Bleakness

Thank you all for your responses to my first post about being depressed.  In that post, I discussed the cognitive side of my depression; today, I want to discuss the emotional side.

Every once in awhile, someone will ask me how it feels to be depressed, and I try to convey how bleak things feel.  Perhaps two stories from my childhood will help.  When I was six or seven, I watched "The Greatest Show on Earth" on TV with my mom and brother.  When we came to the scene where the trapeze artist tries a quadruple flip without a net but misses the bar and falls to the ground, for some reason the finality with which he thudded to the ground gave me for the first time an almost instantaneous surety that my mom was going to die someday, so I start crying really hard right in the living room and my mom has no idea what is wrong with me and I don't tell her because I'm not sure she knows she's going to die.  And this surety hits me so hard and fast at such a young age that it's like I'm clay and it's a chromium stamp and forever after I can't look at my mom without thinking, "She's going to die someday," and I know there's nothing I can do about it.  For awhile after that evening, I would imagine our house being surrounded by rising flood waters with me, my mom and my brother trapped on the shrinking roof and I'm growing more frantic because I doubt my mom is a strong swimmer and I know I can't swim so how am I going to save her?  I will fail and she will drown (my brother, I figured, could fend for himself cause he could swim at this time).

My brother and I were rambunctious, at the very least, so my mom had trouble finding after-school care for us.  When I was in the second grade, we were staying with an elder lady around the corner and up the hill from us, who did her best to keep us out of the house so we wouldn't wreck the place.  One afternoon, John and I were out in the backyard "working" on this old dog house she had though the dog was long gone.  She had given John a hammer (her only one) and me a butter knife so we could nail some nails.  I was up on the roof, trying to nail a nail with that flimsy butter knife, and John was about fifteen feet away dancing around with the hammer, flaunting the fact that he had it and could nail anytime he wanted to but wasn't going to until he was ready.  In anger, I rose up and flung that butter knife at John, and just at the most perfect moment he dodged right into it so that the knife caught him right in the nose.  At first, I was amazed both that I had actually hit John with the knife and at the amount of blood pouring out of his nose.  But our caretaker, after putting a washcloth on John's nose and calling Mom to come get us, said, "What if you had killed your brother?"  And at that moment, I felt as if I had actually killed him, so close did that knife come to hitting him in the eye or temple, so like John I began crying and wailing and didn't stop until Mom got there to take John to the doctor's office for stitches.  But that feeling stayed with me:  someday, I'll screw up and, because of me, someone will lose an eye or die.

Feeling depressed, for me, is a gut-wrenching helplessness to thwart a multitude of deathly possibilities and sureties.  Feeling depressed is living in grief not just when something terrible happens, not just when someone dies, but all the time.  Think back to your last grief response, the feeling of being punched in the gut so that all your air is gone, the wailing despair that washes over you, the feeling of unreality and desperate, futile hope that it can't be real:  that's what depression feels like to me.  Each day, I wait to get the phone call that my son or daughter has been killed, that Nancy has been splattered across the interstate, and horror and bereavement strike me as if these terrors have actually happened.  Even when I'm not thinking such grisly thoughts, my baseline is one of bleak certainty that, if not today, surely one day these possibilities will become actual, surely one day these will happen.

And even if they don't, each day I face the certainty that I, too, will die.  The cognition, the bare fact of this is not so terrible; but the feeling of despair, of dread imagining my last moments is almost unbearable.  I lie awake at night with my heart thudding, quite afraid, and I concentrate on each heartbeat, realizing how tenuous a heart is, how fleeting a beat, and as I feel each one all too easily I can imagine it is the last one, and I wonder what I'll think or feel between the space of that last heartbeat and my losing consciousness for the last time.  I hate the thought that I'll come to my end and all I'll feel is regret, regret not just for all the stupid, insensitive things I've done, but regret that I'd spent so much of my life grieving that very moment instead of living joyously that I was alive at all.  Scripture says, "So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom," but all I've gotten is a heart of grief.

When I was in college, I was proud to swear that no matter how bad I felt, I would never cop out and adopt some belief system that would make my life-dread go away.  I was proud and young and stupid.  Now I'm older, much older, and tired, worn out, beaten and looking for release.  And though I haven't been given a belief in immortality, I have taken refuge in medication - though I'm not particularly proud about it - sweet, soothing meds that dampen dread and, just a little bit, remind me how I felt as a carefree child before all this terrible knowledge and certainty.  What I'd give to feel that way again.  Thank you for reading.

Arrogant Depression

I'm not arrogant.

I get this rap because when I meet people I haven't seen for a week or three decades I don't glad-hand slap-back cackle and gush. I don't hug and ask after one's family and whatnot. Instead I nod my head, grin slightly from one side of my mouth (the right), say hello only, real laconic which can be experienced as ironic, showing no emotion whatsoever, which I'm sure is usually taken as stand-offish at best and don't care shit at worse. But I don't respond this way because I'm arrogant. I respond this way because I'm depressed.

Now I am stupid, in so many ways. That charge I accept, because I didn't really understand that I am depressed until 2002 (a decade now), while my first major depressive episode happened in the Fall of 1979. Back then, even though I had taken Intro to Psych the previous Spring, I never considered the mental anguish that suddenly crushed me halfway through Fall quarter to be depression. I just thought it was angst.

I was taking Intro to Philosophy that Fall, along with New Testament Greek and Creative Writing. For both Philosophy and Writing I had to journal daily (I've never been able to do anything daily), so I've got a lot of records from that time in a box somewhere if I want to check. But I remember pretty clearly. I remember one morning waking up in bed with several suspicions crystallizing into conviction, the conviction that ultimately everything gets annihilated - me, my family, Nancy (whom I had just started dating), this planet and all life on it, even everything that exists, all ends in annihilation. And when I said "annihilation" I meant and still mean a complete cessation, a complete end, in personal terms a total stoppage of all thought, mind, memory with nothing left over, nothing personal persisting after death. The same goes for human culture in cosmic terms, that the day draws daily nearer when our lovely planet and all on it will be consumed by the swelling sun as it transitions into its red giant phase, wiping off all trace of our long history. The same goes for the universe itself, whether with a bang or a whimper. Everything ends in death, and life will never conquer it.

With life vanquished, there goes any possibility for meaning. I lay in bed convinced this was Truth that Fall, and from then 'til now my conviction has rarely wavered: I've rarely seriously doubted it. That Fall, I resolved to stay in bed, just not get up and so starve or waste away, to give up entirely (of course, residence hall staff would have come looking for me eventually, Nancy first of all). I lasted a couple of hours before nature's call grew too insistent, so I got up to go and decided that I might as well stay up as long as I was up, and I've stayed up ever since.

Or at least partly up: for a year now, I've been pretty debilitated by a severe depressive episode, which makes it real hard to write this entry. But apart from the last year, if I look back honestly (and by "honestly" I mean not through depressed eyes, as much as that is possible) to 1979, I've lived my life as an expression of that root conviction: this is all meaningless. College was meaningless, so I dropped out after that Fall quarter and moved home to live with my parents. None of us realized I was seriously mentally ill. My relationship with Nancy was meaningless, so I rarely wrote or called or worked too hard on our relationship (that we're still together is so much a testimony to Nancy's graciousness). Church was meaningless, so I only showed up to sing (I can still sing, but even now I'm not convinced singing is not meaningless, so I don't pursue singing). College was still meaningless when I went back in 1981 and graduated in 1983, so I gave it half-effort (maybe I am arrogant: since my half-effort was so good, I wonder how my full-effort would shine) . . . well, I don't want to recapitulate in detail, but trust me, I've struggled all the years since (which includes four degrees, twelve years of ministry [and I will write later on faith and theology] and my current four years and growing hiatus) between my conviction that all this is ultimately meaningless and the assurance that such a conviction is the surest sign of my mental illness.

Depression is a mental illness. Next time I see one of you, remember: he's not arrogant, he's just depressed. Ten years of therapy and drugs shows how tenacious depression can be, at least in my case. Look, I know I should doubt my convictions, and I'm working real hard to do just that. I try to imagine the day when I wake up and experience, feel that life and love are meaningful, that annihilation does not conquer them, that the now overrides the then. Cognitively, I tell myself daily, "You might be wrong," and try really hard to believe that. I see the joy everybody else seems to find in life and I want that, I truly want to feel that way, too. Because if my convictions are right, tragically and ironically, mine is a dreadful way to live the one life I will ever have. And it's dreadful to inflict my convicted life on those I love.

OK, I must be arrogant after all, because finally I think I'm right about life and death when 95% of all people who are or ever were know I'm wrong. But that's mental illness, right there: stubbornly holding one's convictions in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I accept that. So I need your help. Next time you see me, tell me I'm wrong. Better yet, tell me how I'm wrong, tell me how you find meaning in life, how you stare down death, how love lasts beyond all mortal flesh. Testify bravely, boldly, knowing that under this wry, dismissive exterior lives one who wants a new life so badly, who wants your joy and hope and anticipation for tomorrow. Thank you for reading.