I totally understood, and submitted another article in it's place. What was weird was I didn't see anything wrong with what I sent him initially. Why would anyone want to read such a thing? Why did I write it? He used the word "depressing" at one point to describe the article, and it jiggled a little synapse and tipped me off to the fact that I was probably, once again, going through a depression myself.
I had taken a break from Facebook from the past week, which has always been a good time of refreshment and refocusing. It's also been a busy month, so I could use the time for better purposes. This week, however, rather than refreshment, I have felt an incredible loneliness and isolation. Life goes on, the film continues to roll, whether we're in the movie or not. We leave a job to retire or move on, and someone steps in to fill our roll, typically seamlessly. We lose someone we love, and we still have to wash the dishes and clean the gutters.
The startling thoughts--like second-cousins who smell an inheritance, or long lost relatives coming for a visit on their drive cross county--tasted blood in the water, and started to circle. "Who are your friends? Who can you really turn to? No one, that's who. You have no one. You are alone. If you died tomorrow, who would notice? Matter of fact, why don't you think about that. Your family would take it hard, but they'd get over it. They'd forget about you to. Nothing stays constant. Love is not forever. People move on." Et cetera.
Having worked with an competent Cognitive Behavioral Therapist years ago, who was treating me pro bono at a local clinic when I wasn't working, I recognized the thoughts and was able to rely on that training some to detach and objectify them. My thoughts are not me. I am not my thoughts. Present the evidence. Disprove their assertions. Thank them, and decline their invitation to consummate.
Have you ever been in a relationship or marriage in which you didn't trust the other person? Didn't know whether they were cheating on you, or lying to you, or putting on a smile but secretly inside you they don't like you very much? You can't quite put your finger on what it is that's off, but it's not comfortable, like living with an impersonal stranger in a co-dependent arrangement. You can't trust your mind and you can't live without it either.
That's what your mind becomes during depression: an uncomfortable stranger, someone you live with but don't trust. You need it to function, but it doesn't have your best interest at heart. Your thoughts become fuzzy, skewed, like driving while wearing someone else's glasses. Somewhere along the way, the inner-narrative has changed, become more negative, more condescending.
Grief is triggered by loss, typically, and it is a natural response. Depression, on the other hand, can be triggered by a myriad of events, both external and internal. It is not natural but foreign, not the natural state of being, but a substitute teacher. It could be a betrayal, a feign slight, a misspoken word, an overblown reading in-to canceled plans. And yet, in the throws of it, you are quite convinced that the veil has been drawn back and you are seeing things as they really are; reality has been inverted. Rather than life being a generally pleasant, worthwhile state with occasional downturns, the gray pall is actually what life is, throwing you a bone with a few scraps of ephemeral pleasure just to keep you from throwing in the towel completely.
I'm not a tough guy, but I have worked up some grit over the years. The cycles of depression in college would have been enough to warrant dropping out of school today, but I refused to. Even in grad school in my mid-twenties, when it hit and I was virtually immobilized as a result, barely able to eat or speak or move, my mom would drive to my apartment and pick me up, take me to my summer seminar class, and wait outside for me to finish to take me home. I did end up taking a leave of absence for one semester, but graduated with a 3.8 GPA after five years of part time study. At one point, in a state of mania, I sent the entire theology faculty a rambling grandiose email loosely related to my thesis. The chair of my department was kind--he recognized I was sick. But I made it though, and I prided myself on the fact that my illness did not get the best of me in school or in taking my life either.
But it wears you down. Now with a family, responsibilities, and work, it's like trying to wade through molasses. I just want to lie down and close the door. But I can't. I can't talk to anyone at work about it--whatever people tell you about the "stigma" going away is not always true--and so to take sick days and try to explain what's wrong is not always prudent. In up cycles, I take on a lot, and can sustain it normally, but in down cycles it becomes burdensome and exhausting.
The hardest is when it comes to friends. I don't feel like I have people who I can rely on. I hate needing people in my life, and yet I am so dependent on them for my well-being; I'm more social than I give myself credit for.
And yet, I too have not been a good friend. I know from dealing with depression that people who are depressed can be exhausting to try to help. No amount of convincing that are loved or that things will get better will change their mind in the thick of it. All you can do is love them and sit with them in the dark. But loving takes work, and I don't have it in me always in my selfishness and bravado. Until you are the one that needs a friend. But who has time for that? And who knows what to say? So, it's a Catch-22 of isolation. And so you go in your room and close the door and lay down and just...stare.
But you have no choice but to keep going on, fighting the force working against you. Once during one of the most difficult times, when I had had to resign from a job because I was a liability in my illness (I was working as a counselor at a juvenile detention center), I was driving home after informing my supervisor, feeling like a failure. As I drove, a line of Sycamore trees emerged lining the road, and I could feel a weight on the accelerator and having to put all my energy into not veering right, into the trees. It was if I was wrestling the steering wheel with someone else. I arrived home exhausted from the struggle and collapsed on the couch.
My dad knows. He has been through it, and walked with me through it. At my parent's house ten years ago, during an especially dark and heavy bout of it, He would take me out for walks. It would take me 2 hours to walk half a mile. I shuffled like an old man, the hood of my canvas Carhartt jacket pulled around my face, my beard long, my hair long, my boots scraping the sidewalk like a derelict. He was patient, and waited for me ahead. Little things like that were good to do. They gave some purpose to an otherwise existence devoid, in my mind, of purpose.
When you need it most, prayer can sometimes be the least comfort. It is not a Dark Night of the Soul. I hate when people refer to depression in that way. Dark nights are for saints who put God above all else and can't live without Him. At my most depressed, I am good for nothing, totally helpless. If I am abandoned, it only confirmed my suspicions that nothing lasts. But that does not draw me closer to God in such desolation, or if it does, I will only see it in the rear view mirror, one day. In the moment, all I can do is stare, grit my teeth, tell my thoughts to go to hell, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. But at least it helps to know that I am in it, and trust the evidence that chances are, it will pass in due time. Like everything else that doesn't last.