My Brain Wants Me To Be Controlling — That’s Why I’m Depressed

I’m depressed.

I’ve been depressed, off and on, for most of my life. It’s a clinical thing, tied to my ADHD, and usually easily handled. Usually.

Lately, though, it’s been worse. I’m on new medications, and they aren’t working great. I’m in a new job, and it’s stretching my skills. Usually, that would excite me, and deep down, I feel a tingle of that, but everything seems to get filtered through a malaise that I can’t seem to shake before it reaches my brain.

My wife gets the worst side of this. She is my best friend. My confidant. She knows when I’m keeping things from her. She’s worried about me, and rightly so. Wasn’t I the one who explained to her all the various ways I attempted to kill myself as a teenager because I felt exactly like I feel right now?

Sure, I can try to put her mind at ease by telling her I don’t feel that urge to take my own life — but who really believes that? Even if she did, there would still be that fear.

But what she doesn’t understand is how much of how I’m feeling is related to her. Not that she’s done anything wrong.

It’s just that my brain can’t control her.

I’m controlling, but I don’t want to be

I started programming computers when I was five years old, and one of my earliest and clearest thoughts about computers was how nice it was that computers did what I told them to do.

Nothing else in my life — including my brain — would reliably do what I told it to do. I needed something that I could latch onto that would never randomly decide to do something that I didn’t expect.

People are not computers, and as I grew up, I knew I couldn’t treat them that way. But that desire for control is always there. My brain wants things exactly how it wants things, and when they aren’t that way, it wants to fix them.

I’m controlling, but not in my marriage. I make a conscious effort not to control my marriage because it would be far too easy to allow that part of me to take over.

My wife would understand, too. I know she would. I could tell her that, deep down, every time I see her open Snapchat, I don’t imagine she’s just chatting with her friends. I imagine she’s having an affair and hiding it with ephemeral messages.

I could tell her that when she’s on her phone, and I come by, she has a habit of placing the phone face down. I could explain that, in doing so, my brain has decided she’s hiding something — not that she’s making a graceful gesture of removing a distraction from herself, so she can focus more on me.

I won’t tell her that, though, because how can I explain to her all of those things while also explaining that I don’t actually believe them even though it is my brain saying these things?

How can anyone who isn’t like this understand that, for people like me, our brain is not who we are? We are constantly fighting our true selves back from the grips of the demon that has embedded itself within us?

I can’t explain that to her. She’d think I was crazy.

I fear rejection

You’d think, after being with someone for 13 years, you wouldn’t fear their exit from your life. There have been times in our relationship where comfort has taken over, and I forgot to consider the fact that she isn’t bounded to me by divine grace — she chooses to be with me.

Every day, she makes a choice — conscious or otherwise — to see this whole marriage thing through for another day. Same as I do.

For me, though, the knowledge that this is a choice means my brain reminds me of the flip side of that choice every day. What if today is the day she decides not to see this whole marriage thing through?

What if today is the day she realizes she could do so much better than someone who can’t even control his brain enough to do the dishes or fold the laundry? What if she’s finally tired of the endless fixations and random projects cluttering up the dining room, living room, and office?

What if today is the day that she realizes that I’m not good enough for her?

Because let’s face it — I’m not.

She’s beautiful. Kind. Loving. She’s even able to make the conscious choice to stop watching television and do the dishes, or mow the lawn, just because it needs to get done.

Me, on the other hand? I have to spend an entire week playing mental games with myself. I have to trick myself into being disgusted by the length of the grass. I have to convince myself that not cutting the grass means ticks will start showing up every day. I have to convince myself that if I cut just one half of the lawn on Saturday, I can treat myself with video games for the rest of the day.

And even then, I still nearly didn’t do the mowing.

How did I eventually cut my grass this weekend? Because she said let’s go. She was there. She was cleaning the garage. Being with her makes me better, and I don’t think she even knows it.

If you love someone, let them go

There’s a saying about relationships that I didn’t understand until I met my wife, “If you love someone, let them go.”

For years I thought it was a nice way of helping someone through a breakup. To explain to them that if you truly loved the one that left, you would want them to be happy with anyone — even if that someone wasn’t you.

And it may be that. But it’s more than that.

Once I met my wife, and I felt what true love and happiness could be, that saying started to make sense in a different way.

If you love someone deeply and passionately, you have to love all of them. Their good, and their bad. The parts of them that make you comfortable, and the parts of them that make you uncomfortable.

You have to be able to let go of your control of them and allow them just to be. If you can’t do that, do you love them — or do you love the person they’re pretending to be?

I feel better now

I knew I would. Because it isn’t my wife making me upset. As I said, she’s done nothing wrong. My brain wasn’t happy — but I’ll deal with him later.

Why did I write this? Because I accidentally spilled her coffee yesterday, and today she apologized to me.

Because when I don’t call myself out, that part of my brain thinks he’s won.

Because every single day, I wake up trying to be good enough for her, and for the last few days, I don’t think I’ve been successful. So today, I make a public declaration.

I may not be good enough. Nobody is.

I may not always be the most organized.

I may forget where I put things that are sitting directly in front of me.

But I will never stop trying to prove that this marriage is the right choice for her to make for at least one more day.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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The post My Brain Wants Me To Be Controlling — That’s Why I’m Depressed appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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