I’m tempted to skip my post this week about honor and the antidepressant life.
Honor is an extraordinarily complex subject. It is adjacent to morality and ethics—topics that are themselves worthy of careful study. Discussing honor requires us to consider conflicts between personal values, cultural values, and near-universal human values. It raises challenging emotions like guilt, shame, and indifference. And in mental health, we can’t approach honor without considering perfectionism, scrupulosity, and the impact of high-demand social groups [1].
I also don’t want to give the impression that people who experience depression are dishonorable or immoral. On the contrary, people with depression are prone to excessive, inappropriate guilt. Good treatment helps people identify the ways in which depression distorts their vision.
On a more personal level, talking about honor is challenging because I struggle to align my actions with my values. That’s always been a hard pill to swallow [2].
With all that said, I still believe it is depressing to live a life which is misaligned with our values.
Building an antidepressant life requires us to compassionately confront our personal failings. We come by our imperfections honestly, and our only choice is how we will proceed.
Kindness is the best catalyst for progress. We like to pretend that we’re responsible adults, but we’re all children. Helping a child grow up well is important work, but it’s not something that will be finished in a few years. And when that child is you (and you have decades of experience with your own imperfections), a little extra patience goes a long way.
Honor is not found in a mistake-free life; it is cultivated through the choices we make after each misstep. The only step we can choose is the next one. We can make it small, and we can be kind to ourselves as we approach it.
Footnotes
[1] This last point is especially important. Not much can surprise me anymore, but I am often saddened by the shame people feel when they engage in normal human behavior. I’ll have to say more about this another day. For now, it is sufficient to say that some of the values we internalize may not be helpful.
[2] I know that everyone is subject to human failings; I still don’t like to accept that this is also true for me. I’m in a much better place than I was 20 years ago, but my default response to my mistakes is still too cruel.