This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.
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For me, depression has never been a particularly dramatic experience. And yet, its lack of drama is what I find most interesting about it. It’s relatively easy to form a story around suicide attempts and mental hospital stays. What’s harder to communicate, and even harder to understand, is the dailyness that is the defining feature of the disorder.
Persistent Depression is a lot like having a job you dislike, except that you never leave. There are good moments: morning coffee. Sex, when you can manage it. Regularly, if you use keeping busy as a coping mechanism, you enjoy a sense of accomplishment. But most of your day is spend either mustering the energy to perform banal tasks or actually performing those tasks. The reward for these efforts is a few evening hours of mild dissociation courtesy that lifeless friend-substitute, your phone. A few times a week, this is followed by waves of heartache, often experienced as loneliness, no matter who might be sitting or lying next to you. These final minutes or hours of the day bring on your worst thoughts: I can’t live like this. This will never go away.
Heaviness is a good metaphor for the feeling of depression, but the difficulty of the condition is expressed better as dailyness. Dailyness. As in, every day. As in, Sisyphus struggling behind his rock. As in, waking to your alarm clock yet again and wondering if you can do it.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Henry David Thoreau said that. This book features not a single depths-of-despair anecdote. Instead, I attempt to make Thoreau’s desperation look like an unkempt nine-year-old girl sitting around the corner from the playground, enduring yet another recess, alone.
There’s something else here, too, of course: The hopeful part. The antidote to the dailyness. But of course, it’s daily, too. It has to be.
In this book, I make every argument I can think of for putting one foot in front of the other, and another in front of that, until finally, the landscape has changed.
“Stones are hollowed out by the constant dropping of water.” Ovid, paraphrased.
Be the water.
***
After two years of Bible College, I transitioned to one of the four-year universities back in my hometown. However, the landscape of my life didn’t change much. I didn’t party. I didn’t travel. I didn’t find a fun group of friends or a meaningful extracurricular. I dated a bit, but it never felt right. Though I attended several schools, worked a handful of jobs and moved three or four times, most days felt about the same.
Dailyness.
Though the landscape of my college years and the rest of my twenties was nicer than it had been in high school–there was shelter and water–it was still a desert and thus, mostly featureless. That was mostly okay with me, though. I knew that someday, and suddenly, the mountains would appear. And if I kept walking through this place, I would get there.
As with regular hiking, though, the journey is always at least twice as long as you expect it to be.
***
When my philosophy professor Wayne Pomerleau asked to see me after class one afternoon, I agreed. When class ended, I waited for everyone to leave.
“I wanted to ask you how you are feeling,” Pomerleau said. “I wonder if you are okay.”
This wasn’t the question I was expecting. “Yeah,” I told him. “I’m fine.” I raised my eyebrows. Gave him my half-smile.
“You’re … fine.” His tone was flat. I mean, his tone was always flat but somehow, it was even flatter now.
“Yeah,” I said. I met his eyes. I noticed him noticing me and felt too many things, too quickly, to elaborate.
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
What more could he say? But he went on. “I live with a woman who has suffered with depression for many years.” This was delivered in his usual teacherly, dramatic style. Was he always like this? Was he like this at home? No wonder his wife was depressed.
I wish that in that moment I’d had the courage to let him know that yes, I too, had depression. I wasn’t okay and hadn’t been for a long time. Self-consciousness prevented me, but not only that. There was denial, too–wouldn’t I, shouldn’t I, figure this out on my own? And its opposite: hopelessness. This guy can’t help me. No one can.
If someone in my life prior to this moment would have prepared me even a bit for it–“you know, counseling is always available!”–would that have been enough to give me the courage to say something that day, or even to say nothing at all but not to lie?
But they didn’t, and I did lie.
-blend with: Sure, I’m depressed a lot, I might have reflected after leaving the classroom that day. But isn’t the way I feel … logical, really? Life is hard, and lonely, and I’m still figuring things out. Global crises and private tragedies are a condition of existence. Maybe everyone feels like I do, but they’re just better at suppressing or ignoring it. And even if I am sadder than most people, so what? Therapy won’t help. What could anyone possibly say to make it better? And pills–they’re just for weak people.
I’m not weak. I’m sad, but I’m also tough. I will get through this–whatever it is–by myself.
-blend with: At the time, though, medication wasn’t a thought in my mind. Neither was therapy. In my family, we just didn’t do those things. I’d figure something out eventually, I told myself. God would heal me, or I’d learn to pray the right way, or read the Bible more and with more sincerity.
“Well, okay,” he said. “Then if you are, as you say, ‘fine,’ then good,” and he let me go. I exited his classroom knowing I’d lied to him, but also not knowing. It was a strange experience of cognitive dissonance that was, at the same time, deeply familiar.
I scooted out of the room, remembering my high school history teacher who’d had a similar after-class conversation with me. I didn’t think, “This keeps happening. Maybe I could use some help.” Instead, I just thought, “Thanks God that’s over.”
People with depression understand intellectually that depression lives–the nothing it tells us is the truth. “No one can help you. This will never go away.” If you would’ve asked me if I believed these things, I would have said I didn’t or at least that I wasn’t sure. And yet, I listened. I didn’t know how to.
I didn’t yet know how to change my story.
***
If genetics had been my only mental health obstacle, maybe today I’d be a studious college professor and a novelist. But I’m a mental health counselor and a self-help writer instead, and part of the reason is that for a long time, without knowing it, depression was my practice.
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” Marcus Aurelius.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” Carl Jung, paraphrased.
Depression was my habit.
***
Church was a questionable influence on my mental health; however, it was not without gifts. After testifying during a service about the end of her depression, a woman offered to pray for others who were suffering. I talked to her after the service about my longtime struggle and she invited me to visit her at her home. There, she prayed for me, then did something better than that.
She gave me a book.
It was called Telling Yourself the Truth and in it, authors William Backus and Marie Chapian repackaged an evidence-based depression treatments for an audience that normally eyed with suspicion worldly science-based ideas. They based their largely borrowed technique which they called “misbelief therapy” on two or three plucked-out-of-context scriptures, and gave no credit to the founders of cognitive therapy (or the many inspirational positive thinking authors before them). They were wise to avoid this. At the time, people like me needed to believe this was a Christian method. Regardless, the theme of the book was simple: tell yourself the truth. Since God is good, and God is on your side, the truth is always better than you think it is.
Wait–changing my thinking? Was this even biblical? What about doing good deeds, trusting God and avoiding sinning? I’d never heard of cognitive therapy, and positive thinking–wasn’t that … denial?
The authors walked the reader through the most elementary perspective-changing exercises–exercises that, to me, felt nothing short of radical. I tried it and surprisingly, it worked.
Walking home from class one afternoon, I even tried a mantra: “Thank you, God,” I said, over and over, once for each step I took. By the time I was home, I felt better.
After this experience, I started experiencing something new: short breaks in my otherwise continuous depression. Though these were brief at first, the length didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were happening, and that later, they would happen more.
This was another grown-up that stepped in to help fill the gaps that my parents had left, and I appreciated it.
I still do. These things matter.
***
Maybe a part of me was recalling that book as I lay in my bed one evening, feeling guilty. Guilt was a familiar feeling but today there was a difference: when I searched for a reason for it, I came up empty. I mean, sure, my thoughts weren’t always pure. I probably wasn’t always giving a hundred percent at school. But had I lied? Had I committed adultery? Had I treated someone poorly? I wanted to find some reason for what I was feeling so that, as in times past, I could pray for forgiveness then find relief. This day, though, an Earth-tilting truth: there was nothing to feel guilty about. I had done nothing wrong.
Maybe this feeling of guilt isn’t real guilt, I thought. Maybe it’s just a feeling. Maybe, like my constant aching loneliness and my sometimes-bottomless hunger, it was another disguise for depression.
I sat up in my bed and looked out the window. Just a feeling? Is it possible? It felt right. My jaw set, and against my upbringing, I allowed this to be my truth.
I am not guilty. This feeling of guilt isn’t the truth. And I don’t have to listen to it anymore.
Looking back, it probably wasn’t my decision to stop going to church, or critique questionable scripture passages in college theology classes, or hang out with non-Christians that was the first step to losing my religion. The first step probably happened in that single thought, that millisecond-long flash of understanding that one of my foundational spiritual beliefs was just wrong.
I am not guilty. It was, for me, a rebellious idea.
And it was a healthy one, too.
***
“It is not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Henry David Thoreau.
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