Posted by Mark H. on October 17, 2000, at 22:55:30
In reply to Re: Long, Depressing Response...wisdom?, posted by chdurie2 on October 11, 2000, at 16:13:39
Dear Caroline,
Thank you for your beautiful letter. I don't have any wisdom, but I have found a tiny crack in the monolith.
There is a mysterious and cruel seamlessness to the experience of depression. When I'm seriously depressed, it feels as though I have always been depressed, and I cannot remember what it was like to be otherwise. I lose the present, and I lose the past. If I think of something good I've done, I start questioning why I did it. Past periods of insight and productivity begin to seem like superficial hypomanic episodes rather than sustained and worthwhile accomplishments.
If I try to be logical, to use my intellect, then everywhere I look I see seemingly concrete evidence that the future will only be more difficult and dreadful than the present. Even positive thoughts -- I'm holding down a meaningful full-time job, I'm happily married, I have a nice home, my car is paid for -- can be turned around. After all, if I feel like I'm just barely keeping it together when things are this good, what would I do if faced with even minor adversity?
Just as strange, however, is that when I found a mix of meds three years ago that lifted me out of depression, within a few days I could no longer remember or relate to what it was like to be depressed. It wasn't subtle or gradual. Suddenly, it was as though I had left depression behind decades ago or that it had happened to someone else. Yuck, get me away from all these depressed people! But the depression eventually returned.
These experiences completely undercut my sense of reality. I've always felt I had a heightened capacity for love, for spirituality, for intuitive insight and being able to make connections across multiple disciplines. Now I read that these qualities I hold most dear are considered delusional artifacts of bipolar disorders and other brain diseases. My negative concerns about myself are equally grandiose and just as unlikely to have much validity.
Unable, then, to trust my feelings, my thoughts or my judgment, my accomplishments or my motives, the reality of my demons or my imagined abilities, what is left? What IS left if I take away everything I think of as being "me"?
What's left is awareness. Not concepts, not feelings, just awareness. (Note the inherent foolishness of my trying to use concepts to explain something that is beyond concepts; I'm a slow learner.) If I were able to sustain awareness, then perhaps over time I might also gain some wisdom. In the meantime, I'm still lost in the storm of my thoughts and feelings almost all of the time.
But to whatever microscopic extent I am able to experience simple awareness, I notice that my depression, even at its worst, tends to breathe, and that it is my thoughts about it that turn it into a seemingly uninterrupted living hell. If I can be aware of the thoughts and the depression and my feelings and the desire to get out of my own skin, then whatever it is that is aware also notices that the seamlessness of the experience is an illusion, a biochemical belief system doing mischief to my reality, just another temporary phenomenon that seems incredibly real and durable at the time I'm experiencing it.
If I can relax into awareness, without judgment, then the paralysis of depression doesn't last as long. I'm not as freaked out about bad periods or mindlessly relieved during good periods. I don't make the bad periods worse by striving to change or hide them, or by reifying them with self hatred and yet more concepts. I don't pretend that the good periods are permanent and plan the rest of my life around being reliably brilliant and affable.
I guess I should confess that I am a Buddhist, but a rather retarded one. I feel like life is beating Buddhism into my bones so it doesn't become just a social experience or a bunch of memorized rules and rituals. I'm not anywhere near ready to state that I'm grateful for my depression, but I have glimpsed why people who do have wisdom often are able to make such seemingly outrageous claims.
I hope some of these thoughts find a positive resonance with you.
Thank you,
Mark H.
poster:Mark H.
thread:838
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20001011/msgs/1241.html