Storied Mind» God

A Clear Voice Amid Depression

john — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:27:00 +0000

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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?

A Me to Hold Onto

john — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 03:02:00 +0000

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Reading Catatonic Kid’s post, full of poetry as all of hers are, about how she experiences the disparate parts of her mind, I started thinking once more about what it is that holds me together when so much within seems to be breaking apart.

I work every day to keep myself in a mindset of recovery. Change, as Revellian often says, comes from the inner strength of the individual, not from a government, not from any source of professional benevolence. I agree that the struggle for a changed life out of mental anguish depends on the individual taking charge instead of waiting for doctors, medications, implants or electric convulsing of the brain to cure what’s wrong. I run into a problem, though, when I reach inside for that strong individual because I experience the illness as a self-estrangement, a losing sight of the core of who I am. Suddenly, when depression is breaking into my mind and feelings, I am looking at many faces, all of them mine. I’m no longer sure which is the self that knows the skills of survival. Which is the one among so many?

I search for the center that is my truest self, for the strength that I can draw from, for the sense of direction about where I’m heading. But what I keep running into are layers of identities, some shoved on me from without, some springing to life from my own mind, some demanded by work or family or money. I’ve seen myself, and the selves others have pushed onto me, as so many different people – the wrong son, the brilliant student, someone worthless and less than human, a power-hungry male, a success, a failure, a person of scorned ethnicity, a victim of illnesses, a survivor, a racist, a peace-maker, a writer, a manipulator, a spiritual man, a friend, a father, a husband, sometimes reliable, sometimes absent. There is always the fear that I will choose the wrong one and strain against my deepest drives to satisfy the idea of a self that is not all me.

Once I saw a production of the ancient Greek play about Oedipus the King. When this confident man strode on stage at the height of his power, four other actors, capturing other versions of his soul, crowded behind him. As he spoke his commands, these other selves revealed the scope of his inner conflict – one was fierce with angry violence, one smiled with approval, one writhed in agony, one quietly wept. These conflicting selves tore at each other constantly as the king strode along his tragic path to the doom that awaited him. That image stays with me always.

If I could draw the layers of identity and the inner energies supporting them, I suppose I would start with a sphere and a series of surrounding concentric spheres, none of them touching but each kept in a stable formation by their common center point. They can rotate in different directions, at different speeds; they can light up in turn or all at once; they can nurture the emergence of new selves, new spheres. All that can be contained by the stable center of a balanced mind and soul. But unwell and in depression, the center is suddenly gone – the spheres of the self float off alone, the ties among them lost, a relentless anxiety about who I am or who I should be consumes me. I don’t know where to turn – reaching for that inner stable self is like trying to reach for the surface of the water when I’m drowning and desperate for breath.

What I need at those times is a me to hold onto, a stable center that concentrates and moves the forces for life that I contain.

Years ago I came across a poem by Rilke that has never left me because it captures an endurance amid doubt that keeps me going. I’m roughing out my own version here:

I live my life in growing circles

that spread out over the things of this life.

Perhaps I will not reach the final one

but I will be seeking it.

I circle around God, around the ancient tower,

and I am circling for a thousand years.

And I still do not know: am I a falcon, a storm

or a great song.

Perhaps the real strength I reach for is the simple will to keep going, to keep circling. Recovery, after all, is no straight line.

What do you find to hold onto when your sense of who you are starts breaking into pieces like glass?

Who’s Watching Me?

john — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:41:00 +0000

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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.”

Everywhere? How could that be? I tried hard to imagine this. It was hard because we were also told that the eyes of God were upon us. If He had eyes, He must have some sort of body, even if it was an invisible one. So he couldn’t be like the air – which was the only thing I could think of that was everywhere. Even though the Spirit was said to be like the air, I had the problem of the eyes.

Then suddenly the image came to me. We used to have heavy paperweights consisting of a transparent glass globe on a wooden base. The globe was filled with water and on the bottom there was a layer of white flakes. When the globe was shaken, the flakes would fill the water and move in patterns like the falling snow. You couldn’t take your eyes off the swirling snow, and that was the image I needed. Instead of snow, however, I substituted little Christ-like figurines, like the plaster statuettes of Jesus that were so common. So I envisioned all these diminutive Christs constantly on the move in mysterious patterns. Of course, in reality they must be invisible, but they all had eyes and could thus constantly keep watch on everything, but more particularly on me.

This made complete sense in a six-year-old way. I finally understood how it was that I could be constantly under the eyes of God. Those little pairs of eyes were everywhere, recording my every action and my every sinful thought. God kept careful accounts of my behavior, and every impure thought was noted for the gravity of the sin it represented. It was especially important, then, that I confess these thoughts every week to the priest in the dark confessional and complete my penance carefully, every word of every prayer, and do so with complete sincerity – for those penitential acts were also being noted down. For every sincere repentance, a mark against me in the eternal accounts would be erased, and I would have another chance.

I believe this was the first time I could conceptualize being watched in every moment of my life, though I had long assumed this was the case. Now I knew that it was true because it had all the holiness of Church doctrine behind it. This was simply the condition of life.

Against all reason, I have never lost the conviction that I was being watched, stared at, judged, even when alone in my room writing, as I am now. There is always the extra tension of feeling the presence on me of the eyes of – whoever – neighbors, passersby, audiences refusing to applaud – whoever the moment requires the watchers to be. It is no longer God but people. And I am always playing to these invisible people. It is, of course, that much worse when I am among real folks who are actually looking at me. I always feel their heavy judgment, and I always know that I do not measure up to the expectations I am certain they have.

These days I have much more grown-up explanations for this conviction that I did at the age of six. Now I can say that depression is projecting my sense of worthlessness out into the world and having all those people who look my way confirm the crushing judgment that I can do no right, that I can never measure up. How conveniently the mind works, nimbly playing all the characters on stage at once.

And I have other explanations as well, equally grown-up ones. I’ve written about the eye of the camera focused on me by my mother. That’s powerful watching for a young boy, looking to find his mom’s loving eyes but staring instead into a finely curved lens. I wanted her to see me but not simply to press a mechanical button and then move on to another interesting shot. A boy wonders and knows without thinking – Is Mom watching me now? Will she see a cute or a poignant picture to capture or will she see me? And how will I know what she sees when I look into that ungiving, uninformative face. Clearly, I am not the one her eyes want to see. Even when a young boy, I developed the habit of posing to capture attention, but it was always the camera I got or a cool appraising look.

So – I tell myself without thinking: keep trying to get attention by presenting new faces – just so – look a little more commanding, or a little more humble, look strong, look indifferent in the face of danger, look warm and loving, look happy and content, look wild, look deep. Keep trying a different look, playing a different part . One day all those eyes will open wider and brighten at what they see. One day.