Why “Little Stone Towers:" A Perspective On The Nature of Life

I wanted something descriptive, an image that stuck in people’s minds and helped them to imagine the main message I was looking to communicate. As I brainstormed a name for my hypothetical blog, a few phrases came to mind. The Mighty Battle had always felt like a fitting description of how I perceived depression, and honestly of how I felt in every hard moment of the many years since. Emotional imagery like Treading Water, That Vicious Fight, and The Labyrinth all spoke in similar ways, providing real validity to the difficulty and inner strength that it takes to deal with mental struggles. However, I realized that I wouldn’t just be writing about depression, I wanted to write about life. And is life really A Mighty Battle? A constant struggle against sinking? Is aggression and viciousness a necessary constant? I realized that, since my depression, I’ve always quietly viewed life as some sort of fight. As I now inspect this view and its origin in my darkest years, I see that channeling my desire for happiness into aggression allowed me to feel something deep in my bones, a beautiful signal of a subsiding depression, and as I pursued this invigoration I unconsciously chose to view life as a fight. I now see the fundamental anxiety that comes from constantly battling life, yet I feel I’ve entangled my own security with this forceful, war-minded, worldview.

Why “Little Stone Towers”, A Perspective On

The Nature of Life

Viewing Life as a Fight and the Value and Difficulties of A Motivating Anger

As we stepped outside I heard the eyes-closed deep breaths of my classmates, while I exerted myself to put on a smile in the grey air. But I plodded on, past the tips of grass emerging from new mulch, under the light green buds on trees, around the reading student, and on. I saw it on their faces, a sort of contentment that comes from these mundane moments of peace, the everyday joys that people don’t even know they absorb. I couldn’t describe the difference between me and them, I didn’t realize these little gifts even existed, but I knew, somehow, that the people around me were connected to reality in a way that I only longed to be. All I wanted was to be happy. In part, for the experience, to learn what joy feels like and to live a life that contains it, and in another part, because of a creeping sense of danger—I was disconnected from the world and felt at risk of losing it.

I internalized this two-fold desire. Happiness for my better life and for my survival.

As years ticked by, my brain slowly began to change whether through luck or effort, and slowly too, I began to feel. I felt the curls of the carpet beneath my hand, the bite of autumn air, and the pokes of dark woodchips beneath my feet. Yet the dominant emotion that I found came in the everyday moments, when I was exhausted and wanted to melt away, and my intense desire for happiness grew into a full body feeling. I felt an aggressive, forceful, refusal to be kept down, and in that violent swing I would get out of bed at 2pm on a Saturday. This invigoration was the embodiment of my reach for betterment, and for the first time, I felt something in my bones connecting me to life itself. For what feeling is more human, more organic, than the Darwinian fight to live?

That dual-layered focus on happiness and invigoration came to define my experience with depression. Simply put, it was the most intense and most common feeling of those years. In my daily effort to pick the hard option, the uncomfortable option, the terrifying option, I would feel my hope surge into this invigoration and fill me with even a glimmer of life. And with that push, I, occasionally, had the strength to speak up at family dinner, or to tell a joke in class.

As I worked to change myself and my life, I began to frame these moments of friction as my own personal battles in order to feel that motivating aggression. I imagined I was fighting against life itself, defying fate’s betrayal and the path it had set for me. At the time, I was very truly grappling with life’s unfairness—why had the universe placed me in my own dark dimension and forced me into this dark corner? Yet, in these mountainous moments, like when I was tasked with finishing homework before dinner, I converted these feelings into a war-minded mentality rather than questioning their validity. Going from “why is this so hard for me?” to “the universe cannot do this to me.” All to encourage that invigoration, to feel something, and to motivate myself. And, with time and repetition, I internalized this world view, suspending myself in a quiet, constant fight against life.

I’ve often viewed those dark years as a violent time, a destructive erasure of what once was, followed by a disciplined and militant rebuilding of my envisioned future. I now see why I so strongly identify with this conflicting creative destruction.

As I unravel this anger from my own mental structure, I can parse the duality that has been built within me. On the one hand, my forward-looking desire to create a new life, and on the other, a defensive, aggressive and escapist push for survival. From the latter, I found not just motivation but a new sensation, that invigoration, and I adopted the worldview of a fight in order to encourage my motivational anger. My everyday moments of effort paired the two mentalities and deeply entangled them within me, such that my aggression became an integral part of the construction of my new life.

After three and a half years, while standing outside of a friend’s house at a party in jeans and a t-shirt on a winter night, I took a cold clean breath, and I opened my eyes. Somehow, truly miraculously, I had reached a point where I felt the wind, appreciation, and mundane moments of peace every day. My focus on happiness and the feeling of invigoration was my dominant association with the glimmer of life, and as my depression subsided, I maintained the immense value I placed on them. Even in this second life, continuing these values and having internalized the battle-ready state of being, I also held steadily to my fight against life.

Six years later, as I inspect this mentality that I still carry with me, I now see the difficulty and inaccuracy of fundamentally viewing life as a battle.

I continued on, with that militant construction, building my life. Organizing parties and social events, weeks in advance, and aligning them with my carefully constructed schedule so as to maintain my acts of fulfillment—grades, volunteering, family time. Two Thursdays from now the weather looks nice, perfect time for a drive with Max and Charlie, and I’ll be able to stay up late because that Wednesday I can sleep in, which will leave me well rested for my pre-calc exam, and we can go to Chipotle which is near party city so I can pick up a disco ball, yellow balloons, and glow in the dark stars for the space party this weekend. These types of plans, as we all know, never execute perfectly—always creating a dissonance between what you want and what is. Yet I worked constantly, through the unending and premeditated beration of the obstacles in my way like the ocean on rocks, all to place the pieces of my life so technically and perfectly that I could defend against the cruel whims of life. I mistrusted life because of what it had done to me. And, as a result, I experienced a fundamental anxiety and worry that without the exertion of my own will, simply put, things would not work out.

In addition to this feeling of a necessary defense, to view life as a battle promotes the extremes of wins and losses. In my depression, as I internalized my imagined fight, I also internalized the pressures of a fatalistic win or loss. And to think in terms of such extremes, especially while in a dark place, can be terrifying and extremely inhibiting.

Certainly, everyone has anxiety that feels a lot like this. Both its definitive nature of mistrusting that “everything will be alright” and in the imagined extreme outcomes, as if life culminates in some final state. What was startling for me was realizing that the way I view the world, the fight that I am proud of and really loved, associating it with the end of my depression, and that I had so internalized, was also representative of a highly anxious worldview.

Even more importantly, I do not think it is an accurate representation of the human experience.

As I’ve outlined the origin of this mentality, I’ve realized that I encouraged my universal battle and my anger at life for a motivational purpose, and honestly to feel that invigoration. This symbolism for my life did not arise out of how much it paralleled the world. In reality, the universe is not my constant opponent. The evidence against it is simple. I’ve had too many good days, too many beautiful breaths, for that to be true. This reminder that the universe is kind and giving, in addition to its darkness, dissuades the anxiety of fighting against a creeping abyss or inevitable fall. Similarly, life is not made by the extreme outcomes of a few key moments. Instead, it is composed of many small moments, which, when pieced together, create the life that you live. Whether that is mundane moments of peace, or mundane moments of effort

A far better metaphor to describe life, for my own sake and for its own accuracy, is the construction of life in a creative act, through the everyday moments that we experience. Like building little stone towers.