There's a psychology idea I still can't put into a few clear words.
People say you may not be able to control events, but you can control how you respond to them.
The thing is, your entire perceived world is constructed in your mind, which runs autonomously, not unlike heartbeats and breathing.
You can't control what world you will *think* you're in as much as you think you can.
I can *tell* myself that tomorrow when I wake up and feel like hell, I just need enough caffeine to be normal and start my day. But tomorrow, the world I will *think* I'm in will be different. I will either not remember or not really believe this advice. I will feel it's all hopeless.
I cannot directly control that. At all. Right now, it's obvious: an acutely depressed state is to be expected (thanks to poor sleep and withdrawal effects compounding other problems) but I do know deep down, from real experience, that it can be worked around, and surprisingly quickly. Tomorrow, what I believe about it now will mean nothing. Tomorrow, I will be in a place where the despair is real. Where getting some caffeine does nothing to fix the disaster of my life—or maybe of life generally. That is how it will all *be*, possibly for hours.
Again, right now I can fully believe that all I need to do is remember to see past it. But I cannot directly control my brain state in advance.
*Maybe* we can choose (non-deterministically) how we react to things. But we can't, in advance, select the frame of mind from which we'll be reacting. We can't control the perceptions and memory activity that will construct an interpretation and a set of options.
People focus on this notion that we can opt from a metaphorical How I React menu. But we cannot ensure in advance what the menu will have on it. We can't even be sure it'll be there. Routinely we believe we can ensure both. In normal enough circumstances, the illusion holds. But with peculiar circumstances, say with a mental illness or neurodivergence or calamity, we experience that illusion breaking down into its components much more often.
Hence I know caffeine "recovers" me from the terrible depression of waking up, yet no matter how much I know this, in the moment, I often end up spending much, much too much time in that state. It is possible to "know" something at one time and, for practical purposes, "not know" it later, without having fundamentally forgotten.
Similarly, I can say right now that I dislike the idea of offing myself—that seems crazy—not at all what I want. Yet I can aver (I know this almost for a total fact) that soon, and probably within a day or a week, I'll be thinking about it very differently, and possibly as, maybe, the only bearable option. Right now, I hate the idea. But soon, apparently no matter *what* I think now, I will once again think that maybe that's the only thing that makes sense.
I can't figure out how to convey, without getting as repetitive as this is getting, how critical is this tidbit about the hidden forces implicated when understanding the world from inside a brain—as we all do. It's a thing you feel hard enough that you *know* it. Or else you maybe do not feel or know it at all.
To some extent it's what we run from when we adopt overly rigid beliefs. To get the sands shifting less, we'll confabulate superglue for the sands and call it our free (and yet, paradoxically, correct) choice. "The world I see is real because I stick to what I already believe and I fully choose how I perceive and interpret and react." Never mind that we have little idea what our neurons are doing.
What I'm trying to convey is that my optimism that I *can* and *will* be non-depressed, or let's just say energized enough to act, or organized enough, or aware enough of the next priority steps, has been proven, again and again and again, to be... a bit too optimistic.
I cannot simply decide now, or put myself into a configuration of will, such that every morning in the future I will get my caffeine or whatever remedy I need to not feel like hell and to function normally enough—without wasting hours worrying about how horrible and pointless life is, first. Nor can I simply decide to stop thinking of offing myself and never do that. I cannot seem to make such decisions in a way that holds with consistency because I cannot actually control the perceived reality, the "umwelt" as it's sometimes called, my brain will be constructing in the future.
And not just the distant future. Soon. Today. When I get home from work, what will I be in the right frame of mind to do? I don't know. I'm constantly planning on my drive home, telling myself how it'll be. It rarely works because, as it turns out, I don't fully control the perceived reality my brain will construct—the things that will seem most important, most urgent, most possible, most pleasant or unpleasant. These things shift for me quite a lot.
Because of that, I find it easy to understand other people who think, speak, or act weird. I know that we control our brains less than we think, and some people have the privilege of a brain that is more stable in this dimension, that dimension, or the other dimension. Everyone has stabilities. Everyone has instabilities. But there's variance in the population and through time.
Some people have not experienced enough instability to know that the world our brains will be constructing moments from now is not under our *direct* control very much if at all.
Sometimes drug experiences teach people this. But it's natural to go back to life and think if we aren't intoxicated, then the insight doesn't count; it's only when there's some reason we might *not* be of fully sound mind that we lack any of this control.
No. I posit that we always lack this control, but sometimes we are fortunate to spend a lot of time in relatively unturbulent waters.
I see people on their airline flights of life with relatively little turbulence (of the particular sort I'm describing), and they think their optimism is keeping the flight out of turbulence. But is that really true? They happen to be fortunate, not just optimistic, and they are taking credit for piloting by circumstances and inner weather conditions that they may influence but cannot specify.
Sometimes you have to more undeniably lose something—a capacity—and sometimes over and over—before you realize that it was never your creation in the first place.
You didn't create your mind. Your mind presents the options you choose from. It also guides the process by which you choose. Though it isn't bad advice, "I can choose how to react" tends to overlook biological magic behind the appearance of the menu and the activity of selecting.
I couldn't say this briefly, but I do think just now I have said it.
(Other thoughts: Questioning your beliefs might make you less stable, but not questioning them can lead to all manner of harms also. There seems to be little guarantee that firm belief precludes instability? But I'm speaking from perceptions here and also trying to avoid absolutes.)
