Recovery from depression meant a lot of change in the way I lived, and cutting out the stress of a tension-filled job was at the top of the list. Once I had ended that life of constant pressure, I could feel the relief at the start of each day.

A freedom and energy filled me, and I could step at once into the work of writing that I had long wanted to do. That sounds like a happy ending, but things are not so simple.

Depression was not overwhelming me anymore, but the illness is generous with the legacies it leaves behind. Over the last year, I’ve had to deal with many of those. As I’ve often written here, there was no getting away from depression by going to a new place, finding a new job or trying different relationships. The same proved true of trying to leave stress behind by changing the kind of work I did.

I’ve kept stress with me almost every hour of every day. Instead of chasing the unattainable goals of someone else’s rules, I’ve set up plenty of my own. And not just rules about work. I’m too inventive to stop there. I have rules to follow about almost everything. At any moment, I should be following a rule or condemning myself for breaking one. Nothing is too trivial to merit its guidelines for measurement.

The rules are remnants of battered self-esteem – or rather the weapons of choice to do the battering. I would never have been able to push depression aside if I had not changed my belief about myself. Out went the assumption that I was worthless, bad, inadequate, doomed to fail (and on and on), but it’s taken awhile to dismantle the structure of rules that I had created to bind up that bad person.

Under the rules of depression, I wasn’t allowed to trust myself simply to take life as it came. No, rules had to confine me in narrow hallways allowing movement to certain rooms and not others. If I followed the rules, I could open another door – break them and doors shut in my face, just as I deserved. A judge was always present with a verdict of guilty, whenever I broke a rule by trying to do something too dangerous to be allowed. Writing drew on inner feelings that couldn’t be trusted out in the open, so the rules didn’t allow that. Judgment was swift for an infraction. My mind shut down – don’t go there, strictly off limits.

Without the force of depression, most of those rules disappeared, and I was free to do what I really wanted to do. But I immediately set about creating a new set of rules, most of them shaped by timing and deadlines. To start binding myself up with time might seem strange, but it’s a good route to the sort of self-judgment depression encourages. It’s an old habit, one that dies hard.

Here’s how it happens:

I was all set up to work full-time at online writing, but first I needed to set my goals and deadlines. Write many blogs on several different subjects, build a big readership, start to earn an income and do it all in one year. Having determined that I must meet those grand expectations, I needed projects with tasks, lots of them, each with its own duration and deadline, each having the highest priority. After that I created a daily schedule with pastel-colored blocks of time devoted to each major type of activity or project. It looked so impressive in my online calendar.

Of course, it’s the perfect set-up for disaster. With a long history of depression, I’ve had trouble meeting deadlines and finishing anything, and the old sequence begins again. Set high goals, fail to meet them, feel worthless, set more, try harder, still fall short – or, get everything done three times more slowly than I’d planned and feel hopeless about getting anywhere.

I can’t possibly meet all the goals with all those deadlines. I can see that clearly, but each time I try to drop something, I feel I can’t because it’s so important. If I don’t meet all these goals, I will have failed to…do what? Meet the arbitrary goals I have set for myself, of course. I know they’re arbitrary, but I can’t seem to let go of them.

Finally I have to face the reality that my work rhythm doesn’t match the schedule and need to make adjustments. I decide to give myself much more time – I move the task lines in the calendar days. Now those colorful blocks are bigger, more generous – but I still keep the schedule. There’s an underlying fear of erasing the whole thing. How can I face the day with a blank calendar staring at me – where’s the structure, where are the goals and tasks, the deadlines. No, they have to be there, just better suited to my style of working. Of course, it’s all still far more than I can get done.

On and on it can go. There’s no end to rules, to shoulds, to don’ts and dos. I’ve accomplished a great deal in the last year, but I haven’t met all my self-imposed goals, so it doesn’t feel like enough. If I don’t get out of the stress-by-rules trap, it will never be enough.

…….

I may not be depressed, but I haven’t fully shaken the habit of ruling myself into a kind of captivity. It’s self-willed rather than compelled by depression, but it’s still hard to manage. Fortunately, I know full well that it’s a legacy. The only purpose of the rules is to bring back the sense of worthlessness I’ve struggled to overcome.

So I’ve added the rule habit to the cognitive therapy list. Just as I learned to shut up the voice that kept condemning me as no good, I’m learning now the skill of undoing self-defeating rules.

Part of the problem is the perverse comfort of familiar misery tempting me back from the risks of a new and more fulfilling life. The deadly skills of living with depression were refined over decades, and I mastered them completely. I’m well on my way to kicking the old habits and learning the skills that support a richer life. But it’s taking more time than I’d hoped. ……

Taking more what? Time?? So who set a deadline on healing, John? It’s happening – amazingly, truly happening. So drop the deadline!

…….

Have you had a talk with yourself lately about rules and deadlines, time and stress?

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This is a revision of the first post I wrote for this blog. It came from a journal that I worked at daily for a time, and that experience convinced me that writing about depression was one way I could fight it more actively. I will be publishing revised versions of several early posts over the next few weeks.

Fear wakens with me this morning. I have no idea why. It’s part of a continuing descent I’ve been in for weeks now. After a few great days when I was blazing away at ideas about my projects, depression returned and has been building in its quiet way. But it is fear that is coming on now, and I know if I don’t try to get at this, it will turn to panic and keep me away from everything. Work is impossible when my mind is coming apart. I’ve spent two days at the office, three days at home each of the last three weeks. I’m barely getting the tasks completed to keep each project moving ahead. How commanding and cocksure I’m supposed to be – how implausibly shaky is the reality of my mind and heart.

At work yesterday I could feel the intention to get things done dissolving. My mind was so adrift that it had to work hard to recapture even the memory of whatever urgent task I was about to complete. Then on top of the total loss of drive and feeling and energy, a bare fear came down like sharp hail. This morning I’m feeling it start to return, but this is a new storm that could break up quickly. I’m still strong enough this early in the day to shelter from its full force. I can still tell it to stop. I’m certain that if I let it flow its own course, I will be gripped by a strong panic before long. And what can you do with that inside you? That gets suicidal very quickly because there is no place to run to, no defense that can be constructed through imagery or redirected thought patterns or any other defenses I’ve learned how to use.

The panic isn’t at all like the extreme fear I can feel in the presence of external danger. That fear is part of survival, perhaps the ultimate survival instinct to save yourself. The panic I feel is a shattered drive that points nowhere. It’s not a useful feeling connected to survival instincts. Instead It boils the mind, the feelings, intentions, energy into total confusion and directionless flight. I can’t think at all, much less come up with a destination where I can seek safety. That loss of even the possibility of refuge makes me more and more desperate. What’s left to me of my mind is searching, searching for something to hold onto, something to make it bearable for even a few minutes. How long can the body and brain sustain that destruction? I can’t imagine an end to the attack when I’m in the midst of it.

And yet there is something calming just writing down this little bit. Perhaps trying to describe the worst that could happen will help me keep it away. I’m lucky to have an early warning – that’s rare. Maybe I can avoid the worst of it today.

Do you have a way of catching fear and depression early enough to lessen the impact?

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These are journal excerpts about my fitful beginning work with meditation as a guide through depression.

After a day of feeling the chaos of panic, immobilized at work, I went to see JL, first therapist in years. This guy is real. He wasted no time, quickly running through some patterns he observed (explaining that he was hurrying things up because I had been through therapy) and then hit on something that caught me off guard completely. He said he knew how much I loved my brother, he could hear it in what I said, he could feel it in his body. At that, realizing it was true, I wanted to cry, almost did, but covered it with a forced jerky laugh, fooling no one. I was right there, ready to let loose with the feeling I have been sitting on for so long. He explained that he had methods, he did not shoot from the hip. He realized he could have pushed harder about my brother and gotten somewhere, but he prefers to work carefully, using the models he knows from Buddhist psychology. The guy wanted me to know he’d been around, as he says, raised in different cultures and countries. This should be good. I like his attitude: We can break that cycling, that pattern, we can break that, I guarantee it. Who talks like that these days? I sense in him that he’s witnessed, probably experienced, conversion or at least deep insight within the light of a powerful soul. But he’s not trying to become my guru – at least I hope that’s true.

Fast forward a few days, and I’m messed up again. I dragged myself around at work, unable to concentrate, aware only of wanting to break out of the office prison with its cash flow problems and staff tensions. I was also angry at JL as I thought back over incidental remarks he’d made about depression becoming an artifact of advertising – that seemed insulting when said to someone who first ran into the problem decades before anyone even talked about it or named it. And of course the forbidden subject never got anywhere near the mass media. I argued with him in my mind and felt myself falling into a typical pattern of battling with a dominant male, damned if I’ll let another guy glibly analyze me, and in so doing establish power over me. That male to male contest is so basic (I’ve started analyzing again!), a primitive drive to kill the rival men and possess the women – the caveman buried deep but still whacking against the shell of social rules. There is so much savagery ready to rip through civilized rationality. And I go on and on like that – I guess it’s a way of raging myself out of panic. Bad swap – one smash in the head for another.

Then it was back to JL. He went through my psychic profile based on a test he’d given me that first time. “I’m talking to your psyche now, not to you.” Well that’s interesting – to be a puzzled witness to this communication between a therapist and the invisible me. But even though I was eavesdropping, it’s helpful to hear how JL organizes the forces inside me or rather in this psyche guy. How much is obsessive, how much depressive, strains of anxiety, phobia, restlessness – he got pretty well the highlights of how the psychic force splits up and reshapes the struts of a soul. Then he gives something new – for me – a series of meditation assignments to help change things. He says they can even body chemistry. I will keep a journal – not hard since I’m doing `something like that now. We’re starting on loving and kindness as well as relaxation. He taught me a nice meditation reviewing the people who have brought love and happiness into my life, then the people whom I have given warmth and happiness to. Then I pray for compassion, for ?? – I knew I would forget the words! Depressed mind likes to blank out on important things. Anyway, it has to do with warmth and self-acceptance and peace and relaxation. Twice a day I do this – not forgetting to exercise for an hour a day and to write in the journal. At least I’ve got part of that going.

I spent this day completely nervous and unfocused, increasingly anxious as each hour passed filled with small tasks I didn’t want to do but somehow had to. None of them helped me with issues at work – I’m completely stressed out about getting forward movement on a couple of cases. All this fits with JL’s portrait of my psyche – lots of nervousness, lots of unfinished projects, lots of obsessing, little focus. Tonight I finally made time to meditate, just focusing on keeping the belly soft – awful image since I feel so fat – but I found what power there is in the act of concentration. It was late but even with eyes closed and concentrating on this one thing, there was no sleepiness, only the intensity of mental energy, a cleansing feeling, and a waking up. This is my real beginning on the assignments, and I can see that doing this twice a day with a lot of walking will help restore me.

Interesting to see how just hearing the psychic profile from JL has helped relax me at home. That’s part of what L wanted in pushing me into therapy – or any damn thing that would make me easier to live with. She gets the raging, when I can’t see anything good, and then she gets the loving side, when I’m me again, attentive, baffled that I could ever be so crazy. All that twisting rage in my gut, all that obsessing, paranoia, panic and general stress – they all seem at the moment like barriers to fear. And fear of what, exactly? What monster is going to break out, what caveman with his club, what horrible wreckage and carnage will I cause? I’ve had a few clear-headed moments – like the one years back when I understood deep down that my feelings of anger when coming home masked the real fear of losing my family. This pervasive stress and anxiety washes out everything else.

But I’m reaching for the words JL has been teaching me, trying to focus away from that chaos, focus on what? What do I catch onto in this static? Breathing in, breathing out – I have to keep remembering that simple starting point. Count the breaths, focus on the in-rush, the outflow. How high can I count before my mind wanders away. Just look at the thoughts, the feeling flashes, don’t get too close, just watch the jumble from a distance. JL said the fear was what I most wanted not to feel, but at this point fear is floating on the surface of a sea, and I’m looking at it. Is that scummy stuff really a part of me? But I turn back to my breathing – I keep losing count. It feels so simple, so refreshing just to pay attention to breathing – yet how hard it is to hear that constant rhythm in my body when I’m all shot nerves and drained by panic. At least I can hear it now. Maybe tomorrow I can remember all the words of the loving kindness meditation.

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Reading old journals reminds me how full of twists and turns a recovery road can be. Along the way, I have encountered strong presences that restore a sense of balance – when I have let them. For years, though, I could not let them work within me for more than a few moments. I’ve edited a few journal entries that show the struggle. I was partly aware of the possibility of change, partly convinced I could not break the cycle I was in.

…….

Stress has a lot to do with depression, we’re told, and time has a lot to do with stress. And it’s true, my life is timed, and time runs out before I’ve done enough. Enough to prove my value, enough to quell the sharp-edged voice talking me toward nothingness, enough to win a race I mindlessly run. That’s all the stuff of stress. But I see another side to it. Staying within time is a protection as well. The sequence carries me from place to place, job to job and builds a structure to guide and shelter me, stressful and exhausting though it is. “Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back wherein he keeps alms for oblivion.” It can be a prison, time, but its walls shut out thought and feeling that carry me in dangerous directions. So there is tension and stress inside those walls, but fear of something worse on the outside. Can that change? Can I step outside this beating time without becoming lost?

I drive south on the Interstate from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, shooting up one long ascent to a view of the nearby mountain ranges. Suddenly vision shifts and slows my car speed to a different scale of motion. Now it’s not mph on a highway, it’s a measure of motion passing one distant peak after another. I streak by cars in the next lanes but crawl slowly away from the vast masses of the Sangre de Christo toward the looming giant turtle shape of the Sandias. I have to turn from that distraction, as time reminds me what’s ahead. The next hour is like a few moments of urgent flight as I speed toward an appointment in Albuquerque where I’m giving a talk to Indian Pueblo leaders about negotiation and water rights. I am all purpose and business, running over what I’m trying to communicate, worrying about being late, wondering about the moods and preoccupations of the Pueblo governors, program directors and attorneys I’ll probably see there. All the while, though, part of me remains awed as I slowly pass the southern edge of the Jemez just across the Rio Grande Valley, stare some 50 miles off at sprawling Mount Taylor, catch the glinting snow across the broad back of the approaching Sandias. Those giants move in a scale of time and space that makes little of the human clashes about “managing” this grandeur. Yet it is the fights over human management of the forests, waters and wild places that pull me from valley to valley across the Southwest. Those fights arrive with deadlines, urgencies, a force of unnatural change. I move to their timing.

There is an older route between these cities I’ve also taken, though now it stops dead in many places or turns to dirt. That route heads out of Albuquerque’s old downtown north to one traditional village after another. First, it takes you through quiet farming villages, settled under Spanish land grants, then through Indian Pueblos, though these communities try to keep the tourist traffic confined to certain routes. There is a different pace that’s part of these cultures, one timed more to seasonal changes, the flows of streams, the care of crops, the demands of ceremonial life and religious belief. Yet those are not my worlds, and they offer no permanent stopping place for someone bulleting from crisis to crisis.

And the meeting in Albuquerque has a similar result. The Pueblo leaders listen to the assembled technicians of management, but in the end have a simple answer. We have our certainties. The rest of you just come and go. They have no time that includes us.

…….

Months later, another timed trip – but this one takes me farther away from cities and freeways. I’m visiting an Indian reservation in northern Montana, stopping by a rural school to talk to the principal. The big country and sky all around me disappear as I step inside the wide building and sit with this tribal member in his one-window office. He keeps gazing out that window as he tells us what the school needs. This is all about money, proposals, deadlines, and I have a lot of questions about how things work there, budgeting, transportation, planning – scheduling. Soon he gets up and walks me through the classroom corridor out a side door and across the unplanted grounds. He picks a spot and stands quietly for a moment. He points out a mountain I had seen when driving in, but I hadn’t paid it much attention except to note that the school was directly facing it. As the principal stares , I can see how close and immediate this huge rounded form appears. It’s probably twenty miles away but seems to hover right in front of us, and somehow draws me in, as soon as I can stop thinking about other things and let it work on me.

He tells us a brief story: One day, I was sitting in my office and got to looking at that mountain. And pretty soon I got up to go outside and get a better look. I walked to this spot about here and stood like this. Cal, the janitor, was working outside. He saw me and came on over, and he started looking too. Then a couple of teachers who were on a break came out, and we’re all just looking. Pretty soon, the kindergarten teacher comes out, along with her class of little kids, and they stand quietly too. None of those kids are saying a word. You can see that all those classroom windows look out this way, and it wasn’t long before, one by one, they all came outside. So we had the whole school watching the mountain. Nobody said anything. I don’t know how long that lasted, but after a while we gradually went back inside.

He keeps staring at the mountain as he tells me that story, and when he’s finished he keeps looking that way. And so do I. For some reason, I can’t take my eyes off this immense shadowed presence. I don’t know why. It just feels good, calming, overwhelmingly peaceful, and so close it looks like I can touch it.

It isn’t long, though, before I have to leave and drive as fast as I can to catch a plane in Great Falls.