Depression, and endgame spoilers in Journal of life stuff

There will be Endgame spoilers in this post. Mostly because I want to talk about one of the characters and something someone on Reddit pointed out. Hopefully this is enough text to block out the spoiler from the front page, but if not, well, too bad, you’ve had three sentences to warn you off. Thicc Thor is the face of depression. Hollywood is getting praise for finally starting to display mental illness correctly. But it hit me yesterday when I was reading reddit comments and someone pointed out that Thor is the perfect example of the smiling face of depression.

He’s got a great life. A house, friends, things that make him happy, not a care in the world. He’s living the life, right? What’s to be sad about? He loves seeing old friends. But he isn’t happy. He is lost. He has no direction, no purpose, he knows he failed and he knows he could have not failed. He cannot move past his own failure.

The movie does a good job depicting what and how a depressed person acts, but it does a really shitty job explaining what to do to get better. “Go back in time and fix stuff!” Yeah, almost everyone wishes they could do that at some point in their lives. That’s not how you heal from depression.

I want to be clear, there are two kinds of depression. There’s chemical depression, which is generally speaking a fact of your biology and means that, through no fault of your own, your body will make you depressed if left to its own devices. Sometimes this can be fixed with diet or exercise changes, sometimes not. This kind of depression typically responds well to medications, once the right medication for your body is found. It can be hell on the wrong medication though.

The other kind of depression is what I call reactive depression. Or purposeful depression. That’s depression that happens because of a specific event, or for a specific reason. This is the type of depression Thor has. He didn’t stop the snap and he could have. He was supposed to be a great leader of his people, but he can’t step out of Odin’s shadow. Hela whooped his ass like he was a tissue. He destroyed Asgard and brought about Ragnarok. There have been so many failures in his life and the weight of them all crushes him. Because, with Thanos gone, and the snap unfixable…how can he ever redeem himself from his failure?

But let’s bring it back to problems more likely to happen in our lives, since Thanos isn’t real (I sure fucking hope he isn’t real!) …maybe I’ll write about that later. I petered out and watched videos on youtube instead.