About a year ago, I wrote a series of posts about my experience with the fantasies of a better life that often prompt depressed men to leave their families. You can find the first of those stories here, here and here. Those brief pieces tell only a small part of a long and troubling story. […]
Reconnecting
Seeing and Recovery
A long time ago, I came home from work one day and found my five-year old son carefully studying a pile of metal debris he must have just lugged into our yard from a neighboring hillside lot. We lived on the edge of a small city in the foothills, and there was frequent illegal dumping […]
Ceremonies of Magic, Imagination and Play
Some Rights Reserved by a whisper of unremitting demand at Flickr Merely Me wrote a wonderful post on the importance of bringing play back into everyday life. It is the forgotten tonic among adults in general and depressed adults in particular. She paints a vivid scene of a group therapy session where she coaxed recovering […]
Creating a Way Out of Depression – 2
As a writer, I’ve looked for methods to keep depression from undermining the creative work I try to do. Or should I even put it that way – is it depression that stops me? For years, I told myself I couldn’t work when in a mental fog of depression, my will to act paralyzed, my […]
Connecting Out of Depression
Some Rights Reserved by Spigoo at Flickr. Does recovery ever happen this way for you? Something quietly takes you out of yourself? My room at the inn on the Olympic Peninsula coast looked out broadly on the foggy beach, an early morning panorama grayed out by the ground-level cloud. I tried to discern outlines through […]
Connecting – 2: The Simplest Things
These are scattered journal entries about reconnecting. ……. I saw my neighbor yesterday riding his four-wheeler around the corner lot, holding his toddler son to his chest. His two horses, a chestnut and a roan, pasture there, along with his three goats. They watch impassively, not at all frightened of the buzzing machine. The man […]
