"Cheer Up" Is the Way the World Sees It

… [A] recent feature on depression in a Singapore magazine described the full range of medications, then ended by saying definitively, “Seek professional help if you need it, but in the meantime, cheer up.” (p. 200)

これは前回読んだときにも書き写したと思う。Fuck!!

I have often described myself as bisexual, and have been in three long-term relationships with women… (p. 207)

かなり幸せのように読めるんだけど。シャワーや着替えまで手伝ってくれる友人や父親のことも記述されていて、うらやましい限り。そんな人たち、なかなかいない。

… For the Inuit, depression is so minor in the scale of things and so evident a part of everyone’s life that, except in severe cases of vegetative illness, they simply ignore it. Between their silence and our intensely verbalized self-awareness lie a multitude of ways of speaking of psychic pain, of knowing the pain. Context, gender, tradition, nation – all conspire to determine what is to be said and what is to be unsaid – and to some extent they thereby determine what is to be alleviate, what exacerbated, what endured, what forsworn. The depression – its urgency, its symptoms, and the ways out of it – is all determined by forces quite outside of our individual biochemistry, by who we are, where we were born, what we believe, and how we live. (p. 215)

知人に症状のことを漏らすと、上記にあるように、“Cheer up!” という助言をいただくか、さもなければ、“C’mon! Everybody has ups and downs. I, for one, have gone through this and that and right now have such and such trouble… You’re not the only one who is suffering…” と返ってくる。誰かに話してしまうというのは、自分の「望む返答」を期待している証拠だ。However, it is not the way the world works… 期待なければ、落胆なし。と、わかっていても……。

インドの仕事紹介エージェントから連絡あり。職歴書は提出済み。質問には考えて答えるつもり。うまく行けばそれでよし。期待なければ、落胆なし。しかし、つらい……。つらいんだ。勘弁して。