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.

Someone Else's Words

This posted by PaulDavisTheFirst on the website for the Anchorage Daily News, in a comment in response to a rant by Paul Jenkins on January 29th:

the last time a president tried to tell it like it really is (carter), the country thought he was being a real downer. congratulations for all those who couldn't take the advice to wear an extra sweater or turn down the thermostat - you've basically made it impossible for any president or national elected leader to realistically describe the country to itself.

you want reality? we live in a country that has outsourced its manufacturing capacity, wildly redistributed wealth toward the top 5%, promoted a consumer culture that has been powered by credit, failed to enact a health care system that stands any real chance of bringing our costs into line with other industrialized countries, launched a series of massively expensive wars primarily in defense of our interests in the energy resources of the middle east, failed to significantly develop alternate domestic supplies of clean energy, failed to maintain our physical infrastructure, created a culture that is endlessly focused on our lives as consumers when most of us spend more time as employees and citizens, semi-consistently cut taxes to the wealthiest people (in marked contrast to what has been done during the most economically productive periods in US history), deregulated industry after industry out of some naive and historically absurd notion that they will police themselves in accord with our national interest, sold our political system to the highest bidder (which these days can legally be a corporation), stood by as political gerrymandering and absurd senate rules drain the vitality our government's decision making processes ... the list goes on and on and on.

What do you think you'd feel about a president who said all that?

Read more: http://www.adn.com/2011/01/29/1674405/americans-grow-weary-of-political.html#ixzz1CUZ85RCJ

I like how thorough he is in describing our country's economic policies.

A Stupid Economy

I have heard that President Obama will focus on the economy during tonight’s state of the union address, purportedly because the economy is the number one issue concerning the majority of Americans recently polled by some polling organization or another. Harking back to President Clinton’s 1992 internal campaign motto, “It’s the economy, stupid,” our president seems to be focusing his address on the economy in an effort first to address a public concern and second to bolster his political well-being. That our people care deeply about the economy, according to this brief analysis, is a persistent trend.

And I get this. Abraham Maslow famously presented a pyramid of needs, on the bottom of which are life necessities rising to a crown of spirituality concerns, and argued that before a person can address more lofty or spiritual concerns (those on the top), she or he must first satisfy everyday concerns (those on the bottom), like having enough food to eat, having clothes to wear, having a place to live. After those bottom conditions are satisfied, a person can begin to consider one’s purpose and calling, or theological and philosophical questions. So our emphasis on things economic points to a pressing need to meet these basic necessities for our citizenry before we move on to a public concern for “intangibles” such as justice, and mercy, and compassion.

When President Clinton focused his successful 1992 presidential campaign on the economy, the unemployment rate in the United States was 7.5%. Today that rate is 9.5% or thereabouts. So I can understand 9.5% of those polled listing the economy as their number one concern: they’re unemployed, looking for work in a weak economy, probably looking at their unemployment compensation ending soon. I get this, too: I’ve been unemployed since June of 2008. Even though my wife and I live in such a way that being unemployed is a choice I’ve made rather than a predicament I’m in, I still feel at times useless, frustrated, unwanted, underutilized, simply because I’m not bringing home a regular paycheck.

What I don’t understand is why so many besides those of us who are unemployed would say the economy is their number one concern. This month, the Rasmussen Reports found that 87% of those they polled listed the economy as “a very important issue,” highest of ten pressing issues. So if I subtract 9.5%, representing those unemployed whom I consider have pressing reasons to list the economy as their number one concern, that leaves 77.5% of those polled who are concerned about the economy. Presumably, those 77.5% are employed, though I cannot speculate how well employed, if they have a crushing mortgage, if they’re uninsured, etc. But being employed, why is the economy still their most pressing issue?

Perhaps poverty plays a role here. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate rose to 14.3% in 2009 (which, interestingly, is 8.1% lower than it was in 1959, the year I was born), poverty being (a) a threshold of $22,000.00 in income and aid per year for a family of four and (b) certainly representing a much higher degree of material well-being in comparison to poverty in other nations, particularly in the two-thirds world. So, let’s add this percentage to that of the unemployed, ignoring any overlap that surely exists, and subtract 23.8% representing those who have righteous reasons to list concerns about our economy as number one from the 87% of all of us and that leaves 64% of us who are employed and not impoverished (even by Western economic scales) yet who still list the economy as their number one concern.

And I still don’t understand this. That 64% of us live in a staggering degree of comfort, unseen in all previous millennia. Almost every person in this country has a refrigerator and air conditioning, television and internet, at least three rooms per person in our houses, almost one car, and at least some form of assured retirement income (at the least, Social Security). And that 64% of us still are most concerned about economic issues.

Look, Maslow was right, but he didn’t extend his analysis far enough. He limited his analysis to necessity instead of perception. If a person does not have the necessities covered – housing, food, clothing – he will never rise to consider more spiritual matters. But as we see daily in our country, if a person does not wrench his perceptions away from having more and more food and clothing and housing, having more opulence, he, too, will never rise to consider more spiritual matters, such as truth, and beauty, and justice, and compassion, and love. And in this country, in our culture, you and I are convinced we never have enough, even when we have so much. So how can we expect our polity to step above this crass consumerism and commercialism to a higher plane where we actually advance our morals and ethics, our philosophies and theologies?

Sadly, I do not expect too much out of us: I know us for the shallow breed we’ve become, a breed that exalts value over principle, whose main sense of worth comes from purchasing, bred carefully through many generations to consider economics of prime importance. Of such creatures, one cannot expect more than ravenous consumption. But I do expect more from a leader, especially from our president. I fully appreciate that followers make leaders in their own image, but leaders, dammit, LEAD, they don’t simply follow their followers. I want our president to give us a good spanking, to tell us to stop whining about getting more and more stuff and to stand up and be adults for once instead of the spoiled children we’ve become, to show us how we can be a better commonwealth, not in terms of wealth, but in terms of common dignity and decency and compassion. I’m tired of bottom dwelling. Let’s rise. Thank you for reading.

Stiff Hands

I reached to touch you
And found my hands clumsy
As if a mannequin’s
Or artist’s model
All carven oak and metal joints

Hands remember
Grasping where one should not
Remember textures that
Make one shudder and squirm
Because they violate
So nerves grow stiff and senseless
And tendons petrify
And fingers pose slowly
And wrists and joints creak coldly

Sand my hands
With finest grit
Finish them in shellac and lacquer
Till all is sealed and sleek
Lest my splinters
Pierce and pull your tender skin

Virginia’s Damn Moth

Let us postulate
Two powers, two principalities
Engaged in endless, insensate contest
Purposeless, goalless
Simple consequences from initial conditions

On this hand, life
Boiling, roiling, seething
Bursting into new paths
When another becomes resolutely blocked
Evolving new forms
Without preference, pragmatic
Impelled in the process
Midges teeming from a drying slough
Grasses sprouting in lava flows

On that hand, death
Staunch, resolute, adamant
Impeding, depleting,
Grasping with enormous, weighty hands
Dragging, exhausting
An insensate, clinging giant
Thoughtless, slow, entropic
Inured to forms
All alike like sputtering candles
In a damp and musty tomb

In this demonic trial
Everyone I know, everyone I love is
One of Virginia’s damn moths
Feeble but defiant
Collateral damage on the windowsill

Second Amendment Economics

Whatever else we might say, our United States seems of two minds regarding people murdered by other people wielding firearms: we deeply regret the lives lost to lunatics shooting semi-automatic weapons but we reiterate that such tragedies do not override Second Amendment protections of the liberty to keep and bear arms. I say “we” because, first, we have a broad and successfully organized lobby for not only preserving but advancing Second Amendment rights, a lobby that certainly contributed to our Supreme Court’s recent decision interpreting the Second Amendment to provide an individual’s right to keep and bear arms regardless of any civic interest (the first time in our long history the Supreme Court has found such an unrestrained individual right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment).

I say “we” because, second, recent polling data describe the majority of those polled as favoring more government regulations on the sale of firearms and the types of firearms available for purchase. Please note: this is a temporary majority whose numbers usually spike after some seriously deranged person takes up arms and murders a bunch of people, as recently happened in Tuscon (and Tuscon brings to mind Virginia Tech and UT Austin and the Amish schoolhouse, remember that one?). But so far, this majority has not organized their convictions (and, again, their convictions waver far more than those of gun rights advocates) to a politically persuasive extent. A subset of this majority has mobilized and organized, have called for tighter regulations and have had some success – the Brady Bill comes to mind, though that bill was signed into law by President Clinton twelve years after John Hinkley shot James Brady along with President Reagan and two others, hardly a speedy success.

Finally, I say “we” because you and I – assuming neither you nor I are members of a gun rights group or have been polled – hold private convictions on the matter, convictions we’ve generally kept to ourselves or at most have posted online in the form of “what a shame” or “this is tragic” or a link to an article that does express a strong opinion, for or against. Most of us – and the unpolled and unaffiliated form a sizeable majority, a vast majority – swing emotionally from one argument to the next, feeling that our Constitution does guarantee us rights that are important, feeling horrible about such senseless killings, feeling either emboldened or repulsed by vocal advocacy groups such as the NRA, but we haven’t taken the time to think through the issues and, having thought, to contact our Representative and Senators about our opinions. We in the vast majority are buffeted to and fro by the winds of our shifting public discourse, but usually, if we have an opinion, we keep it generally private.

So we – all of us in this great country – share responsibility for our current predicament: our governments allow each of us, provided we are of sufficient age and pass a computerized background check (with all the shortcomings and strengths of computerization), to bear firearms of astonishing power, capacity and efficiency, even firearms that seem to be designed primarily for shooting other people (for instance, semi-automatic handguns or armor-piercing ammunition). And I realize it’s hard to speak about “we” in meaningful ways since “we” in this instance refers to our United States. Yet our Constitution does just that, beginning “We the people of the United States,” and even though our Constitution’s ratification did not depend on every citizen eligible to vote voting “yea” (ours is a republic, not a democracy), our Constitution represents all of us through the medium of our elected and appointed representatives. So by using “we” I don’t mean to speak about each and every person in this country, but about a public consensus of “we,” representing the media and debates and governments and laws and opinions and spokespersons that our citizenry exude like will-o-the-wisps over sloughs and swamps, that fleeting, shifting, miasmical “we” of representational public discourse.

I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that “we” have adopted a cost/benefit approach to our stance regarding our firearm predicament: though we’re horrified, the number of people killed by other people using firearms, even the particulars about those so killed (for instance, a nine year old girl or a septuagenarian shielding his wife), have so far not risen to a level that would make us willing to curtail a constitutionally protected freedom. If this is the case, why don’t we try a little thought experiment. Let’s ask ourselves this question: how many murders through use of firearms would it take to make us willing to curtail Second Amendment freedoms?

If we answer anything other than “it doesn’t matter how many people are murdered using firearms: a right is a right,” then we demonstrate that it is possible for a certain number of murders to make us reevaluate our convictions regarding the Second Amendment, that is, “we” will preserve and protect the right to keep and bear arms lightly fettered (current regulations, the NRA’s rhetoric notwithstanding, are truly light fetters) provided not too many of us are brutally, senselessly murdered. And whether that number is fifty thousand or one hundred thousand or one million over a one-year period, or if it is just one poignant tragedy (all are poignant, but Nickel Mines comes to mind as especially so), if we’re using a cost/benefit approach our reasoning is morally suspect: we subsidize the constitutional right to bear arms on the people that have been murdered by other people using firearms, and not on thoughtful considerations or patriotic convictions regarding constitutional rights. Bottom line: there haven’t been enough murders for we the people to amend our constitutional right to bear arms.

As for me, I hope and pray that our answer will never be, “it doesn’t matter how many: a right is a right.” Such absolutism hides too many other issues – firearm culture, sports enthusiasm or last-ditch security against encroaching government militantism among them – behind a blanket assertion of constitutional rights. And I find it more frightening if such an answer is honest, if nothing else is on the table except constitutionalism. Such an answer grants way too much foresight to our well-intentioned founders - foresight they undoubtedly would not claim for themselves – and privileges their supposed foresight over all our subsequent history. If we say “a right is a right” we portray the most inhumane brutality, not just to those six murdered in Tuscon, but to every person murdered in every city and home for whatever reason, and to every survivor of attempted murder, and to every person related to or friends with a murder or attempted-murder victim, hell, we portray the most inhumane brutality to everyone, victim or not, including you and me and “We, the people”: all our lives are found wanting when weighed in the balance against Second Amendment rights.

Please, let’s you and I say it is possible for there to be so many murders by people using firearms that we’d seriously consider changing our interpretation of the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms, that you and I would encourage our elected Representatives and Senators to amend the Second Amendment. Let’s pick a horrible number of murders – say, one hundred thousand in a calendar year – and say that once we reach that level, we’ll do something about regulating the purchase and use of firearms more stringently. Once we’ve set that number, then we’ll see how cheaply we hold all those lives that fall short of our arbitrary number, and rather than weighing all of us against the Second Amendment, we’ll see how we weigh even those tragic victims – real this time and not speculative, with names and histories and birthdates and deathdates – against the Second Amendment and find them, too, wanting. Perhaps then we, the people, can move from two minds to one: no right is worth this. Thank you for reading.