> In a draft of his memoir, Ray modified his definition of depression: “This is not an illness, it is not a sickness – it is a state of disconnection.”
I've seen it in myself and in some of my closest friends, where we just start to disconnect more and more from others, more and more from ourselves. Especially from how we're feeling. Wanting to avoid emotions and thoughts, suppress them, repress them. I'm not too familiar with the vast theory in psychology and psychoanalysis, maybe what I'm proposing is quite aligned with Freudian or other thinking.
Just seems to me that when we disconnect, especially from how we're feeling, we can slowly start to shrink into ourselves and if we don't stop it, we sometimes implode.
Conversely, that by connecting more with how we're feeling, we can start to expand a bit, not just with ourselves but with other people.
One of the challenges in that being as we expand, things happen that can make us want to contract (rejection, being ignored, idolized, etc) and then back on the shrinking path again.