Stuck

The last couple of days I've been moving my office, combining my books and papers from two locations into one:  whereas I used to have my desk and biblical studies texts in mine and Nancy's cottage and my organizational and leadership studies (less used than my biblical texts) in the workshop, now both are combined in my new office space in the building formerly known as my daughter's cottage.  Next up, I'll go up to our storage facility and get boxes of goodies such as feminist studies and liberation theology, subjects I first studied in 1983 but have used little since, though I still have the (old and outdated now) texts and still display them proudly.  I remember at my ten-year high school reunion (that would be 1988) how I delighted in shocking my old classmates with "liberation theology" and my plans to write a book about "Jesus the revolutionary."  I'm looking at the shelf space I've reserved for those unused texts right now.

While going through my papers, I came upon a poetry collection I put together 'way back in the Summer of 1982, the summer I spent in New Orleans with Nancy before my senior year in college, the summer I studied Old Testament and English Literature at Loyola, and Nancy and I played racquetball on Loyola's courts.  I tried to get some poems published that summer, unsuccessfully, and eventually (by July, actually) I stopped writing and learned how to bake bagels and cook Chinese food.  But today, re-reading those poems, I was struck by how similar one is to the one I posted here under the heading "Suicidal Tendencies," the older of which I reproduce for you exactly as I wrote it on 4-3-82:

i stand

from

a great height

staring

at

the ground

i

stiffen

slicing regretfully

through

the air

breaking and shattering

then die

i stare

at

the ground

from

a great height

and

a black

yawning

void

stared back

just as intently

If you can get past the presumptuous lower case "i" and the confusion of tenses in the second verse(?) ("stare" vs. "stared"), or the staccato line (what was I thinking?) or the question of whether this is a poem at all, I'm sure you'll recognize (a) the similarity to the more recent poem and (b) the same suicidal tone.  I find it shocking to handle a piece of paper I typed on thirty years ago and find thereon evidence that my thoughts have changed so little in the interval.  I get the feeling that I'm stuck in some way, unable to grow, like a bug in a piece of amber . . . no, that's not quite right.  It's like I'm stuck in one of those snowglobes, in a makeshift office vignette, me alone at a desk made out of an old door, surrounded by amateurish shelves and second-hand furniture, pretending to work on astonishing, insightful prose, awash in academic excellence (Maryville, U. of Chicago, Yale, Emory, Princeton), when in reality I'm cataloging the same artificial snow flakes lying around in the same, predictable heaps, coating the scene unconvincingly in a faux romance.  The truth is, I have not grown a lick in thirty years, I'm still just as stuck ruminating on the same existential issues in tired, trite verse and all my experience and education have not led me beyond a childish, "I don't want to die."

Look, depression engulfed me in 1979 and shook my world mercilessly, and the patterns of falling faux snow were new and intriguing, but bit by bit they grew too predictable as my world was shaken less and less, and less severely, so that today I feel like that globe is covered in dust, unshaken, sitting on a shelf somewhere little noticed with me inside railing repetitiously.  Honestly, through this blog I'm trying to rock the globe (my little vignette, not the earth), to jolt it off the shelf so that it falls and shatters, even if that means spilling me stickily across the floor.  Maybe I'm waiting on one of you to seize this tacky, nostalgic trifle and hurl it against a wall, daring to injure the occupant in setting him free.  However it happens, I want to be free, not pain-free or depression-free (I'm resigned that I'll always be depressed) but stasis-free, alive and growing so that the next thirty years resembles the woeful repetition of these prior not at all.  I find the thought horrible that I will be trolling the net thirty years hence and find my writing and thoughts as closely resemble those in this post as do those in these two poems.  That will truly be a wasted life.  Thank you for reading.

Is There Purpose?

Is there a purpose to my depression?  What's the reason I should feel so bad for so long?  Rather than being a mundane, brain mis-wiring or chemical imbalance, does my being depressed serve some Higher Aim?  

So many ways to begin to answer these questions.  The agnostic empiricist in me warns that Life has no purpose, no driving aim or ultimate goal, no teleology in the classical sense, but that part of me is mistaken.  Life, even in atheistic terms, does have a purpose (though I wouldn't call it Purpose):  to make more life.  From its single-celled beginning, struggling against entropy and disorder, Life presses and surges towards more life, more and diverse forms, utilizing mutations to fill unexploited niches, all without a Guiding Hand, you understand, but nonetheless subsumed into Purpose:  Life swells and recedes, expands here and contracts there, but fills our globe wherever it may.  And I'm sure we're not alone:  this same, indomitable process is undoubtedly universal (we're hardly unique), part of the fabric of being itself, so Life will have grasped a toehold somewhere else, and there it will push for more Life just as hard as it does here.

In agnostic terms, then, my depression is anti-Life, for depression impels me to retreat from Life, to consider ending my part in it; rather than expand, to contract, to shrink until I have no part in Life's outpouring and bounty, so that I am reclusive, remote.  Yet this negativity, too, can serve Life's Purpose, for Life's expansion is based on successful forms, and successful forms are those that lead to more Life.  Given that all forms - successful and unsuccessful, and the agnostic empiricist in me names depression an unsuccessful life form - require resources, the depressive's retreat from life serves Life by freeing up space and place for more successful forms.  I serve Life, for instance, by not serving a church, because my absence makes way for one better suited (read "not depressed") to serve that church.  The unsuccessful retreats from resources on which the successful thrive.

Yet this is hardly satisfying, though one (perhaps me) may find it noble, provided the scale of justice, balancing success against failure, measures truly.  It's also hardly complete, for I have more in me than an agnostic empiricist:  I also have in me a faithful servant, one who is determined to serve the One author of all Life, even if my serving requires my not serving in the pastorate.  So I have to restate the questions:  Does God have a purpose to my depression?  Why does God require that I should feel so bad for so long?  Does my being depressed serve God in some way?

Immediately, faith retorts:  God is not the author of suffering.  Well, faith has not read Scripture.  God punishes extravagantly in Scripture:  read Exodus, or Jeremiah.  Read Job, and find that God - going against God's own law - allows a truly righteous person to suffer for little more than a wager.  Read Ecclesiastes, if you can stand such a stark, nihilistic depiction of the human condition, how God has made both days of prosperity and days of adversity.  Read Mark, where God dangles the very Kingdom like a carrot predicated on how much one is willing to suffer, to take up one's cross like Jesus.  Read Romans, where Paul argues that some are created as vessels to be destroyed just to show God's might and glory, where Paul argues we will share Jesus' glorification so long as we share his suffering.  If God is not the author of suffering, God is at least a willful spectator, a monitor and scorekeeper, a judge who hands out rewards for suffering, which at least makes God complicit, at least according to Scripture.

So I have to say, yes, my depression may serve God in some way, that God may require that I be depressed, that God may have a purpose in my suffering.  Maybe my faith is meant to be an example for others, that I am faithful even though I see no earthly rewards such as career, or possessions, or well-being, certainly a needed antidote to the prosperity gospel.  Maybe my depression is punishment for my sins - God disciplines those that God loves - which gives it purpose, though for the most part my sins are ordinary and common and I can't help thinking God disciplines me too severely.  Maybe my depression makes me holier, that I, too, may be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, which makes me similar (barely) to our Savior, so my depression may be the Spirit's work of sanctification, making me more Christlike with each day.  Maybe my depression will lead me, finally, to a spiritual ecstasy, where I may shout Scripture with my whole being, "I have been crucified with Christ," and know on my final day that mine has truly been a cross-shaped life and, based on that form, truly blessed.

This all may be, but the wicked irony, the viselike catch-22, is that I cannot feel purposeful, cannot feel other than useless, lest I invalidate depression's meager purpose.  I can think these things, but the surety of experience, the body-knowledge that comes from feeling the truth of the matter, escapes me.  Rather than purpose, this all feels vain.  Yet, still, I am faithful, and that counts for something.  Thank you for reading.

Bodies

I presume I have a different view of our bodies than most of you reading this:  I do not believe that you and I have, encased in our mortal, physical bodies, in some mystical or metaphysical way, an immortal soul that holds the essence of who we are.  Rather, I believe (and I do mean "believe" here:  there's not enough evidence for me to think one way or the other) that you and I are just bodies, that all that we do and are as thinking, feeling, individual beings can be chalked up to physical processes - electro-chemical reactions, gene expression, firing neurons, autonomic systems, etc.  In crass terms:  we're all meat with no animating, eternal spark that usually goes by the name of "soul."

As you can imagine, my belief makes me ambivalent about my body.  On the one hand, I'm fascinated by the complexity and intricacy of our bodies, that my thinking, creative, imaginative self is attributed to physical processes.  On the other hand, bodies are fragile vessels to hold such wondrous individuality.  Who I am as an individual is as much a result of my genetic complexity as it is of my upbringing and life experiences, of my inheritance from my parents as it is of my parents' raising me.  But at any time during my upbringing and subsequent life, any of a myriad of possible and all-too-common mishaps could have quite easily ended my individual self for all time and space.

Scripture's testimony regarding bodies and souls is actually closer to my belief in a mortal body than it is to a more common belief in a body/soul duality.  Whereas many people hold a belief in a "living soul" (the KJV's translation of the Hebrew nefesh chaiyah), they actually believe in an indestructible, immortal spirit that animates or gives the spark of life to a mortal body.  The Hebrew Bible understands "living soul" to be a body made from the dust of the ground that in animated by God's breath, the breath or "wind" of life.  On a person's death, God's breath leaves a person, leaving the dust behind.  The Christian New Testament for the most part continues this conviction:  only rarely does the New Testament speak of persons having an immortal soul (I challenge you to find such a reference), emphasizing, instead, the resurrection of the body (Paul's contention that "we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed . . . the corruptible will become incorruptible).  Even in the New Testament, when Jesus dies on the cross Mark says he "gave up his spirit" or, more literally, "he expelled his wind" (the Greek pneuma translates the Hebrew ruach, both meaning "wind" or "breath" or "spirit"), pointing to a conservative, Jewish conviction that bodies are animated by God's breath.  So if you take away God's breath (at least in a crass sense:  I do hold a spiritual conviction regarding our animating spark, though that's in no way an immortal, individual essence) Scripture and I share body theory.

This belief certainly contributes to my depression, at least indirectly.  Whereas Scripture's depiction of our delightful dependence on God's very breath for our very selves is in no way a depressive depiction, my convictions regarding the fragility of our mortal lives leads to some degree of stress thrumming through my daily life.  For instance, the other day a mosquito bit me as I was sitting on our back porch, and my mind went immediately to thoughts of the West Nile virus and speculating whether that mosquito (which I wiped out of this life) had spent any time sucking on birds.  The thought that I, too, in all my individuality can be wiped out by something as minuscule as a virus from something so innocuous as a mosquito bite lends an undue amount of stress to my life, as do so many similar and common maladies.  And as I've written before, stress aggravates depression, so I concede that my belief in a "mortal soul" (another translation of the Hebrew nefesh chaiyah) - because of its low-level but pervasive stress - probably fuels my depression.

However, I do wonder whether our world would be better off if more people shared my belief.  Take Middle Eastern, irate mobs for instance.  A mob of bodies sharing one all-consuming anger is a spiritual matter, at the very least because the conglomeration of bodies share one spirit of vengeance and retribution.  Further, a mob by its very numbers - or a protest or march or public movement of a large number of individuals - seeks not just to enact justice (so they think), but to instill in those observing the mob's behavior the same rage, the same "spirit."  Too often, such violent mob action leads to death, whether by the mobs hands or by the hands of the authorities confronting the mob.  I can't help but wonder whether the mob that killed our ambassador to Libya would have spared his life if the common belief among those mobsters had been more like mine than an Islamic body/soul duality.  I wonder whether any murderer would have refrained from murdering if he or she believed that murder was not a matter of liberating a soul from its body but of eradicating totally an individual unique among all the many billions of our kind that have ever lived.  Crassly, belief in an immortal soul means you can't really kill a person, just by killing them send them on to the next life, and that's not really death at all.

I will never kill a person, nor will I ever support killing a person in the name of justice (war is a different matter, but I think almost all wars are evil and not necessary evils either) because killing means, to me, obliterating a person's entire existence.  I hate killing anything, even the pesky fleas that are leftover from our pet-sitting this past summer:  in their own way, fleas are just as remarkably and wondrously made as am I, though I doubt they're individuals.  I'm conflicted about eating meat, especially pork since pigs seem so intelligent and intelligence is primary prerequisite for individuality (if pork didn't taste so good I'd be less conflicted).  In fact, because I do not believe that we humans alone of all creation have immortal souls I find a remarkable unity among all life:  all of us, from the simplest plant to the most complex animal (which may not be us) share a remarkable, so-far-irreproducible marvelous thing called "life," a process still mysterious and, hence, mystical (or at least mystifying).  To kill end even one life is to diminish forever life's marvelous complexity and unity.  Thank you for reading.

"Why Me?"?

As I reflect on these posts and, through the process of writing, on my thoughts and feelings regarding depression, I find that I don't ask, "Why me?"  Oh, my posts hold plenty of self-pity, don't get me wrong, even though my self-pity may not leap off the screen:  writing sympathetically rather than accusatorially about my illness implies a degree of self-pity, and that's a good thing.  Initially evaluated "Why me?" sounds like a self-pitying question:  "I hurt, so what did I do to deserve this?"  "Why am I the one in pain, and not all these smiling, happy people around me?" And though the question, rightfully so, does hold a healthy and necessary sympathy for oneself, it holds much more.

To whom is "Why me?" addressed?  Secondarily evaluated, "Why me?" sounds as if it is addressed to one's conversation partners, in this instance, from me to you, the readers of this blog.  Or when we get down and honest with our loved ones and allow ourselves to be fully vulnerable (something I rarely do), we ask them, "Why me," because we've run out of answers or our own answers do not satisfy, or we need corroboration of our answers from a second, interested party.  But whatever answers we get from our conversation partners, they will be deemed insufficient unless they address the real interlocutor, that One bigger than us all, whether that One is God or the Universe or Life itself.

Ultimately, "Why me" asks of the determining One the reasons for my suffering and, I might add, the reasons why other people do not suffer as I do.  Further, it implies that my suffering is unjust in comparison with people worse than I am who apparently, even though they're scoundrels, don't suffer at all.  "Why me," thus, is a question of justice and righteousness, a question demanding an answer from a God we consider just and righteous, or from a Life that has promised us that if we live right, work hard and play fair, we will succeed.  And in this sense, "Why me" includes a positive self-evaluation:  I don't deserve to suffer like this, I've done nothing to warrant this suffering, so why am I suffering?  So "Why me" is, finally, an unjustly suffering sufferer's demand for justice from some greater entity that purports to be fair.

It's tempting to give Vonnegut's absurdist, nihilistic but zen-like Tralfamadorian answer, "Why you, why me, why anyone?  The moment is structured so."  But I find his answer's attempt to bypass authority or intentionality fails in the notion of "structure."  And, actually, discussing Vonnegut at this point would do more, in my mind, to establish my literary hipness (though I'm actually poorly-read) than to get at an honest self-evaluation.  It's avoidance of tough issues, nothing more.  So forget this paragraph, if you will.

I do not ask "Why me" for a couple of reasons.  First, and perhaps foremost, I do not believe God creates each one of us intentionally.  Unlike Scripture's poetry, I do not believe God knit me together in my mother's womb, nor do I believe I am wondrously made (though I do wonder at the marvelous intricacy and uniqueness of each one of us).  I do not believe God made me a depressive, I do not believe that Life or the Universe conspired to create me as I am, I do not find any intention in my being depressed.  Rather, I think my depression is simply the way I am, resulting from a combination of genetic heritage and life experience, both of which are the result of this messy, disordered life we live rather than any intentionality whatsoever.  I'm a depressive because I turned out this way, that's it.

But that's superficial.  Actually, if I'm being really honest with myself, and this is getting down to the gritty, I suspect that I don't ask "Why me" because deep down I do think I deserve this.  Ironically, my thinking I deserve this is not due to a low self-image:  I have a high self-image, or at least hold extremely high expectations of myself.  I think I'm brilliant, competent, extremely talented, more so than most everyone I know.  I think I'm one of a kind, extremely rare, capable of excellence in diverse fields.  But I have screwed up in my life, sometimes royally.  I have hurt (so I imagine) everyone I love at one time or another, I have elevated myself over those with greater needs (even this blogging is, to me, a form of self-elevation).  I have squandered all these talents and capabilities, I have accomplished nothing with so much that I've been given, so "Why not me" is a more apt, a more just and righteous question.  If I were not depressed, then something would be dreadfully wrong with the world.

Lest you, dear reader, find this too disturbing, please know I do not stop with such a negative self-evaluation.  Though I come off as the pharisee who prays, "Thank you God that I'm not like that publican over there," I'm actually more like the publican:  though I cannot raise my eyes to heaven, I do pray, "Have mercy on me, a sinner."  Embracing forgiveness, though . . . that's the subject of another post.  Thank you for reading.

Self-Loathing

As I read back over these posts on depression, I begin to suspect that I'm not the most objective observer of my own life.  Rather than a fair, balanced, even-handed description of my depression, I notice places where I give a less-than-honest, unflattering depiction of my illness.  For instance, when I write that my retrospective posture is a matter of choice, I imply criticism that I have not chosen a forward-looking posture, when in actuality grieving is an almost autonomous process that is rarely a matter of personal choice.  Though I've tried to write honestly, I sense some degree of self-loathing creeping into my descriptions.

Being suicidal implies self-loathing.  Though this is not true for many people, I suspect, my depression includes a degree of self-loathing, not just in terms of "I wish I was not this way" but in terms of "It's your fault for being this way" and "You should not be depressed, why don't you fix it."  There's an accusation, you see, that this is my fault in some way, that I'm to blame not just for being depressed, but for letting depression go on for these thirty years or so, that if I were a better person I'd straighten up and fly right, I'd end the pity party and get on with living the last half of my life.

Now, on an intellectual level, I understand that self-loathing is simply one of many facets of depression, that just like depression self-loathing does not truly express who I am, my capabilities, contributions, etc.  Like depression, self-loathing is not rational, so, whereas rationally, intentionally thinking differently can relieve me of feelings of self-loathing, rationality tends to be ineffectual in combating the effects of self-loathing.  Without constant attention, the primary effect of self-loathing - self-denigration (a milder cousin to self-destruction) - creeps into many areas of my life.

For instance, I've been a minister now for sixteen years.  The first nine of these sixteen years, I was a full-time, solo pastor, which means I preached about forty-six Sundays of the year.  During my first year in the pastorate, I tried writing out my sermons, but found that I was unable to write the way I wanted to preach:  rather than writing in a warm, accessible, conversational tone, I wrote in my academic, scholastic voice, which I did not find effective in preaching.  So after that first year, I began writing just the outline to my sermons so that I could fill in the details in a conversational manner.  These outlines were hand-written on small, five by seven note pads.  Rarely did I keep an outline after I had preached it.

I remember clearly when I stopped writing even outlines:  about four months into my second pastorate, during a sermon on the Spirit's coming on the first Sunday of Advent (that would be 1999), I left both the pulpit and my outline behind and preached from memory.  On the one hand, you see, I became a much more dynamic preacher because of this move, so I don't regret it too much.  On the other hand, I no longer wrote outlines; instead, I committed my sermon outline to memory then filled in the details during preaching.  And that means that I have no copies of all those sermons, even the most recent one I preached:  like champaign glasses smashed in the fireplace after a toast (I flatter myself), my sermons were singular events, one-time experiences impermanent as a mayfly.  Though I do have some digital recordings, I find myself regretting that I have no record of all that work.

I could describe the same tendency in my scholarship, how early on in college I stopped taking notes in class, imagining myself smart enough to remember all the details.  Or how I didn't keep papers I wrote or tests I took, telling myself that these were the works of an amateur, and that I would revisit these subjects later on when I was more competent, a practice I continued, get this, through my doctoral thesis.  Same for all the hours of scholarship I accomplished in the practice of preaching, all those insights on Scripture, those particularly "Jeff" readings and interpretations, I've always denigrated in favor of some future work when I'll be truly competent.  I could die today, and Nancy and Ian and Alexa sorting through my effects would find it difficult to convince a stranger that I've actually preached for sixteen years, nine of those full-time:  there's simply no corroborating evidence, aside from personal testimonies.

Again, harking back to my initial post on depression, some would this behavior as arrogance ("He thinks he's too smart to take notes"), but I see it as self-loathing ("I'm no scholar" or "My notes are junk").  And while I am having success therapeutically countering feelings of self-loathing, I have hardly begun to counter the effects of self-loathing, the many obvious and subtle ways I undermine myself, my gifts and my ambitions (I don't sing, I don't preach, I don't lead, I don't perform, I don't do anything but sit up on the mountain and stew).  For thirty years now, I've contorted myself to place my foot on my neck and grind my face in the dirt (self-loathing, you see).  This is neither rational nor sane, and I want to stop.  Thank you for reading.

Grief

Recently, several people have told me how painful they find it to read my bloggings about depression.  Honestly, I have little sensitivity for how my writing comes across:  to me, this is just everyday stuff, no big whoop.  But I'm beginning to recognize that you readers may not see it that way, that these entries are distressing.  I want to say, hang on, I'll be writing about the upsides soon, and I will, but I've not gotten down to the depths I want to plumb yet so the upsides are yet a bit ahead.  

As I mentioned in an eariler post, I grieve almost perpetually as one of the ways I feel depressed.  To me, grief is a longing for something lost when I know it is irretrievably lost.  That unrequitable longing expresses as a deep, thorough sadness, a lump in my throat and a propensity to weep, an vascilation between a desperate denial of loss and a self-loathing surety of loss that chastises me for my foolish denial.  I am also helpless facing loss, which leads to a frustrated anger at time's remorseless march, at the fleeting nature of experience as time flows insensiate into the past.  In grief, I am constantly looking to the past, longing for moments past, so much so that I have almost no expectations for the future, no excitement for upcoming events.  Grief locks me in an eternal present that streams and tatters forceably away to the past.

I remember this grief from a young age.  The summer between my third and fourth grade years was magical in many ways:  the weather was perfect, I had discovered butterfly collecting, I had become a competent outfielder in baseball, even making the all-star team, I had learned how to yo-yo, I could go on.  Suffice it to say I had matured to a point where I was capable of skill in several areas:  I enjoyed being good at things.  Yet during that summer, I found myself thinking about the nature of time, discussing time with my brother and neighbors, arguing about the possibility of time travel (like we saw on Star Trek), but realizing that the wonderful game of kick-the-can we played yesterday was forever gone, somehow destroyed by being past, that though we had indeed played and enjoyed ourselves, we could never get back to that specific evening, that particular game.  I remember the sadness I felt, the frustration even then that I couldn't hold on to good times, to events and smells and tastes and feelings:  all flow away never to return.

Here's where depression is not sane:  I do not experience bad times the same way.  When I am suffering, I do not realize that time flows the same for bad times as for good, I do not see grief as limited in duration simply because all events end as they move from present to the past.  I should understand that my depression, too, can have an end, that I may well find myself in a present free from depression, that like all other things my depression has flowed into the past and has become irretrievable.  To put this differently, I should be able to imagine a future where I stand in a present free from depression, I should be able to turn around and let time's wind blow through me forcefully, placing my hopes on my depression fraying and tattering simply because I can remember (vaguely now, but still actually) how I felt before I became depressed and I can imagine feeling that way again.  This is possible:  depression, too, can pass.  But can I turn and refocus from the past to the future?  Or, can I forget both past and future and focus on this eternal present, can I celebrate "now" as rich and vibrant, filled with both good and bad but all the more blessed because of it, varied and textured and always real?

Well, I'm not prepared to call myself "insane," though as a depressive I'd certainly not call myself "sane" either.  My grief for the past does not relent, or I do not relent from my grieving.  At some level, I do recognize that my posture, my attention is a matter of decision, that I am not helplessly posed in retrospect.  Someday, I will reposition myself, I will turn and face a new direction.  Sadly, today is not that day, not yet.  Thank you for reading.

Suicidal Tendencies

My depression at times has included suicidal impulses, periods when my uncontrolled mind would turn to thoughts of suicide impulsively.  I'm not talking about casual "I could kill myself" or "I wonder how dying feels" thoughts, but about sometimes weak but sometimes quite strong impulses actually to do it.  For instance, here's a short poem about a recent trip to Chimney Rock in North Carolina and my impulses at the top.

Up and Down Chimney Rock

After a slow, hard slog (I'm 52) of seventeen hundred steps

The stairway climbing over boulders sloughed from the cliffs above

Winding around sheer bluffs with granite pilasters

We summit the observation platform atop Chimney Rock.

I see the handrail jiggying in electric bas relief

Walk to it, grasp it with palms slightly slick

Magnificent view, but what grasps me is

Gravity's suction, drawing my eye downward

To the shearing cliffs and scrabbled boulders

Imagine climbing over the railing

Fearfully trembling, despairing,

Nancy rushing forward, begging me to come back

Let go and begin to lean outward, an inch at a time

Relishing the wind and sun and clouds and light

Leaning into the breeze, into rare space

Thinking, ok, let's do this

I pass the halfway point, surrender to the suction

Leap away, begin my last dive

Ramrod straight, arms wide in a swan embrace

Like I did as a young man

Soaring off the board in the summer before college

The wind growing suddenly harder as I try to

Slice its buffeting, rocks surging upward

In good form I close my eyes . . . 

A cloud covers the sun and I blink

Self-consciously wipe my palms on my pants

Silently blaming the sweat on the climb

Step back from the rail, pose for a picture

Start the slow decline

Down the scarp and scree below.

I find these impulses especially ironic since I'm so sure there's no existence after death, so why would I want to rush my oblivion?  Depression isn't rational, is what it is.  And though, like most people, I've experienced instances, mere instances like being on a height (like the north rim of the Black Canyon, where you can look down 2200 feet to the Gunnison River) when I thought of flinging myself over the edge, I've also experienced two periods of prolonged contemplating death by my own hand.

The worst, by far the worst, was during the onset of my depressive episode of 2002.  That winter, while we were building our log home (and sometimes I can't help but view the past ten years of building six buildings as anything but madness) I found myself trying to come up with a way of suicide that would foolproofedly appear accidental, accidental because I would never want my family to know I'd taken my own life.  So I thought of having a car wreck (too chancy - I could end up paralyzed and dependent), or breathing a mixture ammonia and bleach (we were using highly concentrated ammonia, 27% versus the 4% stuff you get in the cleaning aisle at your grocery store) though my family would consider me too smart for such a blunder, you see, or simply disappearing and hoping no one ever found my body.  But that hard winter, in the basement cutting indoor trim on my Shopsmith, I concluded the best way was an accident with the power tools, just a simple slip of the hand on the table saw and I could sever an arm, bleed out before I could get nextdoor (we built the log home on our ten acres next door to our current home) to get help.  

I didn't do it, though I spend too much time staring at that saw blade and weeping.  That period passed, and I didn't have another such sustained period until last fall, after my current relapse.  This time, I didn't give so much thought to hiding my hand in the matter.  My family are hunters, and my dad has about twenty rifles of various calibers.  I found myself thinking about taking a rifle, placing it under my chin and ending this for good.  Again, such thoughts are not rational, or, better yet, are not amenable to rational treatment.  So strong were these impulses that I didn't hunt at all last season, simply refused to go into the woods with a rifle.  Hell, I even avoided the rooms where my dad keeps his rifles, watching the football games in the living room rather than downstairs in my dad's man-cave in the basement.  That period passed, too, probably by the time football season ended, this impulse simply faded away under the combined weight of meds and counseling.  

I suspect that behind suicidal tendencies is a desire for rebirth, for starting over, for eliciting so severe a break in my life's continuity that I can begin anew without the limits of the past, without the mistakes and missteps, the times I did not take full advantage of opportunities, when I half-tried and left my future shallower than it should've been.  Of course, without reincarnation suicide is no starting over at all, but an irrevocable ending, yet the impulse to suicide must be otherwise, or have a different dimension, since pure thoughts of suicide should send one screaming away.  For me, suicidal thoughts feel similar to dreams I have about starting over, of returning to high school, of playing football, of being in college where this time I do things differently, I import the hindsight I've gained from half a century into a period that has no business having such wisdom, but I do it anyway (in my dreams) and now can look back on a different past from a different future.  This isn't rational, either.  Rational would be to take fair accounting of my present, see how depression has engendered in me a self-destructive tendency that has thwarted my ambitions at several key points in my past, then realize that I have engendered a break, a significant break in my life over the last four years, and that I am at a place where I can start a new future, that my path forward can be different than the self-negating path that has brought me here.  I want this to be real.  Thank you for reading.

Crossing Mt. Madison

Stress exacerbates depression.  I had gotten my depression under control by reducing my daily stress, first in 2005 by exchanging a solo pastorate for an associate pastorate, then by retiring from full-time pastoring in 2008 in order to build straw-bale cottages for my brother and sister-in-law and for Nancy and me.  This and good therapy allowed me to stop taking meds and counseling in 2007, so that by the time Nancy and I began to hike the Appalachian Trail in June of 2011 (we started in New York and headed north) I had managed my depression med- and counseling-free for four years.  I thought I was cured.

Long-trail backpacking places great demands on one's body.  To hike twelve miles with a thirty-pound pack daily stresses one's body in various ways, not the least of which is one's dietary requirements.  Simply to maintain one's body weight at that level of demand requires 4000 calories per day, an amount impossible to get in the back country.  So in addition to the raw, physical demands on one's muscles and joints, a backpacker is constantly hungry and losing weight.  By the time we entered New Hampshire's White Mountains, Nancy and I had been on the trail for seven weeks and had lost almost all our body fat:  we had trail legs for sure, but we had almost no energy reserves in our bodies.  I was down to 160 pounds from my pre-hike weight of 180.  I was starving all the time.

We left the Mt. Madison hut - one of eight or nine hiking hostels scattered along the AT through the Whites that offer bunk beds and hot meals to short-term hikers but that also let through-hikers "work for stay" - on a morning of steady, fifty-mile an hour wind and dense fog that reduced our visibility to about thirty feet.  Though the hut is only at 4000 ft. or so, this far north it's just in the tree-line:  the AT immediately leaves the tree-line on its way up Madison's side.  The AT climbs rocks and boulders for the next half mile, gaining about 1000 feet in altitude:  hikers describe this rate of climb as going "straight up."  The wind made climbing (and that steep a grade was more climbing than hiking) difficult, especially as it increased the higher we climbed.  The fog (we were in the clouds, actually) made finding the trail a matter of stopping at one rock cairn and squinting and pointing until we had spotted the next rock cairn, usually twenty to thirty feet further along the trail, then trying to keep the second cairn in sight as we climbed between the two.  Slow-going, you see.

By the time we summitted (it probably took us an hour to climb that half-mile), the wind was steady at 90-100 mph (we subsequently learned) and gusting higher.  Nancy was having a hard time keeping her feet.  Madison's summit is a smallish cone, maybe ten feet higher than the mountain's shoulder, so I hollered to Nancy that we could skirt around the cone on the leeward side and get a break from the wind.  As we climbed around to the far side, we found we were not alone:  an older couple (in their mid-sixties) from Kentucky whom we had met last night at the Madison hut was just summitting, and though he was holding his ground pretty well, all 95 pounds of her were struggling to stay upright through the wind.

I'm a paternalistic hiker:  I tend to feel responsible for those we're hiking with, even though, like Nancy, they're quite capable of hiking on their own.  Honestly, I was having little problem with the wind or the visibility:  I'm built stocky and short, with a high body mass and strong legs.  A gust of 120 meant I'd have to hunker down low and grab a boulder, but the steady wind, though tending to force one off one's direction, was no problem.  Yet the progress of our new group - being in what most hikers would call a dicey situation, we'd automatically coalesced into one group of four - became painfully slow:  I'd move forward about twenty feet, then turn and point out the best (in my opinion) route to Nancy, I'd wait until she had caught up, then we'd both wait until the Kentucky couple had gotten close enough to see us move on.  All the while the wind was howling and the fog impenetrable.

On the north side, Madison descends in a series of step-like plateaus - maybe a hundred feet or so long ending in a steep downhill of thirty to fifty feet - that follow the knife-edge point of a ridge.  The wind was coming at us from the northwest, that is, perpendicular to our route, constantly trying (and succeeding) to blow us off our feet and, I feared, off the ridge.  The cairns were getting harder to identify, as if the clouds were thickening, and all the time I'm hoping it won't start raining:  the one piece of good luck we had was that the temperature was in the mid-fifties - great for hiking so long as we stayed dry, but if it began to rain potentially dangerous.  We slowed to a crawl, struggling to stay on our feet, the Kentucky gentleman seeming more interested in keeping up with me and Nancy than ensuring his wife, who was lagging behind, made it safely.  After the third or fourth plateau - each one teasing us with a downhill section that ended in another plateau instead of continuing directly to tree-line, where I was sure we'd get a break from this wind - as I'm crouching forward waiting for the three to scrabble their painstaking way among the boulders, anxiously feeling the wind for the first pinpricks that presage rain, all my attention was suddenly focused on one thought:  I could leave these people.

Of course, I didn't leave them, but I thought it, and one of "them" was Nancy.  Stuffing that thought back into my head, I returned to my self-appointed guide duties, redoubled my efforts to ensure we were all together and moving purposefully, and by two or three more plateaus we caught a glimpse of the tree-line through a break in the clouds:  actually quite a majestic sight, we could clearly see the ridge descending to a thick blanket of trees no more than half a mile away.  Rejuvenated, we climbed down through lessening wind and longer breaks in the clouds, so that by the time we made tree-line the wind was a mere whisper and we were shedding clothes to cool off in the sudden heat.  As we shared lunch, the Kentuckians and we celebrated our successful crossing and made plans to ride together (they had a car parked at a road crossing nearby) into town and share supper together.

Six days later, crossing into Maine, I warned Nancy that I was getting depressed.  Two days after that, I was doubled over on the trail, weeping and unable to continue the hike.  At a road crossing, we hitched a ride into a town eight miles away, spent the night at a hostel and called a friend of Nancy's from Portland, who came to pick us up and take us to the airport.  As soon as we got home, I got a prescription for antidepressants from my primary care physician and scheduled an appointment with my psychiatrist.  And my four years of being "cured" were over.

Looking back, I'm convinced the stress of crossing Mt. Madison brought on my relapse.  Again, I was depleted, almost no body fat, no reserves of energy, and I'd never been in wind that severe before.  Worse, at the moment I felt most responsible for three people I thought of leaving them behind and getting myself safely down the mountain.  And even though we took two days to recover in town, eating extravagantly as only through-hikers can, all too soon we were back to our fourteen mile days, back to our hunger and deprivation, back to backpacking's daily stress on body and soul.  Like the wind on Mt. Madison, since last August my depression has been unrelenting.  Thank you for reading.

Mind Control

I've seen the same psychiatrist since 2002, almost exclusively to prescribe meds to treat my depression.  But meds alone are rarely sufficient in treating depression.  One also needs counseling, to put one's mind out there for observation and critique with the goal of asserting some kind of control over one's thoughts and feelings.  Often, this control depends on uncovering the roots of depressive thoughts and feelings, of getting down to the bottom of things and facing things unfaced before.  And successful delving depends in turn on honestly speaking about oneself and trusting the counselor's ability to sort through misleads and avoidances until both arrive at some degree of truth.

My first counselor, 2002 - 2003, helped identify a main root of my depression but did little to stem my self-destructive behavior.  He said he was frightened of my intellect, though that may have been a counselor ruse.  Yet he did seem nervous about speaking, worried that I was critiquing how well he spoke or formed his thoughts into words.  I enjoyed our weekly meetings, enjoyed spending an hour talking about nothing but me, but apart from getting to that one root, we were not that productive together.

My second counselor, 2003 - 2007, was much more effective in helping me live more positively, even to the point of my living med-free from 2007 until 2011.  He was older than my first counselor; in fact, he retired in 2007, one of the reasons I stopped seeing a counselor.  One of the best things he did with me was to practice EMDR therapy (google it) to help assuage my emotional responses to certain thoughts.  He was not afraid of me in any way, was not reticent in challenging me in many areas.  Under his care, I came to see depression as primarily a way of feeling - I was going to feel bad, but that was ok - and found the strength to defuse those feelings, so that I considered myself "cured."

My third and current counselor (2012 - ?) holds a PhD and specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).  Together we develop disciplines to control my thoughts and feelings, which is actually quite difficult as I'm sure you know.   For instance, currently I tend to have distressing thoughts and feelings about my soft and squishy organs, 'cause I'm absolutely certain they're whats going to kill me some day.  If I let my mind go, I tend to seep sweat over pancreatic and esophageal cancer, both hard to diagnose early and, consequently, both extremely deadly.  I tend to see every headache or dizzy spell as signs of inoperable brain cancer, and find my self terrified by the certainty that I'm going to hear a doctor soon say, "There's nothing we can do for you."  I find myself wishing I was a spider-like creature, with a hard, hard carapace or exoskeleton, impermeable and cold, with a pendulous sac holding all those soft, squishy, swampy and vulnerable organs, and that by some miracle or special spider ability I could slice away that sac, watch it fall away forever, and survive as a hard, spindly, cold and rigid being with no softness (read "weakness") whatsoever.  CBT helps me first to turn such thoughts off, to think instead about all the good things my innards do for me (giving me life among the most significant).  Then, CBT helps me to face the scary feelings, to experience them, to realize that feeling them is not killing me and, so, to defuse a lot of their power.

Mind control comes hard to us, so we all live at the mercy of our minds.  For most of us, our minds rule benignly, but for depressives, our minds are vicious despots, out to get us at the very least, suicidal at the worst.  What control we have is tenuous, susceptible to accident, or illness, or changes in life circumstances, or media, or diet.  My control unraveled after summiting Mt. Madison in late July, 2011, but that's the subject of another post.  Thank you for reading.

Better Living Through Chemistry

2001, my grandmother home from the drug store with an armload of prescriptions, sitting at the kitchen table with the little week-long, seven cubicle old age aid to dosage regularity, putting one pill in each cubicle from prescription after prescription, so that they're bulging out of the little tops so that she has to force the lids down, hoping they'll catch and stay closed, then at dinner she's gulping them down even the horse pills, taking them with little bites of applesauce all the while grumping that they cost about $400.00 a month even with insurance, but her blood pressure's good, her heart strong, no dizziness, better living through chemistry.

2003, my first taste of antidepressants, Zoloft or a generic equivalent and, mmmmmm, suddenly I'm feeling real good walking to the mail box, realizing I'm not sad and I don't hurt, mmmmmm, I could like this, I could smile like this, hell, is this how normal people feel all the time?  Feel the sun and the breeze, see the green of the grass and the blue of the sky, the white house with dogs capering in the front yard, the driveway warm under my bare feet, straighten up, shake off the gloom, see a future different from the hell of the last year, who cares that my pecker's numb, worthy trade-off, better living through chemistry.

2007, had enough of these damn pills, tired of taking them each day, dependent, weak, junked-up fuzzy thinking, need clarity now more than relief, need to write and think, argue my point, dissertation, after all depression is a feeling, I feel a certain way, just a way of feeling and I can tolerate, realize that the feeling is not the sole reality, bye-bye shrink, ink on the arm to celebrate, I am my family - A lexa, N ancy, I an, ani means me, hey for Hayes, bye-bye Cymbalta it was good to know you, now just me and MY brain chemistry.

Today, one year in and eight meds down after running home from the AT and straight to the doctor to get the meds again, the good ol' meds, but not Cymbalta 'cause it's $12.00 a day with a catastrophic illness insurance policy so the drugs are full price, try the generics the cheap ones, one year on and tricyclics do the job, like Zoloft only instead of welcome to the monkey house numbness I've gained a middle-aged prostate needing some of my dad's Flomax, fair trade-off, thinking about feeling again, just a feeling, thinking about working again, hating the thought of taking meds each day for the rest of my life, my life insufficient without aid, my life halting and spare, ill like my grandmother was (may she rest in peace), each year the pills will multiply, someday I'll have my own week of cubes with pills bulging out the top and from now to then each day is a medicated day, a weak day, but better living through chemistry.