Posted by JohnD
Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:03:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Eddi 07 at Flickr
Susan and Dano have presented in comments here two different ideas about isolation that I need to explore more deeply, with your help. This is hard for me to pin down alone. My mind wants to wander, to lose focus, to put itself to sleep because this gets at something I don’t want to face – so bear with me as I try to chain together a few thoughts about what is happening in the urge or the necessity to isolate.
Dano has written with crushing power about the worst times of depression when the illness flattens her under its unremitting pressure and pain. Isolation, then, is not a choice but a necessity. The ability to face others, to speak, to interact is completely stripped away.
I know that when I’m crashing into the thicket of Depression, I need to be alone. The very act of making eye contact, speaking, inhaling and exhaling have become monumental tasks. I feel contagious, as if by even being near me, others will get sucked into my mental black hole.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Connecting, Fighting Depression | Tags death, defenses, depression, feeling, isolation, recognition, siren, sleep, solitude, symptom, trap, ulysses | 11 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 22 Sep 2007 21:12:00 GMT
There are days that begin in difficult moods, and I start writing down what I’m going through to see if I can shake myself loose. Here’s what I wrote one morning last week.
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I keep sinking away into a deep pool of stillness. Looking outside this morning, I see that the season’s first rain showers came before dawn. After so much dryness, the slick sheen of water seems strange. Everything is damp and chilly, the sky is dark with the rain-weighted clouds, and I keep staring out the window at the garden, the bare yard beyond that, and across the street to an old barn in an open field. It’s a good thing I don’t have to rush to work this morning because my body doesn’t want to move at all. I’ll stay here, connecting remotely, trying to get things done, then go to my meeting late this afternoon. But I’m feeling this stillness getting into me, a kind of comfortable, let’s-sit-and-stare into-the-fathomless-world feeling. A rich depth opens in my chest. I wish it were the warmth preceding a good writing spell, but really it’s more like falling into emptiness, a state where I will do nothing if I don’t activate soon. Writing these lines is a mechanism to turn my mind from emptiness to the beginnings of movement. Work feels miles away and alien – I guess I’m really drifting off. I’ll stop now, get cleaned up and dressed for the day, then come back later. This drugged state of floating seems to lift me easily onto a smoothly flowing cloud that will take me somewhere intensely pleasant. But I know it’s nothing but sleep, a lazy turning round and round, dreamlike days – I’m unconnected to anything. At least there is no fear and panic, everything is muted, distant, like living in the midst of a soft warm fog.
Two Hands (Rights Reserved)
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Posted in Surviving at Work | Tags attention, detachment, focus, recognition, wandering, work | no comments
