard shake.

Tough love, that's me. Which is what I do when I find Charming Calvin ( who is shockingly prone to such fits of despair ) occasionally dipping a toe into such a morass of dejection. Rusty nail leads to a broken door which leads to a fragmented flat which leads to a damaged apartment building which leads to a towering crash which leads to ... You see where I'm going with this. Probably ends with the calamitous destruction of civil society as we know it.

I'm not saying I'm entirely immune to such alarmist thoughts. We all have what seems to be insurmountable quandaries sometimes. But whenever I find myself tottering near the edge, I usually give myself two backhanded slaps to get myself out of that blue funk. Mentally speaking. The ones that can be solved I lay them out on the table. The ones that seem nigh impossible I shelve for later.


Feeling low?
Curling up into a ball in a dark corner sobbing quietly to the strains of weepy emo refrains isn't a reasonable solution.

Perhaps it's the nature of my job. Looking at a sole patient as a whole would leave us all adrift wildly scrabbling for answers - so we start compartmentalizing. What took years, and occasionally decades, to form isn't going to disappear miraculously overnight. There is simply no way we can possibly solve all the medical problems when they are presented. Not to mention the new ones that crop up as ensuing complications of the above!

Compounding the problems certainly doesn't help.

So we split them up into manageable problems. You have an elderly nonagenarian with multiple organ failure - basically falling apart - so we split him up into kidney failure, heart failure etc. Then tackle them accordingly with reasonable targets to be met in a certain length of time. Some problems take longer to solve after all. Some you probably never will.


Turn impenetrable mountains to simple molehills. Easier to handle, that's all. Do what you can. And for the few you can't do anything about, find help. Out there, there's someone who has survived a similar calamity. Talk.

There's no need for a breakdown.