Some Rights Reserved by a whisper of unremitting demand at Flickr

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?

Some Rights Reserved by Lady Orlando at Flickr

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.

Creativity is usually discussed in connection with the arts, and the idea gets overblown into talk of visions, genius, divine inspiration and all that bluster – but it goes far beyond that setting. It takes creativity to have responsive relationships with the people I love, to have the insight and imagination I need at work to solve problems and present ideas persuasively or to be part of a neighborhood, a community. It's really what wakes me up and reminds me who I am. I will likely devote a lot of space on Storied Mind to discussing creativity in this broad sense for one driving reason.

When I can't summon the energy that's hidden away, I need to keep in mind the person I know I really am. Hard as it is in that depressed state, I have to focus as much as possible on that "real" me whose mind and feelings are full of discovery and new possibilities. It's like sending out the all-points bulletin: This guy's out there somewhere – or lost in here – and I intend to get him back.

After so many years of living with depression, I have a good sense of when I'm in it and  when I'm not. Sometimes I drift along in a middling state when I'm not totally in the depths and appear to be functional, but I can't really focus, I can't will myself to do much, I don't care about anything, my memory and attention don't seem to work. I manage to get things done in a minimal sort of way, but I know I'm not really there.  It's usually clear to me when one side or the other – the creative or the depressed – has the upper hand. The change happens invisibly, sometimes without warning. I can be firing on all cylinders one day, then wake up the next a wreck. It could also be a more gradual transition, but I know what's going on and no longer spend weeks or months in denial.

Then there are strange times when it feels more like these two are getting in each other's way, struggling over who's moving in and who's moving out. The friction between them can spark a terrible panic. The first time that happened set the example for what has become all too common since then – a kind of blackout or creative block just when I'm getting into something I really want to do.  These days, it could be writing that gets blocked or a major project at work. That first time it happened, I was in college. I had been acting and directing at the drama center there and was cast in the role of Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest. So, yes, it was that kind of creativity, but it could have been anything.

I was called on to play a role, and that's not so different from what any job requires. There is a professional face you put on, a style that has to achieve a certain impact. When you're well, you're really into it. Everything's clicking – you've connected with your customers, your clients, your bosses, your audience of whatever sort. You're with them and they're with you. The role fits, and you feel good doing it – if, that is, you've gotten yourself into the line of work that's right for you. That's the way I felt doing this role.

Everything started wonderfully. I immersed myself completely in the character. And he's a pretty strange one to feel comfortable with. In this fantasy play, Caliban is the monstrous offspring of a witch and the devil. He lives as a servant to an exiled king, Prospero, who has become a benevolent magician, able to summon natural forces to his bidding. All the action of the play is engineered by him to bring about repentance and redemption of the people who betrayed him. Caliban, all primal drive and instinct, foolishly follows a drunken fellow in hopes of rebelling against Prospero and killing him. Of course, he gets nowhere – this is, after all, a comedy. Because he's a creation of Shakespeare, he speaks beautiful poetry when he isn't bellowing in pain or following his lust. He's an intense character, just the sort an actor loves to get hold of. And I sure did.

In that rehearsal room, I slipped into his skin completely, getting the physicality down instinctively, the roaring guttural voice, the crouching walk, the sullen cringing – it all seemed to fit. Everyone watching was impressed as well. But then I would go home after rehearsal, and intense anxiety would begin to build. Before long, that feeling exploded into full panic. I couldn't focus on anything, read a book, listen to a lecture, talk to friends. All I could do was pound the city streets to wear myself out. That helped, but I could not keep my life together outside the rehearsal sessions. While there, I could lose myself in the part and feel nothing but the sheer joy of projecting into this strange creature's being. I had never felt panic before, but that's what took over in daily life once I had crossed the line to live happily inside Caliban's heart and mind and skin. What was that line, that boundary I was crossing, and why couldn't I live with myself as I did that?

For the first time in my life, I rushed to a psychiatrist, and he promptly let me pour my mind out for three hours one Saturday morning. He helped me link what I was going through with my family history and experiences as a kid – as you might expect. It was all true and filled me with relief to have an explanation for the craziness I had been experiencing. I felt exhilarated and free of panic, but I paid a big price for that return to what I considered normalcy. I immediately got out of the play, (I could never get so deeply into acting again after that), and I shut out the psychiatrist as well. One revelation was plenty, thank you. I wasn't going back there again!

What was happening, though I couldn't see it then, was that depression was taking over. The acting had triggered deep fears from my past, but the realization of that connection did nothing to undo depression itself. Under its influence, I cut myself off from most creative outlets, pulled back from relationships and hunkered down in a shell. Expressing my deepest energy and originality in any context became harder and harder. Of course, I had a ready explanation for the creative block, the stoniness of feeling, the loss of concentration, and all the rest. It was just the way I was, and I had to hide my failures in quiet shame.

There is a line at the end of The Tempest, when all are reunited and the mysteries solved. "In one voyage – all of us found ourselves, when no man was his own."

I wasn't equipped at that time to "find myself" and continued in that state of not being "my own." What has since come to feel like an ongoing tension between forces for creativity, on the one hand, and for depression, on the other, didn't seem to offer a choice in those college years. Being shut down in depression came to feel like normal life, though it was punctuated by occasional surges of an altogether different energy. Fortunately, I never gave up completely – how could I? – trying to break through the close walls of depression. It would be many years before I had a different set of tools to work with to change this imbalance of energy.