Posted by JohnD
Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:15:00 GMT
Photo Credit: JesterArts at Stockxpert
As she often does, Stephany put a thought in my mind that I haven’t been able to shake. It was a three-word comment: “You have recovered.” Nice wish, I thought, if only – ! I’ve been working on recovery so long – it just isn’t happening consistently. But the problem with interpreting this as a wish was her strange use of past rather than future tense (You have recovered). So the words kept coming back to me, and I didn’t know what to do with them. Finally, I started thinking: Well, what if we suppose for a minute or an hour that the statement – all three words of it – were true, not so much for me, but for someone? After all, decades ago I did some acting. Couldn’t I just play this part for a while? And if I did, how exactly would I, as this someone, feel? And what would I say? This could take a lot of research, I thought, but I needed to start somewhere. And the first thing would be – kicking that idiot Depression out of my life – I mean his life – the life of the guy I would pretend to be.
After jotting down a few words for this character to say, I kind of caught the spirit of this recovered thing and started to feel something unusual stirring. I heard odd bursts of laughter and then realized with a shock – hey, that’s me – I mean, of course, he, the guy I was portraying. I – he – felt really good, giggly, smiley – bizarrely out of character – my character, that is. This character, however, was recovered and so could be expected to be happy, giddy even, at having pushed depression out of his life after decades of doom and gloom. Here’s the sort of thing he (well, I, acting in the role of recovered person) might well be saying:
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Fighting Depression | Tags acting, angels, depression, feeling, life, love, pain, recovery, song, Stephany, violence | 13 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:19:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Elena Acin at Flickr
Insightful comments by Stephany and Jane are helping me get to another stage in dealing with depression. In a previous post I started wondering if there might be a very different way of imagining and experiencing this illness. Could there be a way of adapting that started with different assumptions about the condition than the purely negative ones I’ve always accepted? I wondered if depression, which I fight hard to get out of my life, and creativity, which I embrace and cultivate, might be different faces of a psychic force trying to take its place in my mind and the actions of my life? Jane mentioned Eckhart Tolle’s experience of depression as a step toward his experience of enlightenment, and Stephany wrote that “when we leave for a depression, I think we fear losing ourselves and not being able to return to what we considered good… .” She adds that we could look at this as a renewal process, that “we come back with more of ourself.” That’s a wonderful image of leaving for depression and returning with a sense of renewal, as if from a vacation.
So I’ve been asking myself: if I were less combative with depression, accepted it more like a step toward a higher knowledge of myself, would it make the whole experience of living with the condition something more positive? Could I come to see it, not like losing half my waking life, but like gaining ground on healing and spiritual insight? Like most people, I have had many powerful spiritual experiences, but I haven’t connected those with depression – until now. And in my typically associative way, these two things come together in a dream.
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Posted in Explanations, Fighting Depression, Creativity, Spirituality and Depression | Tags adaptation, awareness, breakthrough, consciousness, David Karp, depression, dream, Jane Chin, learning, practice, spirituality, Stephany | 8 comments
