Posted by JohnD
Sat, 22 Sep 2007 21:12:00 GMT
There are days that begin in difficult moods, and I start writing down what I’m going through to see if I can shake myself loose. Here’s what I wrote one morning last week.
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I keep sinking away into a deep pool of stillness. Looking outside this morning, I see that the season’s first rain showers came before dawn. After so much dryness, the slick sheen of water seems strange. Everything is damp and chilly, the sky is dark with the rain-weighted clouds, and I keep staring out the window at the garden, the bare yard beyond that, and across the street to an old barn in an open field. It’s a good thing I don’t have to rush to work this morning because my body doesn’t want to move at all. I’ll stay here, connecting remotely, trying to get things done, then go to my meeting late this afternoon. But I’m feeling this stillness getting into me, a kind of comfortable, let’s-sit-and-stare into-the-fathomless-world feeling. A rich depth opens in my chest. I wish it were the warmth preceding a good writing spell, but really it’s more like falling into emptiness, a state where I will do nothing if I don’t activate soon. Writing these lines is a mechanism to turn my mind from emptiness to the beginnings of movement. Work feels miles away and alien – I guess I’m really drifting off. I’ll stop now, get cleaned up and dressed for the day, then come back later. This drugged state of floating seems to lift me easily onto a smoothly flowing cloud that will take me somewhere intensely pleasant. But I know it’s nothing but sleep, a lazy turning round and round, dreamlike days – I’m unconnected to anything. At least there is no fear and panic, everything is muted, distant, like living in the midst of a soft warm fog.
Two Hands (Rights Reserved)
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Posted in Surviving at Work | Tags attention, detachment, focus, recognition, wandering, work | no comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:53:00 GMT
I’d like to think of the search for the causes and treatments of depression as the tracking down of a killer, a good yarn like the fascinating medical mystery stories
The New Yorker publishes from time to time. But we’re a long way from the end of such a story, and those tales can only be written in retrospect, after it’s clear the great discovery has been made, the mystery solved. It looks more and more as if there is no single discovery to answer all the questions, only multiple lines of research leading to treatments of great promise. Those treatments add to the store of useful tools, but none of them quite gets the job done. The search continues, and we try to make do with what it yields.
One of the most interesting guides to this search and the recent history of treatment strategies is Dr. Peter Kramer. He is now so well known as a result of
Listening to Prozac
and his other writings and media work that it’s automatic to refer to his books in any list of helpful references. I’d like to comment on what it is in his writing that has been so important to me. It’s a continuing challenge to a lay person to sort through the vast amount of available material and get clarity about what it all means. It’s much easier to get hopelessly confused by conflicting claims and theories. I look for people I can trust for help, and Kramer is someone whose writing inspires that trust.
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Posted in Explanations, Connecting, Experience with Treatments | Tags behavior, culture, depression, disease, neurotransmitters, PeterKramer, prozac, self | no comments
Posted by JohnD
Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:16:00 GMT
This post starts an occasional series on creativity. The word has taken on a special meaning for me as the opposite of depression. It's the energy that opens whatever is original, forceful and effective in touching others and building relationships. It's the force in my life that connects and communicates. It's everything I cannot do in the midst of depression.
Creativity is usually discussed in connection with the arts, and the idea gets overblown into talk of visions, genius, divine inspiration and all that bluster – but it goes far beyond that setting. It takes creativity to have responsive relationships with the people I love, to have the insight and imagination I need at work to solve problems and present ideas persuasively or to be part of a neighborhood, a community. It's really what wakes me up and reminds me who I am. I will likely devote a lot of space on Storied Mind to discussing creativity in this broad sense for one driving reason.
When I can't summon the energy that's hidden away, I need to keep in mind the person I know I really am. Hard as it is in that depressed state, I have to focus as much as possible on that "real" me whose mind and feelings are full of discovery and new possibilities. It's like sending out the all-points bulletin: This guy's out there somewhere – or lost in here – and I intend to get him back.
After so many years of living with depression, I have a good sense of when I'm in it and when I'm not. Sometimes I drift along in a middling state when I'm not totally in the depths and appear to be functional, but I can't really focus, I can't will myself to do much, I don't care about anything, my memory and attention don't seem to work. I manage to get things done in a minimal sort of way, but I know I'm not really there. It's usually clear to me when one side or the other – the creative or the depressed – has the upper hand. The change happens invisibly, sometimes without warning. I can be firing on all cylinders one day, then wake up the next a wreck. It could also be a more gradual transition, but I know what's going on and no longer spend weeks or months in denial.
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Posted in Creativity | Tags caliban, creativity, Panic, play, role, Shakespeare, tempest, writing | no comments
Posted by JohnD
Mon, 03 Sep 2007 18:11:00 GMT
These are scattered journal entries about reconnecting.
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I saw my neighbor yesterday riding his four-wheeler around the corner lot, holding his toddler son to his chest. His two horses, a chestnut and a roan, pasture there, along with his three goats. They watch impassively, not at all frightened of the buzzing machine. The man is in his twenties, he has this mobile toy he loves, he holds his wonderful son, and both of them are moving in the spirit of the ride, going round and round within the white horse-fence. What shines out is the kindly bond between them and their comfort together. The boy is leaning back against his dad's chest, held in by strong arms, the father is flowing with the movement, the machine he guides, the son he's opening a new world to. A simple thing, life can be lived.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression | Tags healing, life, light, neighbor, reality, recovery, simplicity | no comments
