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
Sun, 04 May 2008 20:09:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by notsogoodphotography at Flickr
Which insightfully bewildered comic strip character was it who said: I never knew what I was missing until I lost it?
I read that line about ten years ago after a series of surgeries had removed a few expendable body parts and left me in a lot of pain during the weeks of recovery. Suddenly I thought of all the things a healthy body lets you do – simple things, like bending down to get your shoe on, that I had never imagined having trouble with, or complicated things, like climbing mountains, that I had never realized I might someday might dream of doing. So those words hit home.
Depression wasn’t so immediate in impact as surgery. Instead it crept up on me over such a long period that I didn’t realize how much energy of life and mind was disappearing until I got to a point where others had to tell me what I had lost. A basic force for life had gone missing, and I wasn’t sure I would get it back. It was no small part of depression’s voice to tell me over and over again how I had wasted life, and I hadn’t fully realized what was passing me by. Strange how a comic strip character can make you laugh about a condition that wants to leave you hopeless and humorless all the time, that wants you to think about loss, about what you lack that normal people still have. Comic insights often run deep.
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Posted in Explanations, Surviving at Work, Growing Up with Depression, Experience with Treatments | Tags change, cycle, depression, disease, energy, health, loss, normal, pattern, recovery, work | 8 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:07:00 GMT
What's it like, the mixing of shame and despair? I am full of the sense that I have no future, there is no point to living. This is no emptiness or lack of feeling, lack of affect, as they say. It is the intense feeling of hitting bottom, overwhelmed with shame, worthlessness, convinced that this is the real me, the rotten thing beneath the surface, the monster I can't bear to live with. I feel I've lost the essence of life, the will to live, to survive, to seize a spot on the face of the earth as mine where I can feel the good solid weight of my body pushing into the ground as I stand up and breathe deeply of all that is alive. There is no place like that for me in this world, there is no love or pleasure, only a searing palpable despair.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Surviving at Work | Tags cycle, despair, illness, life, shame, work, writing | 1 comment
