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There are no more beautiful and moving stories of healing than those told by Rachel Naomi Remen. Kitchen Table Wisdom is one of those books I come back to again and again. Each of its brief stories renders a moment of discovery that reveals a life’s meaning to someone lost in pain or rigid routine. As moving as these stories are, I had never thought much about the relevance of such experiences to my own life. It didn’t seem possible that the sudden revelation of meaning – and the strength it provides – could possibly result from my own severe depression. Not making the connection probably means that I glossed over such thoughts as these:

The best stories have many meanings; their meaning changes as our capacity to understand and appreciate meaning grows. Revisiting such stories over the years, one wonders how one could not have seen their present meaning all along. … .

Knowing your own story requires having a personal response to life, an inner experience of life. It is possible to live a life without experiencing it.

She tells many stories that capture the awareness of purpose through such re-readings.

• A young athlete, embittered by the loss of a leg, emerges from depression when he finds he can help other young people going through the same kind of pain that he has suffered. His loss and depression themselves became the means by which he could help heal others, rather than the pure loss he had felt them to be.

• An emergency physician, after delivering hundreds of babies, stares into the face of one newborn as she opens her eyes for the first time, and he suddenly understands the meaning of the work he had done more as a technician than a human being. This time “he felt his heart go out to her in welcome from all people everywhere, and tears came to his eyes.”

• An elderly man overcomes his fear of a risky cancer operation by recalling in a daydream his bonds of love with his wife, his best friend, his brother. They all appeared to him, their eyes expressing the love they felt for him in return – and more came. “[I]n the end there were more than fifty or sixty of them, crowding into the living room and even into the hall. In this way he had known that his life has been of value to many others and found that it was of value still.”

But how could such revelations come out of the depression I had experienced for decades? For a long time, I could only look back in anger, bitterness or grief at having lost so much of my life to this illness. It all seemed like such a waste. All I could think of was what I had not done, what I had missed doing, never believing that there was any other side to that story.

Somehow all that changed, as I realized that I had shifted at a fundamental level of belief. I was able to look back at depression as a long period of desperate searching to understand what it meant to be human. Of course, everyone doesn’t need to go through prolonged suffering of this sort to find meaning in their lives. But in my case, the only way to stop feeling less than human was to understand what it meant to be fully alive and to believe that I was capable of a “real” life. Depression continually presented one side of that coin. All I really had to do was turn it over.

But for a long time I put tight boundaries around the search for a way out of depression. I kept running rings around my inner self, trying to revive the belief that I could do so much more and escape the paralysis of will. How is it possible, I thought, to keep plodding through this cycle from brief energy to long depression to energy to depression over and over again, like the endless succession of seasons through the years?

I was always trying to heal so that I could write from my deepest self, be happy with my family, feel alive with hope about mastering whatever might come my way. It was mostly about becoming the star of the Me Show, and I was looking at the world as an audience. I could never get free of depression to find that sort of fulfillment.

In another re-reading, I found a passage in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning that complemented Remen’s stories.

…[T]he true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. … [B]eing human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is … . In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

Stepping away from the circular pursuit of my inner self was hard to do consciously, but it seemed to happen on its own. I gradually realized, for example, that the purpose of this blog was not limited to my initial idea: self-discovery and, to be honest, praise and recognition – the applause of an audience for an actor. It was also a reaching out to people with stories that might be helpful to them. There was a very different sense of fulfillment in that.

Frankl refers to transcendence of self, but that’s such an ethereal word. I can’t live transcendence, but I can respond to the calls for help I hear so often in the world of blogging – and I can learn much more from others’ stories than I can from journaling my thoughts in solitude. In that exchange of depression’s stories I’ve found meaning I had never grasped before. I’m still at work catching up with Rachel Naomi Remen’s idea of learning what such stories have really been about all along:

We carry with us every story we have ever heard and every story we have ever lived, filed away at some deep place in our memory. We carry most of those stories unread, as it were, until we have grown the capacity or the readiness to read them. When that happens they may come back to us filled with a previously unsuspected meaning. It is almost as if we have been collecting pieces of a greater wisdom, sometimes over many years without knowing.

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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?

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It occurs to me that recovery is past, well-being is now and purpose is the future. Let me explain.

Recently, I wrote about recovery as a concept I no longer wanted to apply to what I’ve been going through. The word carried a set of assumptions that kept me within an illness frame of mind. It meant getting over depression or perhaps managing it well enough to function more effectively. The focus was on what I had been through in the past and could not completely escape in the present or the future. My life was stuck in time. Recovery would never end because depression would never fully disappear.

But why did I have to start with that idea? Well-being, mental health, emotional balance, whatever you may call it – that’s what I was experiencing at the present moment. Why was I assuming that depression was the strong, well-being the weak force?

There was an alternative that could start from the fact that I’m excited, full of energy, feeling good right now. I can stay with that and assume that this is my normal state – that I’m well. Every time a depressive thought or symptom comes up, I can refuse to go there. Think it, say it: I’m not going there. If it should get bad, ok – it’s like being sick with the flu, or if it’s a lot worse – like pneumonia. Treat it, get rid of it, then get back to the norm of feeling good.

So I made a list of the assumptions I had carried around for so long. These are some of the big ones:

• I have had a condition diagnosed as major depression for most of my life
• Major depression is a chronic and self-sustaining
• I am treatment resistant and will probably have this condition all my life
• I hope for recovery, but none of the treatments work
• Though I will have good periods, depression will always return
• Medications aren’t very effective, but if I stop taking them, I’ll be much worse

Once I had set the assumptions down and saw them staring back at me, they lost their power to guide my thinking, feeling, expectations about the future and the sense of who I was. Recovery has been taking place for a long time, and the assumptions had to change. They didn’t make sense anymore, and I could suddenly sweep them out of my brain. Recovery was about the past – living and well-being are the rich present.

And what about purpose and the future?

I kept thinking of Viktor Frankl and the story he tells in his classic Man’s Search for Meaning about internment in a Nazi concentration camp. Thrown into the midst of the worst torture and suffering imaginable, subject to arbitrary “selection” for death, living through the grueling work details and lack of food only by mastery of the small tricks of survival, he learned the lesson that would shape his later life and career.

Without a sense of purpose, no one could live for long in those camps. He saw the truth  that starkly. Those who could believe in a positive future, or even a single event like liberation from the camp, and who could sustain the will to achieve it, lived. Those who lacked that inner sense of purpose and meaning died. Those who held such an idea in mind could live as long as it lasted. Once it was lost or given up, they died. Learning the art of survival was not enough; there had to be a vision of what came next that transcended all the suffering.

Frankl developed the basis of his psychiatric practice from such extreme experience. He believed – and I share that belief – that all of us need a sense of meaning and purpose not just for bare survival but for fulfillment as human beings. Since I have survived, that sense of meaning and the hope it engenders must have been much stronger than I imagined.

Getting beyond survival, beyond the goal of recovery – that’s where I am now, shaping a new future while trying to make the most of the life that fills and surrounds me.

What sense do you have of the role of will and purpose in getting past depression?

• I want to add one note. Because of the changes I’ve been going through, I’ve been rethinking the purpose and organization of this blog. Before long, I’ll start adding new dimensions, building on what’s here, not replacing it.