Posted by JohnD
Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:41:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by fdecomite at Flickr
I’m not sure when it began, but I most often trace the conviction that I was constantly being watched to my very early Sunday school classes. After mass, I would follow the sweeping black robe of the nun along with a troupe of boys into a bare room of the Catholic school adjoining the church. All these rooms were colorless and without any ornament, except for crosses and images of Christ in agony, all the more vivid and startling against those drab walls. The small wooden desks had their metal legs bolted to the floor and chairs were attached in rigid position. The lean, dry nun, a few strands of gray hair sticking out from under her bonnet, commanded us into silence (not that we dared disturb the wooden emptiness of that place). She did this without words but with a metal-edged ruler that came down hard on the table beside her. Its flat-side smack seemed to echo in my six-year-old head. We were all afraid of the ruler, and we watched it, usually gripped in a fist behind the nun’s back as she paced up and down the aisles. Silently she tipped the ruler from side to side across her back with the regularity of a metronome. Without warning, she would swing it around like lightening to strike young knuckles. Infractions could be any deviation from the silent focus on the catechism text that Sister demanded.
So I read that text carefully, never lifting my eyes except to show that I was listening to her explanations or eager to answer a question – though, of course, not too eager. One day I was staring at the catechism page and trying to understand a sentence I had been trained to repeat. We were being prepared for First Communion and to achieve that sacrament would have to answer questions put to us by the Monsignor himself. That was a nerve-racking prospect not so much because of the Monsignor – he was, after all, a benign and garrulous man who was especially gentle with us, the youngest students of his flock. No, it was Sister we feared because she demanded that we answer every question with strict accuracy, promptly, without the slightest hesitation or uncertainty because we were speaking the truths of the Church Eternal to the highest ranking father we would ever meet – until, that is, the bishop would tap our cheeks from his altar throne some years later during the Confirmation ceremony. One of those truths we had to master was contained in the sentence I puzzled over.
“God is everywhere.”
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Posted in Explanations, Growing Up with Depression | Tags attention, Catholic, church, communion, depression, eye, God, life, love, mother, nun | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by juria yoshikawa at Flickr
I run a race with depression that keeps me on edge. The stakes are high because we race to take each other apart. I intend to keep the lead. For years, I’d hit the wall and lose the bare will to win. But somehow I got back not just the energy to move but a belief in myself that had long been lost. I can separate myself from depression, understand it’s a condition to be dealt with and so gain the inner strength not to give up anymore. Of course, in this race I never quite get to the finish line. There is no ending.
You can’t live with depression for fifty years, as I have, and fall for easy answers or mental tricks or chemical doses as ways to escape the problem and get on with your life. Bill Wilson once wrote an essay in The Language of the Heart that told his history with this problem. He couldn’t understand how the breakthroughs of the 12-step method could work with alcoholism but not with depression.
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Posted in Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags 12, attention, Bill Wilson, cycle, depressionsymptoms, focus, obsessivethinking, recovering, step, Therese Borchard, treatment, will | 14 comments
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
