Some Rights Reserved by simiant at Flickr.

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.

Some Rights Reserved by Funky64(www.lucarossato.com) at Flickr

Understanding what work means for my sense of personal identity, for a basic acceptance of who I am, has been a central issue in making progress in recovery over this past year. Yet it seems strange that both my identity and feelings of self-worth should so depend on what I do.

I spent a long time during the 80s in a form of therapy that emphasized learning to accept myself “just the way I am.” But the truth is that I’ve always depended on some sort of work for a sense of identity and self-worth. A few weeks ago, I found again how true this is.

A computer meltdown made my writing and blogging tools disappear. All my notes and rough drafts were inaccessible. My days were suddenly all about computer machinery, waiting for parts, frustration with repairs and then the endless task of restoring every program and every file. I got more and more anxious about not writing and having to force my mind to focus on the invisible trolls and traps of code and software.

The anxiety and tension were tearing me apart. When things get that bad, anything I’m holding in my hands is in great danger of being strangled, torn to bits, trampled, smashed, or pounded into dust. The cats flee for their lives when my fists start hammering the desktop, and the dogs come meekly to my side to be forgiven for whatever they’ve done to push me to such fury. I feel like I’m coming apart, and something close to terror grips me.

But then it all goes away. This time it took five days of torture, but at last I could get back to work. After writing just a few pages, I could breathe more easily, an inner balance returned and I felt the beautiful restfulness of concentration on the flow of words, ideas and images.

There was no question about it – I had to be writing to feel completely myself, comfortable in my own skin, to feel right. I was doing the kind of work I felt I was made for.

What we call work is not always an external thing driven by the expectations and standards of success of the world we live in. There are goals I could set that would have nothing to do with my inmost needs. I could focus on making money or winning a prize or an election or a leadership position – and in the past I often did feel the need to set such goals – but none of them were true to what I most needed.

It’s so common to hear about the contrast between being and doing. As I learned in the 80s, we should be able to find fulfillment in being who we are, fully aware of the soundness of the inner self and not dependent on any external test of our human value. We do not need to become someone through work; we already are the person we were meant to be. As wise as that may sound, it’s missing the contribution of what we do to our sense of fulfillment. There is a connection between inner soul and outer action.

Thomas Merton is one of the writers who explores this bond quite deeply. In No Man Is an Island, he writes that it’s not a question of either/or but of balancing:

My soul does not find itself unless it acts. Therefore it must act. Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death. But my soul must not project itself entirely into the outward effects of its activity. I do not need to see myself, I merely need to be myself.  …  The soul that throws itself outdoors in order to find itself in the effects of its own work is like a fire that has no desire to burn but seeks only to go up in smoke.

I come to life most fully in the work of writing and communicating. That supports the inner harmony I’m trying to find during this process of recovery, but the work within is equally important. I’m closer now to finding the balance between the two than I have ever been before.

There is always the risk of choosing the wrong kind of work, and I have done that. I’ll take up that story in the next post in this series.

What’s the story of the choices you have made about work and career? Have you found the right balance? Does illness keep you from any kind of satisfying work? Or does work contribute to illness?