Fatigue Makes Cowards of All of Us
Mental health, moral capacity, and the difference between an excuse and an explanation
The hazy memory of learning about Edgar Allen Poe in eighth grade is a pleasant place to visit in my mind. The sheen of wax on the hard wood floor. The early afternoon spring sun flooding in from overly large windows. The quasi chaos of a classroom of Gifted students. Macintosh IIe’s with Oregon Trail on floppy disk.
Our teacher wasn’t just going over the works of Poe but discussing the man that wrote them. Brilliant. Ruinous. Dead at forty. In her lesson she dropped a line that has stayed with me ever since.
“Sanity is not a fixed point; it is a sliding scale. We all move between perfect sanity and absolute insanity, anchored around points, but never stopped.”
My life has proven her insight to be true. In the throes of grief, I abandoned my Army post and went AWOL for a month, driving aimlessly around the country.
Not a great move.
In the depths of depression I made life altering decisions that made my life worse. I directed the anger I felt toward myself at the people I cared about most, I hurt them and scarred them in ways that may be dulled by time, but present nonetheless.
Many of the harms I have committed can be examined through the lens of mental health that has slid towards the less sane part of the scale. Would a rational young man destroy a promising military career and throw away the benefits that come with that for a five thousand mile road trip to nowhere? Probably not. Would a sensible person lash out at their most supportive friend when that friend was trying to help them? And don’t get me started on the mistakes I made searching for romantic validation… I already wrote that post.
You might think you know where this post is going. “Understanding why you failed is just a sophisticated way of letting yourself off the hook… especially if you can blame it on something like brain chemistry.” And admittedly, I have thought that way to justify to myself the harms I have done.
The saying goes “fatigue makes cowards of all men.” And this is true of mental as well as physical fatigue. But living with influences, internal or external, that could not bear the weight of the “better” choices we could have made does not erase the harms we have done.
What it does is teach us about the conditions that made the harm possible. Understanding your own mental state and the way that impacts your choices is the first step in preparing to make better choices and consciously building resiliency for the future.
Being clear-eyed about the harm we have done is not about seeking punishment. A person self-flagellating never made the world better. No, but it does help us determine what needs to be repaired. And seeing our failure points, show us where we need help from others.
After all, if I know that when I am suffering in the throes of depression I make poor choices, shouldn’t that tell me I should engage help?
If I know the brakes on my car are compromised, I wouldn’t drive it. It needs repair. If it’s my car, that repair is my responsibility, but it can’t be done alone. Even if I can make the fix myself I need parts. But if I’ve let them go long enough to be a danger, then I probably need more help.
Not to mention what happens if I drive it. I don’t just put myself at risk, but others too.
Repair is a relational act. It involves the people harmed, the communities that held you while you were breaking, the help you should have asked for before the brakes failed in the first place.
The lesson about Poe sticks with me today. I know I can always slide towards insanity. But the other part of the lesson is that we are anchored on the sliding scale. We have a core self we can return to.
The work of repair is the work of finding our way back to it, which means being honest about how far we’ve traveled, asking for help with the distance, and extending to ourselves the same patience we’d offer anyone we loved who was trying to find their way home.
I’ve said before that you can always be better tomorrow. I keep saying it because I keep needing to hear it.
Not absolved.
Not unchanged.
Better.
That’s the only direction available to us.
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