Toxic Masculinity and Depression

I have depression and I think that I always will, a fact about me that I am only just accepting.When it subsumes me, shuts down my attention, focus and memory and tells me that I don't belong here and I never will I have to deconstruct it, I have to understand it. I have to dismantle it, rearrange the parts and build myself back up in order to get myself back to where I was before it consumed my soul. Yes, if you're reading this as an overly sentimentalized piece of prose, replete with pathos and well-worn metaphors that's because the intensity of depression is both overly emotional and repetitive (at least in my case when it re-emerges semi-episodically). The reason I journal is so I can analyse my depression in order to isolate, extract and fully capture the root of the problem, the underlying cause and to dig it up to interrogate it. If I can at least understand it, I assure myself, then I am able to confront it and nullify its power by destabilizing it's nucleus of control.One way I try to minimise its destructive impact on me is to journal and keep a diary. Today I opened up my diary and read something that I had written last year (please forgive the frenetic shifts in first and second person);

2.1.19 When my depression infects me it paralyses me. Depression paralyses me and infects me like a parasitic virus once I've tuned into its frequency; it shuts down my emotional resilience and leaves your defenses and leaves you vulnerable, fragile, over-sensitive and prone to internalizing every single comment other people make about you. It tells you that you are a failure, that you haven't achieved enough, that your performance is less than adequate and insufficient.

As I read this, as a psychoanalyst might retrospectively read a patient's private journal, I was struck by how my experiences of, and the triggers to, my anxiety and depression where fed from the paradigm of toxic masculinity. It is both fascinating and disturbing how the 'reasons' and manifestations I attribute to depression are conditioned and learned responses to assess myself on a model of toxic masculinity. When I wrote that my 'emotional resilience' was shut down what I really meant was that I had permitted my sensitivities, insecurities and vulnerabilities to rise to the surface. The psychological self-flagellation wasn't arising out of guilt or of pressure but out of shame for allowing my feelings to rise to the surface, defenceless, raw and exposed for a cruel and critical audience. Was it really a problem that I internalize the 'banter' of other men who see my sexuality as a spectacle and an object of ridicule where its apparent magnetism ensures that any comment levelled at me somehow a comment on my sexuality. Is it really a problem that I was affected and impacted by the words of others and their tone of voice? And the questions I ask about 'adequacy' and 'sufficiency' are clear-cut signifiers of the cultural conditioning of masculinity that continually conflates the value of the man with with the intensity of his virility, power, control and his accumulation of progressive wealth. His stoic sense of unaffected self-assurance; it's part and parcel. I find it interesting here as well that I used the word 'performance' in two ways. On the one hand it revealed to me my self-awareness over the constructedness of masculine-achievement-as-spectacle and as a predetermined sequence of participatory rituals in the medley of masculinity. Yet I also used the word in the sense of performance as a tool of assessment; as a framework for quantifying success; as a marker of my achievements that other people read me through. 

Ultimately, what I was able to discern from my own interrogation of depression was that I was actually evaluating my own abilities to assimilate, adapt and perform within the prism of masculine normativity. When I read it back I started to dismantle the binary structures of oppositional thoughts and feelings that I was evaluating my own self-esteem with. I was looking at  myself, through a masculine lens, of pass/fail, acceptable/unacceptable.