Some Rights Reserved by dean_forbes at Flickr

In this dream, I heard myself saying: I am waking up out of the earth. I wasn’t at all sure what that meant. Was it supposed to be some mythic arising, or was it just another way of seeing myself as so much dirt? Then I realized I’d been sleeping outside – in the ground.

I couldn’t tell how deeply I had been buried, but it seemed quite natural to be sleeping there. I had no trouble getting out of that dark bed. Standing up, I brushed off my clothes but felt terribly dirty, inside and out.

Looking around for water to wash off the rest of the gritty soil, I saw that I was standing on a small bench of land just above a wide river. There were tall shade trees along its banks – enormous cottonwoods amid dense bushes of new willow strands. They broke the sunlight into tiny streaks of color glinting along the slender shoots.

I walked through them to the river’s edge, knelt down and started splashing myself clean. Then I had the strange sensation that this water was somehow filtering into my body through the skin. I looked upstream and saw its clear flow coming toward me and, somehow, right through me.

I stepped back a few feet from the water and realized all at once that I was that river, that in a strange way I took in its entire length, tributaries and all, right down to the smallest dips of land that carried rains toward it. I imagined its source, my own, high up in the Sierra Nevada’s melting snows, and I felt part of the water trickling downward into the first tiny rivulets.

All these finger flows merged into each other, picking up more and more water from all sides. I seemed to be part of its increasing speed as the onrush filled larger and larger creeks. These were like capillaries leading to veins carrying blood back to my heart then flowing out again.

As this mass of movement and I became a single energy, we crashed into boulders, dropped suddenly down long falls, plunging and roiling through huge pools in foaming confusion. There was a wild, thrilling freedom without the tight binding of bone and muscle. I could be shoved against cliffs only to splash apart, rain back into the main flow and move on.

We thundered across broken rocky beds and surged into the tormenting darkness of a long deep canyon. Finally the whole rush of violent energy spent itself, and I moved quietly with a wide calm river flowing smoothly across the open valley.

Suddenly I knew I wasn’t alone there anymore. The changing river was everyone, at least everyone I knew or had ever known. Merged at some invisible level, all of us – my close family, relations of every generation, friends alive and long gone – were gliding downstream together.

I knew they were there because I heard them. All those voices, mine blending in, were speaking through water. I couldn’t distinguish any words – only a blended, murmuring chorus. We seemed to flow on the sound waves of a single voice.

Then I was standing at the river’s edge again, confused but exhilarated. I felt whole and strong and started off to look for something – I don’t know what it was. Everything was getting vague and dim then.

I snapped awake for real and felt more fully alive than I had for so long. This dream has stayed with me ever since, like calming music.

Some Rights Reserved by wallyg at Flickr

I’ve published another post at Health Central. The opening is below with a link to the full post.

Quite a while back, there was a TV series about a group of nurses in the Vietnam War. It was called China Beach. In one episode of this powerful drama, a soldier who had lost a leg from the knee down is back home, feeling lost and depressed about his life. Desperate for a loving human bond, he drives a great distance to find the home of one of the nurses who’d taken care of him “in country.”

He finds her and talks stumblingly about his hopes to be with her, and it’s clear he feels like an ugly reject whom no one will have anything to do with. She sees at once that what he’s looking for is an emotional crutch, not a real relationship and gently explains that she can’t be with him. Then she does something amazing. Understanding what he feels about himself, she wants to give him the one message above all that he needs to hear and believe.

Taking him into a room with a full-length mirror, she tells him to stand in front of it and to take off all his clothes. He does that numbly, mechanically, revealing what’s left of his leg, and she tells him to really look at himself, not just the leg. Then she says, in so heartfelt a way:

“You are beautiful.”

You can read the full text of the post here.

Some Rights Reserved by Boskizzi at Flickr

The words went up like walls, and I stepped inside to stay. I paced around in that confinement and after a while got to know the enclosure well. I liked its stillness and the sense of limits and order. Around me I read the names for mental things and emotions that I owned. They explained me, and I had a place to call home. I paid the rent in pain.

Depression, disease, obsessive thinking, mood disorder, isolation, sleep disturbance, paralysis of will, loss of concentration, anxiety, rage, hopelessness – I knew each one, the symptoms that likely would never go away, except for little breaks here and there. They were like furniture to rest in – or more than that, coordinates on a map that gave me location in the world. I could say: That’s where I live – right there.

At first, despite the inner emptiness and hurt, there was a comfort in knowing that all these symptoms were not my unique, damaged, failing self – but shared by millions all around the world – even named as a leading cause of disability. I was part of a vast economic loss with days, weeks, months, years of diminished capacity. Like all the rest, I wasn’t too helpful in getting the world’s work done. I added to their negative sum.

But after a while, I couldn’t take the dark cell anymore. I was afraid of what might happen there and resolved to move out, find brighter surroundings, know and hold my family again, thrive in my work, throw a little light around me – reform my life, reverse it completely. All that change, though, kept not happening.

I needed a sense of order, a sense of knowing where I was in the world of mind, feeling and spirit as well as place, worklife, community, country. I needed hooks to hold onto, and I had those, familiar after decades, hurtful as they were – but what would happen if I let them go? Would I grab onto new ones in a better life or would I drop in free fall to nothingness? I needed change to survive, but I feared change would leave me stranded in a place I couldn’t begin to understand. I never said that to myself at the time. I only knew how hard it was to stop depression. I could long for a new life, but getting there seemed impossible.

Depression was full of dreams of all that I might do – if only I could break myself away from it. But deciding among those possible new futures was the stopper. Deciding, after all, meant cutting away those many dreams, killing them off to pick the one that was real, that put me back on firm ground. But which one was that – and would I be any good at it? Somewhere deep down – and I can say now it was my twin, depression, talking – I felt a desperation to maintain that perverse and lightless stability. Reform is shape-shifting and letting go, and I was holding on. I believed so deeply that I could not change.

Most of the treatment people were not much help. Until recently, I never heard from a therapist or psychiatrist that ending life-long depression was even a possibility. They listened, opened up depths of history I needed to understand, offered sympathy, medication, temporary respite. At times, that stirred hope but mostly it confirmed illness, treatment resistance, the need for adaptation to an endless condition. I had a four-digit diagnostic number, and that would never change – unless at some point a fifth digit needed to be tacked on.

The words of explanation multiplied like the dreams of recovery. New findings of neuroscience, brain chemistry, changes in brain structures, neural pathways, genetics, increased likelihood of heart disease and bone loss, and then too the self-perpetuating nature of the illness. After a while, it kept itself going without need for an external push. My depression home seemed hard-wired, storm resistant.

But then – just like that – it was over – or mostly so. I suddenly believed that I could break out and so pushed against those hardening walls. Of course, they gave way, the word-bricks floated up like full balloons, burst at once and rained back down as bright ripped ribbons.

True, as I expected, it’s been hard to learn again the habits of life with people, the routines of work I love to do, the resilience of hope. And the hardest thing of all is keeping a determined mind and will not to go there again when the temptation to give up returns.

So how does this happen? What brings on, after so long, a change of spirit as deep as conversion? I’m not sure I will ever know exactly what it was. There’s no one cause of depression, so I wouldn’t expect to find a single cause of recovery.

It feels like a kind of grace, a gift, a quiet mystery.

Some Rights Reserved by xip at Flickr

I wrote recently here about masking emotions from myself as I grew up through my college years. Here’s what happened to change that, or at least start me on a different path. As often happens with me, it started in a dream:

For so long, I lived in a beautiful fortress made of defiant walls. It stood remote in sheltered hills, safe from attack at any angle, approached only over steep rugged trails that few could manage. I often flew over it in dreams, its great length and height visible in every detail, almost touchable in my smoothly gliding passes. I would sail higher to see more clearly the narrow isthmus between great continents in which it lay hidden. But always I would wake in stillness within it.

Daily I strummed inside its intricate corridors. They never grew familiar, no matter how many times I walked them, mentally mapping each turn and door. The picture never stayed in my mind for long. In a vast structure of dark rooms I could be lost for days, looking for light in windowless corners, testing each door for new discoveries. At times, its night-like shadows would envelope me in comforting invisibility. I could see nothing, nothing could see me.

At times, though, baffling to me, I would become tense with a fear of moving from where I stood. Yet I could not resist opening each heavy door to find whatever it contained. There were so many in this vastness I had never visited. I could not stop moving and searching, but I always dreaded what I might find. What terrible thing was I searching for?

In a hallway of the topmost floor, I found a ceiling panel with a long cord dangling to within easy reach of my hand. I knew there would be a spring-hinged stairway dropping toward me as I pulled open the panel. I would have to catch and guide it down smoothly to rest on the floor. This was the only entrance to a long attic room I had never entered. I had no idea what was there, but I had till then always avoided going up those rickety fold-down steps into the darkness of that space. The thought of it sent me into a panic, but that day I had come upon the attic door without thinking, while searching for another room that I had never seen.

Surprised by the sight of the cord, I simply pulled at it without stopping to think, without giving myself time to be afraid. At once the creaking stairs fell toward me, and I caught the bottom, pulled it all the way down and pushed at its middle hinge to link the two sections of steps. I started up, grasping the flimsy railings on either side of the narrow stairs, as I caught that musty smell of stale air, dust and old boxes untouched for years. But I got no higher than the third step when I froze.

Suddenly leaping into view was a compact man, his face distorted with rage and hate. I no sooner saw him that he just dove at me, his eyes insanely white, fury burning his mind and his fists as his full weight struck me in the chest, shoving me backwards to fall hard on the floor, taking the impact full on my back, feeling the breath knocked out of me, struggling then to breathe, to get out a single gasp. me to ground and begins to strangle me and gnaw deliriously at my skull. I am desperate to wake up, kick him away, fly back to safety high above this alluring fortress.

In a moment, I’ve done it, terrified, awake, my wide open eyes staring into the dark of my bedroom. My mind is telling me I’m free of that nightmare, safe in my West Village apartment, but I still shake as I shove out of bed and reach for the locked bars on the fire-escape window. I grab them and pull to test their strength. All in order, all safe, no one outside. Suddenly, I see so plainly that the madman killer coming at me is pushing through from inside. He’s the roiling pain and anger I’ve so long held back, he’s the kid from my family I suddenly own up to. And flaring through my memory come fiery, unforgettable family scenes that I can’t make light of anymore. I feel them at last as the shaping moments of my life, and such relief pours through me at this obvious fact that I’ve managed to forget for years.

My mother, father, brother can no longer be the emotional strangers I ignore. I’m screaming at each one, loving each one, but seeing myself in the past silent and suppressed in the midst of those struggles. Finally, my life with them breaks free in my feelings, and I sweat sudden knowledge of what I am doing to myself, what I have hidden from for so long. I’m drained, happy, pained at once. I see my family tearing up my insides, and see the symbols I have made of them, the anger, the loss, the love I have always felt. The love I could never own or express, the chances I could never take to give out that feeling and ask for its safe return.

I was crying in relief that night. I could feel who I was and who I had long feared becoming. I could only think – what have I been afraid of? No sudden light, no answer, but a long struggle for recovery had finally begun.