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Following the last post, I need to expand on the idea of changing the mindset of recovery to that of finding purpose for the future. Just as I could undo the belief in my perpetual illness, I could also undo the belief that there had been little meaning or value in what I had done in the past. In other words, purpose might not be something I have yet to discover.

The insistent verdict of depression that I’ve accepted for so long, with its refrain of my worthlessness and failure as a person, only undermined the idea that I could ever have done anything of value in the past, or could in the future. I’ve known for a long time that what depression told me wasn’t true, but I believed that it was. I had to be able to change that mindset, and I remembered a couple of famous quotes:

- Pascal said in his Pensees
about the search of a doubting man for God:
“You would not be seeking Him, if you had not already found him.”

- Gandhi once said in a speech, as quoted in Conquest of Violence
:
“The bond of the slave is snapped the moment he considers himself a free being. He will plainly tell the master: I was your bondslave till this moment, but I am a slave no longer…”

I had to stop thinking I was a slave to this condition; I had to see the purpose I had already found.

I do not in any way mean to imply that major depression is only a matter of mindset and belief. No distortion of thought and emotion that can drive people to kill themselves could only be that. But it has been true for me that until belief, conviction and thinking had started to change, there was no hope for dislodging depression as the major force in my life.

How could I begin to sort out my experience and find this purpose and direction – or meaning, as Viktor Frankl puts it? I wanted to focus first on my work life, where I had recently made a huge breakthrough. The new sense of excitement, however, had only served to heighten the contrast with the negative feelings I still had about what I had done in the past. To change that old belief about my life up to that point – especially my work life – I needed some method to start sorting it out and help me cut through the confusion that had previously made this task so difficult.

Though it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit it, I found a simple tool not in the writing of a philosopher, spiritual leader or psychologist but in a blog post by one of the online gurus of marketing. Chris Brogan *wrote* about the idea that people trying to market their own services needed to present a simple story about who they were, what their passion was and what unifying purpose tied together everything they had done in their careers.

Taking this method out of the context of “personal branding,” I looked back at the types of work I had done to find that unifying story. A couple of things stood out.

• I have always tried to interpret between groups and individuals of different values, cultures and histories so they could more effectively communicate and learn from each other.

• I have always done this work with people in conflict and have had a driving interest in learning what they had faced in their life experiences and how these encounters had shaped their values and beliefs.

• I have worked through many media and professional roles, but my most effective and fulfilling has been writing.

To get to the heart of my work life: I’m a writer, interpreter and mediator. Writing is what I’m most passionate about because I love the written word and because it is my method of discovery. It doesn’t even matter how good I might be. It’s what I do.

This is not news to me at an intellectual level. What has been building for some time – and is new – is the inner conviction, the felt belief, that there is plenty of meaning and value in the essential work I have always done. My purpose is already there, and I’m running with it. This is my way of acting in the world instead of hiding my fearful and doubting self in a thick blanket and imagining I’m invisible.

That’s an insight about my work life. It’s only step one.

What have you found in looking back in time to find the purposes that have shaped what you’ve tried to do? Whether you’ve been successful or frustrated is not the point. What’s been there all along?

I started thinking about the value of writing stories to deal with depression when I read Alcoholics Anonymous, the book that named the growing self-help movement in 1939. For me, it was not the method the book describes but the stories that first hit home so deeply. A psychiatrist I was seeing at the time lent me a copy because he had found it to be helpful to many of his non-addict patients, though he wasn’t sure why.

If you don’t know the book, it consists mostly of the stories of alcoholics themselves. One after another, they tell unsparingly how they lost control of their lives to alcohol, struggled repeatedly through failed efforts to quit, ruined everything they had and then, often by chance, linked up with other alcoholics who had gotten their lives back. Most of these story-tellers didn’t talk directly about feelings or causes – and they certainly didn’t use psychological jargon. They knew who they were talking to – other alcoholics, people like them who had tried and failed to get sober. To reach them, their stories had to be totally honest and absolutely free of pretension or any other false note.

So why did these voices talk to me so deeply since I hadn’t been drinking at all for several years and had never become obsessed with alcohol? There’s more to it than I can understand or explain, but one thing stands out. Woven through those histories I heard about the misery of hitting rock-bottom, having no self-respect, being good for nothing. I could touch the undercurrent of desperation that ran all too close to the surface of my own life. I couldn’t feel so immediately the parts of the book that described the 12-step method itself. Instead, I needed the telling of the stories, the sharing of experience among alcoholics. That’s what caught me.

That seemed to have been the key for the pioneers of AA as well rather than the famous method in its entirety – that came after years of trial and error and was first codified in its 12-step form when Bill Wilson started writing Alcoholics Anonymous. Even the great principle of recognizing the need for help from a higher power seemed not to have been decisive. Wilson had had a powerful spiritual experience that certainly marked a key phase in his life, but it ultimately didn’t help when he found himself alone one night in Akron, Ohio – a city where he didn’t know anyone – and was scared to death of getting drunk. Wilson knew that he had to find another alcoholic to talk to, someone who needed help. Only that could keep him sober. The man he found that night in Akron, Dr. Bob Smith, was the perfect match because he needed to hear a story of recovery from another alcoholic in order to get sober himself. That night, Bill W told his story and forgot about drinking, and Dr. Bob finally sobered up.

Both men had worked with professional therapists, medical doctors and spiritual advisers, but they could really hear what they needed to know only when it came directly out of the desperate experience of another alcoholic. That was the key to building the relationship between Bill W and Dr. Bob. Only a drunk could talk to a drunk. That experience was necessary for the recovery of both the listener and the teller, and people who have lived with the AA method for years have told me that working with other alcoholics is one of the central things that keeps them sober.

That’s what draws me back to the Big Book – the need to hear those stories from people who really lived them. Somehow the narratives of depression that abound today don’t reach me in the same way. For one thing, though many of them describe as well as anyone could the terrible depths of despair, suicidal thinking and other extremes of the condition, the narratives tend to emphasize a near total recovery. There are concerns about relapses, descriptions of the meds and methods they rely on, but still many of these writers talk about their experiences in the past tense.

That’s not my experience. There is no simple getting well. That’s what the AA stories are about. Yes, there are the great turning points in those lives, but they only marked the beginning. What they live with is the ongoing work of recovery and the need to take it one day at a time. That’s the truth of my life, and it’s what I connect with in the Big Book. You’re never done with this problem – it is always there, and you have to dig into yourself with all the support you can get and keep working every single day to prevent a deadly disease from sweeping you away. I need to hear people who’ve been through that kind of life talk about it, and I need to hear those stories over and over again.