Taking Depression Apart
Posted by JohnD
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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struggle with alcohol and the role that religious experience played in his recovery, I’ve had hope that spirituality can also be decisive in undoing the impact of long-term depression. William James, whose 
was so important to Wilson and other founders of AA, wrote in that study that the world is divided into two broad classes of people as far as religion is concerned, the once-born and the twice-born. The once-born take the world as it is, sum up their problems and successes and move along in life with a core acceptance of themselves and the religious practice they were raised with. The twice-born, as you might suspect, run into problems. They long for and work hard at finding a second birth into a new life of spiritual fulfillment. James describes them as the “sick souls who need to be twice-born in order to be happy.” Hmm, wonder where I fit.
