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The hardest thing about recovery can be the first step. It’s an alluring thought to be done with depression, but recovery can seem as overwhelming as the illness you’re trying to end. Since you may not have any energy at all, how can you begin to follow all this advice: get active, go running, start meditating, eat all that nourishing food, change your thinking, find your purpose in life, starts months of therapy, try a bunch of meds. And be determined to get through the long, tough grind.

Even the thought of all that is exhausting. The reality is quite different.

Perhaps you’re trying to think about recovery while lying in bed in a dark room, your mind drifting. There could be sunlight streaming through the windows, but it’s still a dark room. Everything around you fades into the background, loses its color, even its shape. You can feel the weight of all that stuff cluttering up the room – and your life. You forget where it all came from, the reasons you arranged them just so. What does it all matter?

You can’t do anything. Simple things feel impossible – getting up, throwing water on your face, dressing, eating something – all are work, and you’re not moving. Where there used to be energy, intention, will, action, there is now lead. It’s like being on a high mountain, the oxygen levels get lower, you tire too quickly, your legs are leaden weights that can only be lifted with a strength that’s deserted you – and a determination you just can’t muster. So you sit, all energy gone. But resting, slow breathing don’t restore you because the air’s too thin. All you can do is sit, overwhelmed with weakness.

How on earth can you begin to change? How can you even think about starting recovery, or doing anything at all?

Reach over to the lamp by your bed, twist the little knob, pull the short chain, press the button – however it works, just turn on the light. You’re so used to darkness, the brightness shocks your eyes, and your mind for an instant goes blank. But then a flood of impressions hits. In the dark you’ve only been seeing what’s in your mind. Of course, it’s all bleak, like looking at the night sky with all your failures the only bright points across a vast black emptiness. With light, colors emerge, the shapes of things stand out, your mind is busy sorting through it all.

It’s a flashing moment when your mind stops in surprise as you remember what each thing is – what it really is behind the screen you’ve put over it. These are simple things, pictures, clothes, CDs, shelves full of the odd things you’ve tossed there. But you brought each one into this room, and your mind links it to some use or purpose you’ve pushed aside into mental shadows. For just a moment they stand out again. It’s a small step of reconnection to a life you’ve led outside the limits of depression. A tiny step, but a start.

Once I felt that sudden shock, and it helped wake me up – in a couple of ways. Here’s how I described it in a post I wrote three years ago (with a couple of minor edits).

I awoke in the middle of one night, or rather I gave up trying to sleep. Thoughts of an incident at work were stinging me – I had failed to do X, or Y was upset with me or a clever strategy had backfired. Whatever it was, I couldn’t stop going over it and had made myself weary with the fears of what would follow from what felt like the greatest blunder of my life. After hours of tossing, I saw it was getting toward dawn. I decided to get up but my mind had become foggy – I felt drugged and run down after pouring all my mental energy into the bleakest interpretation of what I had done, who I was. Not wanting to wake my wife that early, I walked in the dark toward the bathroom, feeling my way around obstacles, but still sunk in the misery of those obsessive thoughts. I knew very well this thickness of mind and lingering anxiety could lead to a day of depression in which I would be able to do nothing useful. Then, stepping into the bathroom, I pushed the door closed behind me, reached to the right and flipped the light switch.

And the room came alive with light, shapes, color. Suddenly, my senses and mind were flooded, as each object, tiled pattern, clothing dropped on the floor, magazines, open bottles, everything called up worlds of associations. The brightness of the everyday was dazzling, each thing a link to the simple world of being alive. There were the deep blue and bright white tiles L put in when she redesigned the bathroom, a copy of English Gardens on the floor showing an add for intricate glass greenhouses, that special red hair blower Cathy loves , the dozens of tiny bottles of lotions, sunscreen, hair treatments, a rack of glistening ear rings, the quieting thick towels hanging from racks, the tangling weaves of long bright runners leading me eye across the room to the wall-width mirror and the image of tousled me taking it all in. Colors pull the mind in many directions, a blaze of lightening-fast connections that help assemble the external world as something real, something that you can’t ignore. I felt comfort and relief at this rich sight of a hundred tiny things. All the associations they called to mind crisscrossed in the familiar jumble of a shared life that reassured me. They were part of a reality too complicated to be submerged by inner bleakness. A light switch took me out of myself for that moment to mingle with this population of ordinary things that my wife and I had placed here for a hundred little purposes.

Has there been a moment in any setting that shocked your mind and feelings out of depression, even for a brief time? Perhaps you could let us know what it was like.

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In thinking about how I managed to rid myself of depression, I’ve realized the importance of getting ready to recover. This idea never occurred to me during many failed attempts to find a way out of the underworld of living. I had hoped there would be a quick, linear pathway to feeling fully alive again, but there was never going to be such a simple solution.

I mentioned in a post on patterns of recovery that I really could have used the sort of roadmap that writers on PTSD have developed. Having a sense of what lies ahead and what to expect would have been great, but even more basic would have been an understanding of the inner skills I would need to keep going.

In saying that, I don’t want to suggest that it’s possible to approach recovery in a linear way. You can’t say to yourself: Well, I’m depressed, and I want to recover. So I need to learn these skills first, then create a master plan covering all the bases and then get started. That doesn’t happen – except in books about the latest sure-fire way to cure yourself of depression.

Learning to Observe, Becoming Aware

I can illustrate what I mean about learning skills by backing up to that first idea: I’m depressed. The ability to recognize that I had a condition called depression was my first breakthrough. As obvious as it seems, it takes a lot of mental muscle power to get to this basic awareness.

Until I could do that, I was simply lost in a kind of whirlwind. I had no idea that I was experiencing anything but my own nature. This was my life, a swirling mass of moods and drives and ideas about myself that were indistinct. My behavior was driven by those forces and influences, and I made sense of it all by believing I was a bad or stupid or worthless person.

I needed the ability to stand back from those drives and begin to separate one from another. I started to do that when I sought help from psychiatrists at the height of two crises that occurred during my twenties. Those crises passed as soon as I could identify something like a cause – an association with family history or a habit of thinking that was distorting my experience.

Those moments of insight and the self-exploration that led to them were like basic training. They helped me develop the ability to look at my experience more as an observer than a driven victim.

Becoming an observer of dominating feelings and thoughts is what meditation teaches as well. That is a powerful way of building the skill, but it’s not the only way of achieving some level of emotional detachment.

Every form of therapy helps you learn how to step back from experience and emotions that feel overwhelming. For me, writing about what I was going through also helped. That’s another way of learning how to sort things out and name the many different influences that add to inner pain and confusion.

The Fear of Changing

But awareness only goes so far. It was one thing to wish to feel better. It was much harder to want recovery so deeply that I could take action to get started and then keep going. What prevented me from doing anything for a long time was fear. Fear had stopped me from pursuing therapy after those early crises, even though I knew it was helping. In each case, I got to a key insight, felt better and then got out of there.

The skill of being able to experience the fear as an observer helped me get past it – but only after so many times when the fear was strong enough to dominate my behavior. For me, it was fear of change, fear of launching into daily life without having the certainty, however grim, that depression provided. As I’ve written elsewhere, it set the habits I used to get through everyday life, though, of course, they were terribly self-defeating.

I could readily imagine feeling good again, feeling “like myself” but that self had been conditioned to live with depression since childhood. Fantasizing about a great life ahead was one thing, but changing what I did from day to day evoked a deep resistance. The truth was that I had only lived without depression for isolated periods. It was the life I knew best.

So making a consistent, determined effort to stay with any form of therapy became hard. There would always come a point where I’d slow down, back off, or give up out of a sense of failure. Those were the moments when fear took over, though I’d convince myself there was another reason – the treatment didn’t work, the therapist wasn’t any good, I didn’t have time to do it right. I could always come up with some excuse other than plain old fear.

The ability to explore this fear as an observer – not avoiding it but letting myself feel it – finally helped me to set it aside. But this also happened only after a lot of failed attempts and a lot of fear. It never feels good to do – or avoid doing – anything out of fear. I felt great when I got to the point of believing: I can do this, and I’m going to get it done.

What has been the biggest obstacle for you to start and then stay with your attempts to recover from depression?

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Here are two posts about self-esteem (here and here) I’ve recently published at Health Central. “Loss of self-esteem” has become the clinical term for one of depression’s key symptoms, but it doesn’t convey much about living with the contempt I used to feel for myself, day in, day out.

One habit that was especially hard to break was the constant comparing of myself, always unfavorably, to just about anyone I met or even read about in the news. A day was filled with reminders of inadequacy because of this, but I think part of it was also envy. I’ve always felt contradictory impulses – tearing myself down but also feeling strongly competitive with other men. I could easily shift from feeling powerless to imagining myself capable of super-achievements. I suppose these are different forms of insecurity, damaged sense of self, loss of self-esteem – whatever you’d like to call it.

The other habit was lashing myself with the failures or blunders I committed each day. Of course, I could never see the positive side of anything I did when consumed by depression. I obsessed and winced over each mistake and took it as yet more proof of worthlessness. Strange how limited the mind and emotions become in this state – one answer, one judgment for everything.

In one of the Health Central posts, I describe how I’ve worked to break these two habits I lived with for so long. They still come up, but more as ghostly reminders that I can back-hand out of the way.

I hope you’ll find these posts helpful.

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I’m a paws-on kind of guy so I get really upset when they’re tied behind my back. Truly, deeply, combustibly upset, especially with the self-imposed deadline for my new website fast approaching.

For two weeks, I’ve been sitting at this keyboard staring at spinning beach balls of computer death against the bright and cheery background of my frozen website. Gray screens, grinding gears and broken hard drives. Vanishing posts, failed backups and wheezy memory of the random access type. Very, very random.

Primary system blown, older system now in place. More spinning beach balls, grinding gears and gray screens. I work at the machine’s convenience.

Is there a lesson in this? Is it hubris to set a deadline for launching a new website?

I guess I’ve set my own stress trap and should have read this post of mine again before making firm commitments. After all, no one but me cares about or remembers or ever knew about this deadline, so I’ll try to relax about missing it. Good practice in breaking an old depression-era habit.

So, RecoveryFromDepression.com will remain shut behind password-only access well beyond my hoped for launch date of August 1st. I’ll let you know when it’s up and running.

In the meantime, I get a cool new computer to satisfy my gadget-lust. So all is not lost.

Here’s wishing you the best in hardware reliability.