Posted by JohnD
Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:34:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Thomas Hawk at Flickr
This is a revision of the first post I wrote for this blog. It came from a journal that I worked at daily for a time, and that experience convinced me that writing about depression was one way I could fight it more actively. I will be publishing revised versions of several early posts over the next few weeks.
Fear wakens with me this morning. I have no idea why. It’s part of a continuing descent I’ve been in for weeks now. After a few great days when I was blazing away at ideas about my projects, depression returned and has been building in its quiet way. But it is fear that is coming on now, and I know if I don’t try to get at this, it will turn to panic and keep me away from everything. Work is impossible when my mind is coming apart. I’ve spent two days at the office, three days at home each of the last three weeks. I’m barely getting the tasks completed to keep each project moving ahead. How commanding and cocksure I’m supposed to be – how implausibly shaky is the reality of my mind and heart.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Surviving at Work, Fighting Depression | Tags danger, depression, Fear, memory, mind, Panic, stress, survival, waking, work, writing | 9 comments
Posted by JohnD
Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:13:00 GMT
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George Eliot wrote these lines in Middlemarch about 135 years ago:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
In the midst of severe anxiety or panic I have heard something like that roar and found there is a price to pay for such a heightened sense of ordinary life. I suppose the only way we can navigate a world of massive sensations is by screening out everything that distracts us from the single goal we have in mind at any moment. There are times when I am stopped completely by a roar that shakes me deeply, but I can’t be sure where it’s coming from. Is it only inside my mind or is it, as Eliot suggests, sounds of ordinary life we can’t bear to hear for long? I’ve written about one terrifying incident when a shrieking chorus of everyday sounds overwhelmed me. It was clear then that my mind had been consumed by a level of anxiety and panic more intense than any I had known to that time. It was all inside me, and I could even imagine ending my life just to stop that inner roar.
There was another incident, though, when I felt the impact of sound and even emotion that seemed to come from people and actions around me. I say “seemed” because it is so hard to understand what was happening. Something sharpened my nerves and perceptions, but I didn’t just hear the detail of the sounds. I sensed keenly what other people were feeling but not talking about. I’m not claiming any special powers here. It happened when I was recovering from a cancer operation. Everything was electric.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags anxiety, cancer, confusion, depression, energy, feelings, focus, George Eliot, intensity, Panic, recovery, surgery | 10 comments
Posted by JohnD
Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:44:00 GMT
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Anxiety is one of the fringe benefits of depression. The form of it that I find most acute is now called social anxiety, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I used to call it torture. When it’s upon me in full force, every encounter with people is a searing experience. I can hardly make out who they are because of the blinding panic that sets in. Driven to say or do something, words tumble out, expressions cross my face that are usually totally off the mark. Completely embarrassed and burning inside, I leave as fast as I can.
There was a time when I tried to capture moments like that in poems, and this is one from a long time ago.
The two beside me on the bench
speak in one touch of their intimacy,
and I am the cheap voyeur.
I touch up face after face,
I bluff, I burn in unlikely mime,
I dangle near their design
of entwining arms.
Like an antique entertainer
tapping song to his ragged time
while the showgirls upstage him,
I want the sudden comeback,
want the place dead with applause:
I don’t know what I want.
Then quiet like a curtain falls,
and I make off.
Is social anxiety a partner to the depression you experience? Does it happen mostly with strangers, or can it be triggered in any situation?
Posted in What Depression Can Do, Men and Depression | Tags depression, experience, face, intimacy, people, poem, social anxiety | 15 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:08:00 GMT
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Marissa wrote a post at Wellsphere that made me pause. She was objecting to the idea found in Richard O’Connor’s book (Undoing Depression
) that “I am not my depression.” She interpreted this as an evasion of accountability for one’s actions. The depressed behavior that harms relationships, for example, can’t be dismissed as something you’re not responsible for – it has a real impact because of your behavior, and you remain accountable for what you do. And so, in this sense, she insists: “I am my depression.”
I agree with the need to be accountable. I have hurt those around me by being emotionally absent, self-involved, unable to talk, irritable or in a rage, or behaving badly in any of the ways that are symptomatic of depression. But O’Connor’s intention with this formulation, I believe, isn’t aimed at releasing people from accountability. It’s a way of reminding those suffering from depression that they have an illness, that there is hope for recovery, that they should not confuse the symptoms with the totality of their human identities.
I think a better way of putting this, however, is another sentence that appears frequently in books about how to deal with this condition: “I am more than my depression.” In other words, my identity isn’t defined by behavior linked to the illness, but it also says that I am my depression, in part.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Connecting, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags belief, depression, hope, identity, imagination, intention, marissa, recovery, richardoconnor, treatment | 10 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:16:00 GMT
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About a hundred years ago, Robert Frost wrote a famous poem about two roads diverging in a wood: “And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler.” He makes his choice to take “the one less traveled by.” “Oh I kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/ I doubted I should ever come back.”
When I faced a choice of two roads to my own future, I believed I could follow both and be one traveler. Why were there two roads? I imagined there were two sides of myself – one creative, artistic – the other public, drawn to political and social change – and I needed both to feel whole. What followed from this attempt were years of struggling and failing to balance both, searching for the fulfillment I needed but finding it always just out of reach on either path. I tried sprinting down one for a time, then leaving that to cut through a brambled mile of thickets to get back to the other, sprint down that road for a while, cut back through the less and less penetrable undergrowth, hit the other again – and so on. What does that mean? Among other things, it means that I spend a lot of time between the roads in those thickets – lost.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Fighting Depression, Creativity | Tags career, choices, depression, double, fulfillment, life, oneness, path, robertfrost, tension | 12 comments
