Life Diary.
November 2021 was a rough month for me emotionally. I had very high highs and very low lows. I hit a pit of despair for a number of days. This state of realm that I’m referring to is a state of being that feels black and stuck. It’s completely fatalistic with no hope or way out. A bottomless pit of dashed hopes. A valley of shit. Funny thing is, the same things that were causing my highs were also the ones leading to my lows.
As much as I hated it there, it was also such a place of comfort.
So disgustingly so but I lingered on every moment I could. I recreated scenarios over and over again every minute I could spare. Heck, I even made time to torture myself into this pain. To self sabotage. To set fire to my pain and not in a good way. So I wanted to write out how I was feeling. I wrote this piece;
I’m in a pit of despair
and everytime I come up for air
I’m thinking that maybe
maybe, this time I’ll escape
only to get sucked back in again
And maybe it’s a stage of grief but it scared me to realize that I could contemplate ending it all. Most times when I’m over a feeling like this, I like to know if anyone else went through a similar experience. So I turn to Google.
This time I was surprised.
Apparently The Pit of Despair was a name used by American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow for a device he designed, technically called a vertical chamber apparatus, that he used in experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the 1970s. It was a secret dungeon containing a Machine, a torture device. The aim was to produce an animal model of depression. In short, Harlow would place monkeys in until they went insane with hopeless depression, just to see what would happen.
For the study, some monkeys were kept in solitary isolation for 15 years. In the total isolation experiments, baby monkeys would be left alone for three, six, 12, or 24 months of total social deprivation. Some of these monkeys were those that had already bonded with their mothers alone for several weeks.
The resulting animals would barely eat or move, instead resigning themselves to hopeless cowering at the corner of the cell.
Later, these monkeys would be forced to mate and foster children, which the scarred monkeys would mistreat horrendously. Harlow would say of these damaged monkey parents: “Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers were”.
The degree of it being unethical is beyond comprehensibility because he was actually hoping to push these monkeys into some sort of depressive state, which worked.... He soon found that the monkeys were completely unable to care for their children, often abusing and neglecting them.
Obviously this has to be one of the most unethical experiments ever done. And maybe coming across this study in a way helped me get over and climb out of my pit. And now there’s a story on a pit of despair that has nothing to do with Harlow or the macaque monkeys.
This is in no way a story of hope but quite the contrary of lost hope. But a month plus later, it’s refreshing to know that such horrid moments don’t last. And at this very moment, I’m content. That counts for something.
