Stories can be an immediate and moving way to learn about someone because they evoke the feelings and experience that factual details never can. When told with honesty and sincerity, a story helps establish a bond of trust because the teller has been willing to open such personal insight to the listener. For me, certain stories have served another purpose even more vital than forming connections with other people.
Those are the stories I tell myself to explain depression in my life: what it is, how I can live with it, what I can hope for in the future. Like stories told to friends, they connect with feeling and belief instead of rational analysis. Without the story I would feel lost in a chaos of uncontrollable and destructive forces. I’ve told many different stories, but each one has reflected what I felt and believed at the time. Each one has given meaning to emotional pain, whether a hopeful meaning or a bleak one.
There is another purpose for these stories, though. Seeing myself as playing roles in the context of treatment helps me understand the assumptions I’m making about myself, depression and the possibility of a recovery. It’s too easy to go along with therapies passively without this awareness, yet each approach to treatment is making those assumptions for me.
There can also be a downside to stories. It’s the danger that I’ll cling to one at all costs because it’s the one I want to believe, the one that I demand be absolutely true. Once I have this way of explaining what I’m going through, I don’t want to listen to a new one. It’s hard to accept any evidence or alternative stories that would change the character and plot I’ve created for myself. I’m afraid to let go of it.
Please understand that in talking about stories and playing different roles I don’t mean to say they can be taken up or tossed aside at will. Being able to make sense of depression is vitally important, and I don’t use the word “vital” loosely. The story metaphor is my way of thinking about the deadly serious efforts I’ve made to stay alive.
The story metaphor helps in another way by turning depression itself into a character. At first, I was depression, and the story was pure stream of consciousness, all in my head. But as I grew more aware and hopeful, depression and its allies split off as separate characters. Instead of attacking myself in an internal drama, I was attacking them. It was an empowering way of thinking about what I was going through.
Here are a few of those stories I told myself when depression and I were one. Even these were a form of support, a terribly negative one, simply because they gave me a way to explain what was happening.
- The Con Artist: I’m a fraud and deceive people into thinking I’m smarter and more accomplished than I really am. I’m ashamed, anxious, depressed much of the time, but everyone thinks I’m on top of the world, relaxed and calm, sure to succeed at whatever I do. I’ve tricked them all.
- The Prisoner: I’m trapped in a career, marriage, place that have made me miserable. My plan of escape will give me back the freedom to find a new life and start over. I know that everything will be fine as soon as I can get out. That’s the answer to all my problems.
- The Loser: I know I can’t do anything right, that I’m bound to ruin everything, that I’m worthless. If I were a stronger person, I could control my feelings and get rid of this misery. But I can’t, and it’s all I deserve anyway. I should just die.
- Jekyll and Hyde: I have a monster within that has to be kept in chains. If he escapes, he’ll take me over and destroy everything. I live in fear that he’ll break out, and so I have to keep every feeling in check. Releasing powerful emotions is the first step in losing control of his destructive power.
Once I became aware of the full impact of depression in shaping my life, I tried several forms of treatment. Each one helped in some way but also had a limiting effect in how I thought of myself and my ability to live without dependence on external help. I realized I would never recover fully unless I integrated the therapies to support my own idea of a new life free of the illness.
The succession of “roles” reflected a changing self-concept, as I became more independent of the limitations of any single approach to ending depression.
- The Son Shaped by the Past: I’m living today as a captive of childhood experience. As I tried to survive the tensions and dysfunctions within my family, I devised patterns of behaving and controlling my emotions that still dominate my behavior. I need to work with a psychiatrist or other therapist over many years to free myself from these patterns. Recovery means ending their influence in my life.
- The Medical Patient: Depression is a mental disorder rooted in neurochemical changes in the brain that can be treated effectively with medication. There’s nothing I can do about that on my own. I need to take antidepressants, probably for the rest of my life. I’m not going to get rid of the illness completely, but I can look forward to ending symptoms and stopping medication. I’ll be under continuing care, however, to be sure I remain alert to the first signs of relapse. If medication or other treatments, like electroconvulsive therapy don’t work, I won’t have much hope for the future.
- The Warrior/Activist: The therapies won’t work by themselves unless I am the active, leading partner in using them. As proved to be true in fighting cancer, my own determination, energy and hopefulness give each treatment a much greater chance of success. I have to stay in shape, mentally and emotionally, to make the use of each weapon in my arsenal. I’m fighting to win and will defeat depression.
- The Spiritual Searcher: Ending depression is only one part of a much larger spiritual change I’m seeking. As I become more mindful of each moment, I can experience a different dimension of being. Living with continuing experience of that dimension, I gain a detachment from depression which makes that form of pain somehow irrelevant. Its control of my feelings and mind disappears.
- The New Man: I’m not only in recovery, becoming “me” again. I am living a new life, and, to some extent, am becoming a new man. The old “me” never lived completely free of depression, and now for the first time since my early years I can find a fulfilling life apart from its influence. I am learning the skills of wellness in the here and now, not just those of preventing relapse into the past.
These are a few of the true stories that have helped me separate depression from my inmost life. As I’ve said many times, there was no straight line from illness to well-being. I went round and round before a decisive change occurred. But there was always a role to make sense out of chaotic feelings, even if the role was that of a drowning person. I doubt we could live without some way of explaining who we are.
How have you defined yourself in dealing with depression?
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You know people who don’t have stories, right? Dull, methodical, predictable journalism: who, what, where, when, how. Just the facts, ma’am. Telling our stories different ways, I think, is a way we allow ourselves to “try on” something different. I often tell stories where I sound more heroic than I really was at the time. Tell it often enough, and I start feeling that might really have been the truth. It feels good, and isn’t narcissistic, to tell stories of our strong self even if a bit over the top. Knights of the Round Table. The feats of Hercules and Jason and Beowulf just to name a few. Maybe if I told more stories about joy and beauty and what just might be good in my life, I would move nearer toward incorporating them as truth.
This is one of your best posts, I think. When you talk about telling many stories, each one having relevance and truth at the time, I know exactly what you’re talking about. And the stories I tell my psychiatrist and therapist are often embarrassingly dissimilar. But they are the truth as I know it at the moment. I think it happens when I can’t find all words and metaphors necessary to encompass the whole. Last time I told a certain story I had those words and images in my mind, at my disposal. This time when I tell it, I find myself speaking with emphasis and stronger descriptions and it almost feels out of control. Each story is a living being, just like me. Sometimes I think all those stories must be crowding each other in my brain, so that sometimes one has to combine with another to make room for more.
Still, at the root, I maintain a constancy. Maybe my stories change to cover up the parts I wish were not the constant me. I don’t want my close friends to get a really good look at what I feel like I am at my core. So I may get too involved in my story for a moment and the “true” story floods a sensitive part of our relationship. I try to take it back, make it not seem so horrible and desolate. I try to back off and make it sound not so bad, not so desperate. I dress it up a bit, move the furniture of the story around and redecorate and hope they don’t recognize it next time. Sad but true.
My shame is what is at the root of my Depression. It truly feels like being in public without any clothes on; exposed to the ridicule and disgust of others. It takes so much willpower to keep my “everything is okay” mask from falling off my face…I’m so exhausted believe you me!
But as long as I’m still breathing: I’ll continue to embrace and move forward in life with my self hate. I am truly my worst enemy. Cheers.
John,
Thanks for sharing about your journey through the mine fields of “depression.” I guess one knows some of one’s life is not tracking with the pack, and assign markers that help others figure out where one has been, and where one thinks they are headed. Channeling some of the juice into story form can be helpful, as you have shared above. Where the thrills come in is when you figure out ways to be awarded for the territories you pass through. As the characters on some TV sitcoms do. But no need to despair, if your material does not make it through the producer’s office, you can blog! The trick is to stay in the “zone” where your creativity or exploding imagination simmers at a pace that captures the hearts of the multitudes. I like the characters you have overcome. You are shining your light for others to resonate with (I am not a grammarian, yet). Keep marching, your cadence is bound to attract a following.
Thank you – I appreciate the support, and so eloquently put. I like the idea of assigning markers along the path to help others see where I’ve been. Everyone has to find their own way, but my hope in writing here is that others can get some ideas on how to start.
Thanks for commenting.
John
Hi John,
I just found your site and am overwhelmed by your insight and the parallels to my own life. I have struggled with depression for a long time and have just been diagnosed with OCD. Done 12-step work via OA and Alanon and understand the concept of recovery but NEVER aligned depression with recovery. I am seeing my therapist for the first time in almost two years tomorrow and want to finally DO SOMETHING about my illnesses (I first wrote down “issues” which really minimizes the seriousness of this). Want to get active in getting better. I will continue to read and begin my fight. I don’t want to live like this anymore. Thank you for putting my feelings into words.
ann
Hi, Ann –
I’m glad you’re finding this site helpful – and thank you for your kind words. I hope rekindling therapy will help take you a long way toward recovery. Your 12-step work is great preparation for getting a handle on depression and OCD.
I hope you’ll visit and comment often.
JOhn
I know well the years of depression being who I was. My journals were a kind of confessional about how I had tried and failed to be someone/something else (anything else) other than the embodiment of depression. They did not record how many sighs there were between the words nor the mental sidebar of tormenting visions of death. My own death. But one day, I realized I was beginning to move away from being depression to being depressed as a part of my repertoire of feelings, and then to having a life outside the journal-me. There was a world “out there” that was becoming more enticing than the inner world. Or the world of words. I was a Depression Debutante making my way into the society of those who treasured love, hope, fresh ideas, beauty and peace.
Hi, Donna –
How beautifully put! That’s such a huge step to go from being depression to being depressed. That was half the battle for me, and I’m so glad you’ve gotten back into the “world out there.”
Thanks so much for your comments.
John
Hi John,
This is such an interesting post, and I can relate to every single one of the stories/roles you describe. Although I’ve been in recovery from food addiction/depression for 11 years (for me, eating was a way to cope with the depression), I’m still struggling with the “con man” thing, particularly at work. No matter how much praise I get from my boss, I’m always worried about getting fired! I think this idea that I’m not good enough is deeply ingrained in me, and I keep waiting for other people to figure that out.
I also found this post really interesting in light of my Twelve Step experience. At meetings, we get up and tell our stories of “experience, strength, and hope.” This practice gives hope to other people, but it also reinforces it for ourselves.
Best,
Heather
(I recently started a blog about marriage and mental illness, and would love to hear what you think if you have a chance to stop by.)
Hi, Heather –
The con man idea is a hard one to shake. I’m never sure if the damaged sense of myself was one of the causes of depression, or whether it worked the other way. I can’t explain why exactly, but at some points, I stopped believing all the self-battering thoughts and feelings, including the one about being a fraud. I hope you can get to that place too.
I’m a firm believer in the healing power of sharing stories in the 12 step manner. It’s been a big part of my recovery, though it hasn’t been in face-to-face groups but here online. I’ve had such support in this blogging world.
John