The Spirit Of Melancholy
By: Timothy O'Neill
Tags: Spirituality, Mental Health, Grief, Sadness, Self

The Spirit Of Melancholy

Image by Melk Hagelslag from Pixabay

I am possessed by the spirit of melancholy. It settles inside me like a dense fog, influencing my every thought, feeling and action. No positive emotion can penetrate it. It obscures all joy, frightens away all peace and contentment and drains the light from love itself. Even on warm days I feel cold. Even when it is bright I feel dark. I force myself to laugh as my soul weeps. There is an irrepressible sadness within me that will not know reason. I cry until I howl like a beast at an ancient moon. I clutch my chest and feel my heart breaking, over and over again. The spirit of melancholy moves me to write, but it also moves me to substance use, self-harm and general self-destruction. I do not want to be its victim, but I don’t know how to reclaim my power. I accept it for what it is: a shard of my soul that was chipped off in transit to this body.

I wouldn’t call it depression. It’s not a mood. It doesn’t fluctuate in intensity. It’s not like the weather, coming or going. It is perpetually pervading my very being. Perhaps I humor it too much. Perhaps I surrender to it too easily. Perhaps I have tolerated it for so long I have assimilated it as part of my identity. My system has gone septic with sadness. I’m mourning a death I haven’t died.

Over the past day and a half or so I’ve cried twice at equally trivial things. The first was when my sister sent out a group text saying we, my parents, younger sister and I, could use her Amazon account to access HBO Max. My father responded with: ‘I would love that’. I burst into tears. ‘He just wants to watch his movies,’ I moaned to the air, ‘He just wants to watch his movies’. It was the innocence that did me in. Innocence will do it every time. That’s why it’s been so hard for me seeing children in cages and children wearing masks. Lost innocence. So this morning my dog joined me on the couch and I was giving him a good rubdown and I noticed bits of food caught in his chin whiskers. I burst into tears again. ‘He’s just eating his treats,’ I moaned to the air, ‘He’s just eating his treats’. I eventually pulled myself together. I said to him, ‘I can’t pity you because you don’t pity yourself’. That made me feel better. Mildly.

I have not lived a happy life. If it ended now we would call it a tragedy of debilitating mental illness and addiction, trauma, reckless behavior, crushed dreams and unrealized potential. I think I was born with the spirit of melancholy in me, and I think that spirit has thickened and spread over the years as I’ve nurtured it with decades of endless suffering. Somewhere along the way I came to believe that this is exactly what I deserved. I deserved my melancholy because I had made the decisions that had broken my heart.

Medication attacks the leaves of the plant but does not get at its roots. The same goes for talk therapy. They target symptoms. Whenever we try to go deeper we are met with rocky soil that will not give way to our shovels. My melancholy simply refuses to be known or understood or treated. How can you treat a fractured soul?

I have done much self-work over the past five years and I have discovered that most of my melancholy comes from a profound, untouchable grief that defies conventional description. I grieve loved ones lost, but I also grieve myself and the painful realities of life on our planet. I grieve for every lost soul, every innocent abused or abandoned, every person in an agony they can’t understand or explain, every individual who is dying alone and who is afraid of what the Mystery will reveal to them.

I’m tired. I’m tired of the experience of being human. It saddens me. I don’t want to be in this body anymore, trapped in flesh and bone, forced to go through the major pains and the smaller inconveniences and indignities. I know I am not my body, that my soul supersedes it, and I yearn for release. That doesn’t mean I will take any action to hasten my exit, but it means I struggle every moment to tolerate myself.

There was a time when I had plans, goals and dreams. Now I want nothing but nothing. I crave the ability to switch off my mind at will and dwell in the sepulcher of my subconscious. I don’t want the unreliable rest provided by sleep, I want the relief of non-being. Just for a few moments here and there. You know those times when you awake from a long dreamless sleep and you think to yourself, ‘Wow, it’s like I stopped existing for awhile’? I want that.

I’ll admit, part of me enjoys feeling sad. It enjoys the severity of my sadness. I cry tears and my heart hurts and a secret part of me is in its perverse glory. What is this? Self-punishment? Crossed wires? The pleasure of the release of so much internal suffering? I don’t know. I just know that I love it when my melancholy is given expression. Too often it stays hidden, simmering just under the surface.

As something of an artist, melancholy is fuel for my creative fire. Sometimes it seems like everyone is falling over themselves to subvert or dispel the tortured artist stereotype. I am a tortured artist and I’m not ashamed of it. Melancholy moves my fingers across the keyboard. It allows me to empathize with the suffering of others. It allows me to reach the dark depths of my being, the space we all find within us when we dig deep enough. Right now I’m listening to the plaintive chords of NF’s ‘’Let You Down’ and I’m harnessing my melancholy to write this piece. Am I sad right now, in this moment? Yes, I am. I want to cry ten-thousand tears for the boy who was never allowed to be a child. I want to cry ten-thousand tears for the young man who came, on multiple occasions, moments away from ending his own life. I don’t like it here. I never have.

I just want to go home. My house isn’t my home. I want to go to my home in the stars. I’m a wayward angel who descended to Earth and who incarnated here to learn lessons he had forgotten. And maybe one of those lessons is to learn to live in peace. My melancholy is an old friend and I cling to it because in many ways I find it comforting, but if I am ever going to truly move on in life I am going to have to work on letting it go. Do I have the resources necessary to do this? Time will tell. Time will tell what I want more, my tears or my freedom.