Some of the most frightening moments I’ve had during long years of depression were not those of despairing mood or even suicidal thinking. Instead, they were the times of panic when I’d feel yanked into a wind tunnel, no hold on anything, air sucked out of my lungs, my body fired into emptiness. Most […]
panic
Caught in Panic
I think of creativity as an opposite of depression. As the driver in my life that connects and communicates, it represents everything I cannot do in the midst of the illness. Yet there was a time when it led to panic. Creativity is usually discussed in connection with the arts, and the idea gets overblown […]
The Crowded Emptiness of a Depressed Man
Long before I began to recover from depression, I stumbled my way into moments when time seemed to disappear. My mind cleared itself out completely, and I found myself in a kind of stillness that I can only call spiritual. Those were hopeful experiences, the closest I’ve come to the sense of oneness that Jill […]
The Delusions of Depression
I’ve had several moments in recovery when I realized that things I assumed to be true were really delusions of depression. Some were long-held beliefs about myself, others were briefly held convictions that were too far from reality to maintain for long. Psychiatrists probably wouldn’t call these delusions of the sort linked to psychosis, but […]
A Stage for Anxiety
(Anxiety has dominated more of my waking hours than I care to admit, yet I’ve written relatively few posts about it. While working on the next ebook, Depression Present Tense, I came across this early post that captures a typical incident. The new book is an attempt to capture the inner feelings of depression in […]
Lost in Place, Finding Home
Simple things can overwhelm, turn me upside down, submerge who I am in a great wave. I was turned over once as a kid, swimming at a beach near LA, the ocean churning and huge. I tried to jump into a breaker and ride it in, but the surge tossed me up in its gritty […]
