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Merely Me wrote a wonderful post on the importance of bringing play back into everyday life. It is the forgotten tonic among adults in general and depressed adults in particular. She paints a vivid scene of a group therapy session where she coaxed recovering addicts into playing rather than talking about themselves. Some brought in precious toys they’d probably had for years, and everyone got immersed in their games. It sounded like they felt the release of a long-buried instinct – for play is surely one of the basic human instincts.

Her post brought to mind one of the most extraordinary people I’ve known. He was a born teacher infusing his own life and the lives of those around him with imagination and play as a natural part of his instinct for life.

Steven and his lifelong friend Maria arrived in town one day, found a small space they could rent to start a school and dubbed it Little Earth. Its first citizens were both kindergarten age kids and the dozens of figures emerging from the imaginations of this gifted pair. The little kids referred to them as the grownup kids because they took the imaginative adventures and instinctive games of children as seriously as any event in adult life. They accepted kids on their own terms, could speak their language, play with them, win their confidence and teach them through play-adapted methods.

They told dramatic tales with hand puppets and marionette shows, taking on the voices of all the characters as they either crouched behind the puppet theater or stood over it guiding strings that brought the flopping marionettes to life. The artifice disappeared as the puppets took on life in zany stories that always reflected back on what the kids were really going through. Drawing on their network of talented friends, they arranged visits by performers from street theater groups who taught the kids circus arts. Everyone learned to walk on stilts, perform acrobatics and turn into dangerous tigers and bears that challenged the ring master’s control and composure as he flashed his string whip. That intense training culminated in a public circus performance in a city park, the Greatest Show on Little Earth. Each kid, no matter how timid or bold, found a role to play and drew great cheers from the crowd.

Each year, All Species Day was celebrated by a parade around the downtown plaza, kids and parents together dressed as river otters, eagles, polar bears, and bearing signs about the endangered animals and how to protect them. Steven’s teaching, in particular, was filled with guitar accompanied songs for all instructive and fun occasions. Small and slender, he had a kid-like curiosity, wonder and imagination that saw the play and teaching possibilities in almost everything.

He also played the magician, appearing in his black top hat and tails over blue jeans. Coins, eggs, stuffed animals would appear and disappear, often with the tap of his magic cane over the upturned hat. Reaching for a handkerchief stuffed up his sleeve, he would be amazed as he drew forth an endless stream of red silk. And most miraculously, his assistant, Maria, would disappear in a huge smoke puff from his ever present flash powder. For Halloween evening, the two organized an outdoor extravaganza with bonfires, magic incantations, bursts of mysterious smoke, cauldrons of potions and a gentle witch and wizard presiding over all. There was a sense of instructive ceremony about all of Steven’s ideas. He cajoled the most reluctant kids into playing lead roles in dramas designed to stretch their ideas of who they were and what they could do.

This was not just dramatic flair. There were sound teaching principles woven through everything he created. Eventually, with the help of friends, he and Maria produced a book about Little Earth, and as the school grew into a much larger and more complicated place, they both retired to find new adventures. Steven fulfilled a lifelong dream of traveling to Egypt. There with his irrepressible personality, he befriended the sister of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former ruler of the country, and persuaded her to support the establishment of a new school in Alexandria – based, of course, on Little Earth principles. After some years he continued his travels around the world and eventually found his way back to our small city.

But when he returned he brought the news that he had AIDS. Even then, he followed his instinct to teach through ceremony. One night he gathered a group of friends to share with them what the disease meant in his life and what his prospects were. After greeting many he had not seen in years and swapping many stories, he settled himself on the floor in the middle of the room and spread out in a semi-circle before him the dozens of small dark bottles that contained his daily regimen of pills. He swept his arm over all those medications and said simply: This is the umbrella of hope in the 90s. Always concerned that we know and learn, he described the symptoms he was living with, the impact of the medications and eventually made it clear that this chemical hope might not be effective.

He went through a long decline like most other AIDS patients of that time. Infections plagued and weakened him, minor strokes began to affect his concentration and memory, weakness kept him in a wheelchair, and his body started to shrink as eating became too painful. But he created one more ceremony before he died. He asked (and no one could ever refuse one of Steven’s requests) that a circle of friends join around him to be present for the end of his life. It was as if he wanted to be sure that his spirit would become one with our own. And so a small phone tree was organized, and one day my wife and I received the call to come.

He was unconscious by then and kept alive by means of an oxygen tank. One friend, who had come from San Francisco where he worked with AIDS patients, took a look at him lying on the bed and agreed that he was just about gone. He had seen a lot of this before. The attending nurse explained that Steven would probably go shortly after the oxygen tubes were removed. His sister, who had helped him through this long ending phase of life, said it was time, the tubes were taken out, and we held hands in a circle around his bed as he had wished. He managed a few rough-edged breaths, then a quiet one, then nothing. I doubt that anyone there thought of him as dead. We all took turns alone with him, saying personal good-byes. When I stood over him, his face still looked close to life, as if he might at wake any moment and start telling a story. All I could do was bend down and kiss him good-bye.

Naturally, we organized a costume parade to honor him. The procession around the central plaza was led by his off-white 62 Chevy with the fake feet sticking out of the half-open trunk – one of his trademarks -and followed by the rest of us in whatever costume pieces had come immediately to hand – along with a few of our musician friends playing familiar Little Earth songs. Then we packed ourselves into a church hall for an impromptu service, and each took turns reminiscing. The one I most remember was a story told by the AIDS worker from San Francisco.

One day he visited Steven and found him putting up on the walls a series of portraits, each surrounded by his fanciful painting. They all looked like small celebratory shrines. As he looked at the portraits, the visitor recognized each one. He turned to Steven and said: Steven, all these guys treated you horribly – they abused and betrayed you and left you in agony each time. Why are you putting all this up as if you’re honoring them? Steven answered quite simply: Yes, it’s true they hurt me – but they were all angels who brought love into my life, and I want to celebrate each one.

That was pure Steven, who died when he was 36. There is no forgetting him or the spirit he shared with everyone he knew – a spirit that might appear in a sudden flash of light tossed from his magic hand.

Who is that special person in your life who has helped in whatever way to wake up a sleeping part of your spirit?

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Catatonic Kid (CK) and Isabella have had an inspired exchange of posts in the last couple of months on the use of language and creativity to engage depression, take away its power and release creativity. There are so many ideas and evocative phrases in these posts that I’ve had trouble picking out responses from the dozens that run through me. So I’m going to start with notes on writing, creativity and language and how they relate to depression – and see where these jottings take me.

To be clear, though, I can only talk about how these basic elements help me in recovery. CK and Isabella have their own truths about words and creative imagination. Each of us responds differently, and what works for me may not work for another. So this is my take, a rough rendering of my truth – maybe it’s like yours, maybe not. There are as many paths to recovery as there are people trying to figure this out.

My imagination is expressed primarily through writing, and it helps distance me from the symptoms of depression by portraying them as different characters intruding on my life. These are my visitors from the theater of depression. I can laugh at them, kick them off stage or manage their movements and cues like the director of a play.

This shows me more precisely how they behave, what influence they try to have on me, as I attempted in this post. Imagining a character, say, who captures how my mind obsesses on painful moments sharpens my awareness and so helps me catch myself falling into that mode of thought. Naming things helps, then, but in a particular way that sets them in motion like friends of bad influence, patrons generous with evil gifts, manipulators of intimacy, perverse alchemists turning gold into lead. I don’t want any of them around. I certainly don’t want to live with them and let them control how I think and feel.

Writing itself is discovery. Ideas, flows of images linked to words, associations of one event with another arrive in mind that come in no other way. Putting the words together produces a guided energy that pushes around the boxes in the mind’s cluttered attic. Suddenly the useful springs out of old packing, and the beautiful emerges from cobwebbed obscurity. A touch of new life puts color into the rush of feeling and memory, and my tense neck relaxes once again.

This verbal and pictured imagination is my drug of choice. But it’s all the more devastating when my mind blanks out for a day or a week. A mental fog and fear take over, blocking not just words but new roads into recovery. I run into detours, closed exit ramps, and have to push on to the wrong destination where depression is waiting. The gas tank falls, a clunk on the pavement, and I’m running on empty. Maybe I’m squatting and pulling at my flat tire on a narrow shoulder of the freeway, feeling the wind of 70 mile an hour metal tonnage streaking by. It’s dangerous there! A tempting small move, the impulsive decision – it’s all over! That’s what it’s like when the living soul machine breaks, and the language and stories are lost. I’m desperate. I feel I’ll never write again, paralyzed! What am I alive for?

So I force myself back to a notebook or keyboard and write down something, anything to get myself going again. The first post I did on this blog consisted of two journal entries capturing this process – a paragraph naming what I was feeling in order to get going in the morning, and then a report back in the afternoon to say that things had begun breaking well for me the rest of the day. There it was – a self-prescribed dose of syntax like a finger snap in my awareness, a bit of sunlight through fog, a voice suddenly calling my name to startle me into action.

My mind simply awakens when I write. There are so many links to the unexpected – moments in my life I had thought lost, insight about something I’ve experienced that day. The ideas that come are not mental flashes but a slow nourishing rain, livening, raising hope like the smell of water in the desert air. It’s the contrast between seeing shadowy objects in a darkened room – all of them anonymous, asleep, lacking individuality – and then turning on the light to a shock of color and clear space in which each thing takes back its uniqueness and finds again its place in my life and memory.

Writing wraps my soul around purpose and builds a fire-like warmth as self and task become one. I’m on a different wavelength – or swimming in a fluid medium of no resistance. It’s not like a high or sudden rush but rather a deep dive and gliding in an underworld where life seems to start, where there is no barrier between me and what I see. It’s suddenly within me, a part of who I am, not just a thing to be labeled or defined externally. That is a place of genesis, fertility, birth.

As I was emerging from that place once, I had a painful vision of attempting to pull the living quality of experience into words, seeing the original vitality gradually lost as the source of the thought worked its way up through the winding nerves and blood vessels of the body to my mind and then tried to flow out through my hand, the pen it held in the form of words onto paper. But the result was only black scratchings, words that would hopefully evoke a semblance of the original. They seemed like dead shadows, still-born attempts to render a world impossible for words to capture. The best I can do is use language to approximate what I’ve tried to bring back with me from that underworld. It’ a clumsy verbal dance or charade with crude gestures trying to make things clear. Yet even then it retains a remembered power that strengthens life and intensifies energy.

So the writing experience at its very best and richest has a deeply healing quality that remains mysterious. But there are other parts of writing as well that are more like slow torture. There is the struggle to find a way in when nothing brightens a destination to let me know where to go next. And there is alway a long looking back to edit, squeeze, reshape in order to fit words more cleanly into a structure that lets others – readers – claim when is written down as a part of their own experience. Does the scene work, does the story connect?

And that is the final piece – the connection with readers, the response, the sharing within a community. That brings in another healing dimension of life. But that’s another story.

What are the ways you follow toward recovery? Do they include writing or other kinds of creative expression? If you blog or comment much, I imagine that writing plays some role in healing.

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Marissa wrote a post at Wellsphere that made me pause. She was objecting to the idea found in Richard O’Connor’s book (Undoing Depression) that “I am not my depression.” She interpreted this as an evasion of accountability for one’s actions. The depressed behavior that harms relationships, for example, can’t be dismissed as something you’re not responsible for – it has a real impact because of your behavior, and you remain accountable for what you do. And so, in this sense, she insists: “I am my depression.”

I agree with the need to be accountable. I have hurt those around me by being emotionally absent, self-involved, unable to talk, irritable or in a rage, or behaving badly in any of the ways that are symptomatic of depression. But O’Connor’s intention with this formulation, I believe, isn’t aimed at releasing people from accountability. It’s a way of reminding those suffering from depression that they have an illness, that there is hope for recovery, that they should not confuse the symptoms with the totality of their human identities.

I think a better way of putting this, however, is another sentence that appears frequently in books about how to deal with this condition: “I am more than my depression.” In other words, my identity isn’t defined by behavior linked to the illness, but it also says that I am my depression, in part.

However I might phrase it, I have to get the point that I can fight the inner voice telling me I am nothing more than my depression. I can work hard to build up the other forces in my psyche, like creativity and love. Those qualities should never be eclipsed in my mind by the negative self-image that depression shrouds me with. In another post, I visualized the intermingling of these forces as a kind of spiraling in which they remain separate but closely bound in a single turning flow. Yes, depression is a part of me, but I don’t have to accept it as the dominant force.

In a much earlier post, I described a turning point in dealing with depression when I rebelled against the trend of thinking that was taking me to a kind of passive suicide by the temptation to leave a cancer untreated. That moment helped change my inner belief that I was the worthless person depressed thinking encouraged me to accept. I emerged from that crisis convinced there was so much more to my life and that I could get better by becoming an active partner in any treatment I might undertake. I was responsible for recovery, not medication, not therapy. Those could be helpful tools only if I used them with the deep intention of pushing depression back to a lesser role and bringing forward the positive forces that nourished life and relationships.

I believe that everyone has to arrive at a formulation that is right for them, that helps carry on the hard, daily work of recovery. Some find that power through faith in God, some through meditation, some through the concept of depression as a treatable disease, some by denying that it is a disease and seeing it as a part of their lives they need to manage without drugs. Although I may not agree with all of these formulations, I am not looking for absolute truth but rather for the beliefs that help with survival. I do not mean to be flip or disrespectful of deeply held values and convictions. I am simply observing that people go in different directions to arrive at the same place of recovery and hope.

In some of my posts I have narrated incidents in which I separated myself from depression completely by imagining it as a different character whom I could kick out of my life. That half comic representation was useful to me in those moments. Of course, I don’t actually believe that I can separate myself from depression as I would from a destructive person. But if imagination can help me from time to time, I’ll take anything I can dream up to get through another day.

So my thanks to Marissa for helping me work a bit harder to be clear and intentional about how I think about my responses to depression.

What are the beliefs you hold that help you keep going?

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I’ve been looking back at the way I’ve thought about depression and my stance toward dealing with it, and I’ve started to wonder: Could I imagine and adopt in my life a different approach to this illness?

What starts me on this track is my encounter with the experiences of so many other thoughtful fellow-sufferers who have achieved a way of living with depression that finds some positive value where I find none. What are they seeing that I’m missing? As I’ve indicated repeatedly, I see depression as an intruder, a trespasser that steals the vital energy of creativity that is its opposite. My last post recognized that while others whom I respect may have very different experiences, I have always wound up cheering on a Jane Chin or Therese Borchard or Peter Kramer who see depression as a disease that is just as welcome in life as cancer. – Ah, cancer—well, that gives me pause. I find a similar tension in the experiences even of terminal cancer patients. Some kick at their condition in anger and bitterness while others find a transformative spiritual experience in what they have to endure. This has nothing to do with the fact that cancer is a disease; it has everything to do with adapting to the experience of living with a potentially deadly problem. My own experience with cancer brought out a fighting spirit that got me through and that persists in my stance toward depression. I firmly believe in the need for using all available treatment options in responding to depression -it is an illness that can kill me. What I’m thinking about now is the way I live my life with this condition as a permanent part of my mind, body and soul. Can or should I adapt to it in a different way?

I’ve been trying to pull together my own sense of how my imagination has brought about my current adaptation to illness with ideas from Donald Karp’s intriguing book, Speaking of Sadness. The results are surprising.

Karp detects a pattern in responses to depression among the fifty people he interviewed, patterns that resonated with his own long experience of living with the condition. The pattern begins with an effort either to deny that depression will interfere with normal life or to seek diversion or escape from pain though intense involvement in other activities. When those strategies failed the people in his interviews, they tried hard to fix the problem by getting help from therapists and medication or alternative remedies. Sooner or later, they were forced to realize that these methods could only alleviate but never cure the problem. Faced with the reality that depression was not going to disappear, they set about finding strategies of coping and adapting to a life lived on different terms. What Karp found most often was that this last stage led people to see an advantage in their condition, either a special sensitivity to life, a creativity or a deeper spiritual awareness that non-depressed people seemed to lack. This is exactly what I have not found, or at least I have never imagined my experience in this way. Perhaps imagination is the key.

There are elements of our mental and emotional experience we want to disown, others we want to claim. When I am in a creative mode, I’m truly experiencing things in a different way than I usually do – it is part of my soul I want to cultivate, own, prize. When I am in depressed mode, I’m also experiencing things in a different way from “normal” life or thinking or feeling, yet I want to fight, disown, expel it. In this blog, I’ve often imagined depression as a person I fight in anger, sometimes as a pair I have to stumble around with, always as a presence I am trying to get rid of. My creativity is part of the real me, depression is a diseased burden I’m trying to cut out.

This way of imagining and feeling about depression has been a powerful tool in keeping me functional, and it’s been an adaptation that has generally worked. But the question I am asking myself, given the differing experiences of others, is: Could I come up with another strategy based on a different way of imagining what’s going on in my psyche, mind, emotions, soul?

One aspect of my current adaptation is that I live in cycles with highs of intense creativity and lows of intense despair with normal functionality on the way up and the way down. I feel the highs and relatively normal periods as the real me and the lows as an alien personality that is stealing my place in the world.

Is it possible to imagine and really experience all this not as an opposition of forces, a constant battle, but rather as a unified psyche through which different forces flow at different times? Is it possible that it’s neither “creativity” nor “depression” that I’m reacting to and experiencing but an underlying power of life that wants to push itself into the world? A power that sometimes terrifies and paralyzes me, even when I recognize it as creativity?

I don’t know, but I’m exploring the possibilities. What do you think?