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Like so many, I experience depression in various forms, yet each in its own way knocks out the decision control center in my mind. At times, I scramble in anxiety and can’t focus enough to pick out one among many possibilities. At other times, I don’t care about choosing – or anything else for that matter – and I let the alternatives fall where they may. Or I make all kinds of decisions, even life changing ones, but none of them seems like a choice. Each one is do-or-die. If I fail to do it, I’ll go right over the edge.

Varieties of Indecision

Depression isn’t one thing but a series of moods along a continuum from mild to severe. I used to move regularly with this perverse flow toward desperation. At the mild end, I might wake up knowing that something is wrong, feeling at once that everything is a bit off. I want and need to get a lot done, but I’ve lost my sense of where to begin and what’s most important. Then I get anxious.

There’s a steady snowfall of tasks, floating free of deadlines and priorities. I feel the anxiety and tension about getting them all done, so I pick one out of the air – yes, I’ve got to do that! Then I realize after a few minutes of continuing worry that I’ve got to do that other one in a hurry too. So I grab that and start working. And then another and another. It’s like picking snow flakes out of the air, each melting at once, a drop of moisture in my hand. I’ve got to get everything done, but I’m going crazy because I can’t grab hold of anything.

Then there are those times when I’ve felt nothing and could care less about making decisions. That’s happened most often when I’ve been on the antidepressants targeting serotonin, like Prozac. I think I’m fine because I don’t feel depressed, but then everything else, including close relationships, seemed far away and empty. I could drop them in a minute, and that might well seem to be the logical thing to do. The thinking brain can still function but cut loose from any tie to feeling. Decisions based on logic and indifference can be the most dangerous of all.

But on the other end of the spectrum, where major depression waits, there is plenty of feeling, but it’s all desperation. My survival is at stake. I have to be alone and shut the door on everyone I know. I have to quit this job, or it’ll destroy my life. Seeing this therapist makes me sicker, and I’ll go off the deep end if I don’t quit. This relationship is a trap that’s ruining my life. There are only relentless drives here, and everything I do or desperately feel I need to do simply has to happen. I have no power of choice. It’s easy to argue that a decision has been made. But I can’t see it that way, any more than I would say that someone under torture makes a choice to confess and stop the unbearable pain.

What Does It Take to Decide?

The psychologist James Hillman wrote a book called Kinds of Powerin which he presents an interesting take on decisions. This may sound a bit pedantic, but he looks at the root meanings of the word from a Latin verb meaning to cut or to kill. Decision/decide shares this root with words like incision and homicide. Cutting away or killing off are useful metaphors because that’s what I have to do to pick one among many possibilities.

Cut away the extraneous possibilities and narrow down to specific action that will accomplish something: here’s what to do, now do it. Choices must be made to keep life and mind moving. But to do that, I need a clear vision of what I want, confidence that I can do it and belief that I can improve my life by acting in this way. When depressed, those are exactly the qualities I know I don’t have.

Depression brings the whole world inside me. I look at people and everything around me, and I’m not seeing anything but evidence of how bad I am. I’m dancing with my own nightmares. Even if I’m only mildly depressed and feel suspended amid a thousand possibilities, no one of which I can choose, I’m assuming that whichever I might pick will not take me anywhere. I’ll move in an endless circle.

Or else I’ll feel nothing, and there is no point in wanting anything. I put on a good show, pass for happily adjusted to life but only see blankness ahead – if I take the trouble to look. And in the most desperate state of severe depression, I’m running for my life. The idea of choosing a different path doesn’t enter my mind.

What’s common to all those ways of being depressed is an all-or-nothing thinking. Nothing good can result from what I do, and so there is no vision that I can choose of my own will. Everyone else is better than I am, and each seems a powerful presence that only makes me smaller still. Whatever I do will not work and only confirms the worst. All the creative possibilities I might see when I’m healthy become so many triggers of obsessive thinking.

When I began to recover some years ago, I started with a single decision. I can’t explain how it happened when I was so close to believing that I should do the world a favor and just disappear. But something snapped. All I could hear in my mind, louder than any sound I knew, was NO, I won’t go there, and YES, I’m getting out of this. I will do it. It was more than a survival instinct, or fear of where I was headed. I had to push hard against the current that was forcing me in the wrong direction, and suddenly the strength and purpose were there. I felt in my bones that I did have a choice, and I’d better make the right one.

Most people don’t have to make a decision like that. They can take self-respect for granted and get on with living. I guess people with severe depression have to work harder to master the most basic dimensions of life, to keep going and to kill of the impulse to stop.

How are you doing at deciding things these days?

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Simple things can overwhelm, turn me upside down, submerge who I am in a great wave. I was turned over once as a kid, swimming at a beach near LA, the ocean churning and huge. I tried to jump into a breaker and ride it in, but the surge tossed me up in its gritty gnash of turgid green, where I whirled about, then smashed head first into the sand. Lying there on the beach, I turned to see if I was safe and saw what was left of the wave easing away in a mass of bubbles, like so much harmless fizz in a glass. I had been completely lost inside that thing, powerless to move, jetsam to be thrown aside. And now it was nothing.

It’s one thing to be taken over by a force outside you, another to be overwhelmed from within – tossed into emptiness only by your mind. Little things – nothing at all really – can tear you loose from the ground you stand on.

I was driving home one evening on autopilot – it was late, I was tired, preoccupied. My mind was obsessing, vice-tightened on every mistake I had made in my work that night. I had done everything wrong, was sure my colleagues now thought me a fool, a liability. How could I have done this, said that? Every detail cut into my skull, and I thought my head would just crack with the tension.

How could I go back to the office the next day, continue working as if nothing had happened. How could I live with myself? I could never do anything right – I was a fraud, and everyone would know. I was the star in this masterpiece of depressive thinking.

Then I came to a stop sign, a routine stop sign. There wasn’t any light, not even moonlight, but what I could see was suddenly all wrong.

I knew I must be near my home, but I couldn’t recognize a thing. I had come through here hundreds of times, yet now everything was strange. Those tall dark masses must be a row of trees – but there is no row of trees on that corner. How could the road angle off to the left? I knew it went straight ahead, it had to go straight ahead!

I was completely lost. I panicked – I couldn’t make any sense of this space. It was like driving off the freeway into an emptiness without direction or even the pull of gravity. Whatever internal compass it is that keeps me oriented on the face of the earth was broken – a suspended needle spinning round its wobbly circle over and over again, and my mind was spinning with it.

I tried to search my memory for the corners and streets I knew to get my bearings – but there were too many – I could hardly think straight. I was flailing inside, and I couldn’t choose among those rapid flashes. This is crazy, I told myself, just calm down for a minute – it’s no big deal. Why is this happening?

But I had to do something in that dark, empty place without a sign I could see. I was all panic, but I knew one thing. I was in my car, the wheel in my left hand, the shift knob in my right, the accelerator next to the foot pushing way too hard on the brake.

I forced myself to stop thinking and drove straight through what felt like a wall of flashing red lights warning me not to move. But that was all I could do, and somehow I just did it. If I kept on, I would have to find something familiar, something that would place me back where the world was instead of in this nothingness. Movement felt good. Panicked confusion was so many bits of broken glass cutting my hands, but here was a smooth and useful fragment.

It took another couple of miles heading straight down the silent street until I found it. A light, a sign with a name I knew, a corner with a small store and post office, just where they were supposed to be. I knew where I was. A few miles too far, but I knew exactly how to get back. I knew where my house was and would soon be there.

Everything looked right, I could sink into the comfort of the familiar, an order around me that contained my feelings, my awareness. The world was still there, and I was back in place. I wasn’t lost, and the panic ebbed away. No crisis, just a dark night. I knew where I was.

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Thinking about recovery from depression often makes me dizzy. I’m trying to follow at once all the brief streaks of light from this roman candle mind. Each one’s gone before I can see where it’s headed, and I wind up chasing nothing. I have even asked myself, why get well?

There is so much talk of journeys or paths or steps leading from here, the place of pain, to an often hazy there, a place where the pain no longer dominates, or where a new life awaits you. There are journeys toward the fulfillment of my Jungian self, toward bliss through magnetized neurons, toward positive thinking, toward inner chemical balance, toward stress-free living, toward fit, lean and sweaty health, toward self-esteem, toward nurturing of my lost inner child, toward mindfulness, toward freedom, toward God. I’m reeling and drunk on a hundred paths, starting and stopping, striking out then retracing steps or, worse still, striding with confidence down a path that disappears in dark woods.

I suppose that at some time everyone has heard a certain voice within. In my case, it speaks my name, calling with total authority, as if to demand I come back from confusion. JOHN! It never says anything else and does not have to. Its tone resonates through every bone, its command instantly snaps on every sleeping nerve circuit in my brain. There is no resisting it.

Clear and commanding, that voice sounded again in the middle of a recent night when I was sizzling obsessively over something I can’t even remember now but that seemed larger than my life at that moment. The call of my name centered me, snapped me back from the mental hole I had been digging, but that was not the end of its impact. For then I realized I had to pick up one of the half dozen books sprawled on the night table next to me – a book of spiritual meditations. I had begun reading through it earlier but couldn’t really focus on what it was saying so I had put it aside. Now I started over, and the words went straight in. Each brief meditation offered a glimpse into the intense struggle by a Catholic priest to recover from a deep depression that had challenged his faith in God.

The book is The Inner Voice of Love
by Henri Nouwen and is subtitled A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom. So here was another journey, but the metaphor was not central to Nouwen’s experience. Instead of moving him neatly step by step toward his goal, the meditations probe and test the tenets of his faith, as he urgently applies them to himself. I had thought when first scanning through that he was addressing his words to the reader with a prescriptive “you” that I often find irritating in books like this. “You” must do this or “we” must remember to … Such directives often seem to come from the mind, not the heart and so I avoid them. But as I looked closely, I suddenly realized that this writer wasn’t talking to his readers. He was desperately trying to remind himself of the reality of his faith.

From somewhere inside him, a voice was speaking, and the urgency of his writing revealed the deep misery that he was trying to overcome. He does not so much assert as ask: is this really true, is this belief that I have written and preached so often to others going to heal me? Is my faith in God going to survive? What am I missing, what am I learning from this anguish, is it a test or is it simply the end of me?

What flowed into me with such immediacy and bright clarity was an almost word for word correspondence to my own struggle. Nouwen was reaching into himself for the strength – and faith – to come back from a loss that felt like spiritual death. Here is how he describes his life in this period:

“I had come face to face with my own nothingness … I could no longer sleep. I cried uncontrollably for hours. … All had become darkness. Within me there was one long scream coming from a place I didn’t know existed, a place full of demons.”

As deep as that depression was, he could still write – …writing became part of my struggle for survival. It gave me the little distance that I needed to keep from drowning in my despair. And so each day he wrote to himself the spiritual imperatives of this journal.

“Try to keep your small, fearful self close to you. This is going to be a struggle, because you have to live for a while with the not yet. Your deepest, truest self is not yet home.”

“When you are temporarily pulled out of your true self, you can have the sudden feeling that God is just a word, prayer is fantasy, sanctity is a dream, and the eternal life is an escape from true living.”

“The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them.”

“You can think yourself into a depression, you can talk yourself into low self-esteem, you can act in a self-rejecting way. But you always have a choice to think, speak, and act in the name of God and so move toward the Light, the Truth and the Life.”

Choice is the recurring word. He ends these reflections not in a glowing reaffirmation of his faith but in the awareness that his struggle will continue, that each day he is faced with a choice.

“Your future depends on how you choose to remember your past. Choose for the truth that you know. … You are not alone. … What is of God will last. It belongs to the eternal life. Choose it, and it will be yours.”

For me, depression itself is not a choice – it is a condition that seeps into me. The choice is what I do after it has taken over. I lack the clear faith and imperatives that Nouwen could turn to, but what I try to maintain is the will to choose some way out of depression.

Is that determination the key for you? How do you keep it alive?