My essential humanity

When I am depressed, I get mean. Meanspirited, blackhearted and angry. It is a terrible thing to be at the receiving end of my acerbic tongue over which, it seems, not even the gods are powerless to rein it in. I become this callous troglodyte, incapable of empathy or good judgment. It becomes my mission in life to turn what was your good day into the most miserable eight hours you've ever been through. I am petty, vindictive, malicious and cruel. And I am the coldhearted ogre unwilling to apologise or be called to account for my cruelty.

Then the remorse sets in as soon as my dark cloud has passed. I am mortified. I am sad. I am a little blue, but not in a manic-depressive way. I am penitent and shit-scared that I have allowed another black mark to be added to my name. If I were the weeping type, there would be buckets to weep. If I were the gregarious type, I would be buying rounds of something or the other at the Porterhouse. But I am neither of those things and yet, all of them.

Do not fret, my friend. It is not a disquisition on my fragile ego, my fragile psyche or my enfeebled mental constitution. It is neither an explanation nor a plea for forgiveness. It is an examination of a flawed being. It is an examination of one flaw in a flawed being. And, sadly, it will not be a complete explanation. The Freudians and Jungians out there with their writing pads and on-the-tip-of-their-noses reading glasses, put away the pads and start polishing your glasses now - this is not for you either.

It is strange when one admits that they are not god, godlike or godly. One is free. One only has to cope with human frailty. No more, no less. Sometimes that is much harder than if one banged about like a Greek or Roman god of ancient mythology, because then, one has to contend with the judgment of mere mortals like himself. And that judgment is frequently unflattering, exposing scabs long forgotten - or ignored. That judgment picks at the scabs over and over until they start to bleed afresh, eventually festering and turning gangrenous if the same godlike disinterest in them persists.

But if one is sure of himself, confident in his essential humanity, satisfied to be taught as he surely is a teacher, the truth about himself is a burden off his back. He is no longer Atlas holding up the Earth on his shoulders, no longer Sisyphus pushing his sorrows up the mountain only to watch them roll back down. And so we now know. It is not a spirit of meanness, it is not the soot of a black heart nor the anger of a youngish black man, but the frailty at the heart of every man that walks the Earth as a man.