A four-word comment from Stephany has set my mind going. “Hope is not love.” she writes in reference to my last post on the difficulty of sustaining a marriage in the midst of major depression. At the end of that brief story I used a house-building image in talking about hope, and I think that’s what she’s responding to. “Hope” and “love” are such big words, I’d better get clear what they have come to mean to me in the very specific context of fighting depression.
I spoke of hope as a house my wife and I were building, and that sounds a bit strange. Isn’t hope something you feel about the future rather than a conscious construction? I can feel it as a response to something that creates an expectation about good things to come. Or it’s a coloring over all my thinking and actions, an energizing force, a constant Yes! Yes! at some preconscious level that is a motive to keep on building things. In depression, of course, I feel hopeless, but beyond the simple absence of hope I get to despair, a force that moves me in the opposite direction – doom, gloom, futility – the deep belief that I’m worthless and so is everything I do. At its mildest that means stillness and paralysis, at its worst, the urge to undermine what I’ve been building, to destroy – ultimately – me.
Hopeful and undepressed, I can be emotionally open, responsive to my wife, loving and even, on occasion, considering I’m a man, able to talk about these things with her. In other words, in small ways I’m trying to build, or rebuild with my wife a relationship that has been damaged. Those are the things that love, an action word, depends on. This marriage can’t be sustained by hidden feelings – I have to get them out there by doing, sharing, talking. And that is the last thing I can do when depressed. Then I’m despairing, isolated, closed off from her, unloving, irritably silent – taking down what we’ve been building. And that’s the problem as far as sustaining marriage is concerned. She can’t count on me.
From her point of view, what is the basis for trust? Now he’s there, now he’s gone. Now he’s loving, now he’s hostile. Now he’s talking, now he’s silent. And the swings can be extreme – from total warmth and wanting to be close to angry abuse and longing to get away into a different life. That’s not stable, not secure, not safe so how can she be open with her feelings when they might be tossed right back at her or ignored and overrun completely?
So true enough, hope is not love, but I need hope to get to loving action, and my wife needs hope to believe there is a future for a relationship with a man who is often warped by depression. Hope comes and goes so much we need to give it support, a structure, a place to feel at home in. Whatever we can do together in practical day-by-day actions helps create confidence that there’s a there to the relationship. Not only in the future – though that’s vital – but also right here, right now.
This recurring deep depression has been with us for the entire time we’ve been together, and recovery is a daily shoving match with that negative force. Not merely the uninvited guest at the wedding but its worst nightmare, depression doesn’t fit at all in a picture with hope, love, trust, marriage. But there it is.
So I guess there’s no end to this building and unbuilding thing – or to this story.
Is there?
Photo: Galina Barskaya – Fotolia.com
I have suffered years of depression accompanied with OCD, since being a child in fact. I have always denied my depression as I found that in my experience, people avoid depressives like the plague. I have been for counselling and cognitive therapies several times which helped for a while but depression always returned. My biggest problem is guilt. I wake up each morning with that feeling. My family have disowned me especially my youngest son. I am divorced and now living with a partner who doesn,t understand depression. My parents gave no help apart from taking me to see a doctor at the age nine. The doctor said that I would have to fight it. So,all these years I have felt very much alone and like many of your readers I have battled with different strategies to try and overcome this degrading illness. I don,t feel alone now because I know there are many people out there who suffer thoughts and feelings like I do . You have given me the courage to self help and I am truly grateful for that.I know it will not be easy but it is a start.
I understood you equating hope and house building room by room. My blog depicts hope and love as equal, due to my fierce love for a child, I had some days, the word hope, was all I had. Some days, it caused me such anger, I remember recently screaming out loud alone in my house, ” I am sick of hoping!”. Another part of my personal story, goes beyond a depressed man, if that what it was…it was another defining moment I had, and one important to share here, discussing depression and mental health. When I had “an official” bipolar diagnoses, I heard this phrase, now considering the last near decade was about caring for not just one but 2 daughters with mental health issues, [for instance one Spring I drove 12 hours to another state to visit one in a psych hosp and the other here….]well, when I came out of the ER it was already over, and done with, and in my opinion and this is harsh but people should care about others as basic human beings at some level right? so for someone who knew me for too many years says, “I hate mental illness.”
I was relieved when he left. What you wrote here offers hope. Did you know that? To remain in the struggle, and to show by example that yes, it should be but may not always be a relationship worth fighting for, and this is where I share here and hope others can see from this side– some things were not meant to be, and has nothing to do with depression or bipolar. It also drives a fear right to my core of my being, that if one person “hates mental illness” [me]; then who ever will? I hope your story doesn’t end, because you see how you just gave hope a meaning? Now, there is this tiny part of my soul saying, what if he is right? I uprooted many of my plants when I moved the last time, and I didn’t know what the person planted in the house I live in now. Each season, I waited to see. I had left behind one of my most prized and loved shrubs. A pink lilac. A neighbor drove me to my new home, and I sobbed, I missed my garden. The one I had built all of the years my daughter was so sick. It was my life, my living hope. To drive away from it, was as if I drove away from my hope.
The next Spring, I stood in my backyard, and there it was, the fragrance of the pink lilac. In all of it’s glory, at my new home. I closed my eyes and it was hope, mine.
I tend gardens of hope. Sometimes, they just are tended by invisible gardeners. Alone.