In sunshine and in shadow
I have scheduled an appointment with a therapist for March 23; I am still calling doctors, however, trying to get an earlier appointment. In the end, I could not get a female therapist, either. When the choice is almost non-existent, beggars can’t be picky.
At the moment, I do not feel particularly miserable, but one thing I have learned about myself over the years is that I am liable to slide back into the pit without much warning. Sometimes there are precipitating events–innocuous events, quite often, such as a trip to Lowe’s–but just as often, there is no discernible reason for the onset of depression.
On any particularly ordinary afternoon, the sky can unexpectedly cloud over. And even when feeling the warm sun on my face, standing just behind me is the shadow.
I feel good, but there is a part of me that knows I am not well and worries over my state of being, the way one will compulsively wiggle and poke at a sore tooth with the tongue, until a minor soreness blossoms into nerve-tender pain. For me, the part I obsess over is my loss of interest in things that used to bring me enjoyment: reading, writing, and thinking about intellectual matters, from politics to literature.
I used to be a voracious reader. For me, reading was the foundation stone of my identity, even above and beyond what I considered (falsely) my identity as a writer. Even though I have always doubted my writing talent, I never doubted my love of reading. From the time one of my family members first picked up a book and read to me as a toddler, through my school years when I began exploring books on my own, I read, and read, and read, as if books were in danger of extinction and I had to consume as many of them as possible before the coming apocalypse.
I also bought lots of books, once I reached an age at which I had money for such things. In middle school, I recall discovering a local comic book shop. I began visiting it for the comics, but I soon discovered that it had a back room where used books were sold. In the space of a few months, I put away my comics for good.
One of my greatest finds was discovered in that back room: an almost complete set of Charles Dickens’ novels with no copyright date on the title page, indicating to my adolescent mind that the books must date to the nineteenth century. I still have those books.
Crummy and worthless as they are, I still recall the details of reading many of them. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I read A Tale of Two Cities in the bedroom of the trailer where I lived throughout my childhood, propped up in bed at night with only the yellow glow of a small, dusty lamp clipped to the head of my bed to illuminate the pages. The lamp had been my great-grandma’s, my mother’s grandma’s. The plastic shade was a dull ivory color from cigarette smoke and age, with a rose print painted on it; the cord was the cloth-covered type that dates back to mid-twentieth century and before.
What has the French Revolution to do with a lonely young boy living in a trailer somewhere in West Virginia? Why should he care? What fertile coupling of genetics and environment consorted to create an aesthete where, by all rights, he should not have existed? I haven’t the foggiest answer, but am tempted to say, “Fat lot of good that reading did me.”
At least I enjoyed it at the time, though.
Looking back, however, it was not the French Revolution and its atrocities as described by the incomparable Dickens, or the love story between Darnay and Lucie that interested me. It was all about Sydney Carton, the cynical romantic–perhaps the only cynical romantic in all of Dickens–who drinks himself into a stupor and pretends to care about nothing and no one. And yet, it is the cynical romantic, Carton, who gives his life to the guilottine so that Darnay, the supposed hero, may live. That kind of idealistic crapola was like mother’s milk to a teenager such as I was.
Sometimes, all that seems left to me are the memories of the pleasure of reading. For years now, I have not read anything for pleasure. I have read books to pass the time on the train, more out of a sense of duty or responsibility to occupy my mind, than out of pleasure. But at home, I read nothing. I don’t read before dinner. I don’t read before bed. I don’t lie on the couch on a quiet evening and read for hours, the way I did when I was in college.
Even on the train, for weeks now I have read nothing. I have gotten quite good at falling into a deep sleep and somehow rousing myself just when the train reaches my stop. Or else I stare out the window at nothing.
No books. No magazines. No newspapers. Nothing but the awful sound of my own voice echoing through my dull, empty head.
Thomas Jefferson once said, “I cannot live without books.”
I have discovered, much to my horror, that I can live without books. I never thoguht such a day would come to pass, but here I am, admitting for the first time that I no longer even count myself among that elite class of people, “readers.”
There is a tendency to rationalize away my lack of interest. Having attempted to force reading upon myself, I have given up, saying that I have not found the right book. Or else I blame my indifference to books on my extensive education in English literature, which (I tell myself) reduced the act of literary creation to a philosophical stratagem on the part of the author, or a twitch of the psycho-sexual neuroses that haunted the poet.
I’ve read enough Freud, taken enough courses in human psychology, to know a defense mechanism when I see one. Yet defense mechanisms serve an eminently practical purpose, and thus are difficult to resist: defense mechanisms act as a shield between ourselves and something dangerous to our identity.
In my case, the dangerous idea is that I really don’t enjoy reading anymore.
I am not the person I once was. So who am I?
There are other things that used to give me joy that I no longer enjoy. The loss of all sensation of pleasure is an indescribable feeling, almost like losing one’s reason for being. I can’t even write about it adequately.
As an example, I mentioned recently that I wrote one last short story and was saddened to discover that completing it provided none of the joy I used to derive from it. Nor did it provide any respite from the persistent negative feelings of self-loathing, hopelessness, and failure.
Sometimes I think I play World of Warcraft not necessarily because it is fun, but because it mimics the fun I used to have creating my own imaginary worlds. It is a vivid world that, for me, defines what the escapist experience must be for an alcoholic or drug or sex addict. From this game I derive a simulation of achievement by completing quests. And through the “friendships” I develop with other players, I derive a sense of worth and, for the first time in my life, a sense of belonging somewhere. This, then, is the simulacrum I have chosen over the barren reality of my soul.
On top of everything else, I have this incomprehensible anger towards those I love. When my mom phones to chat, I feel this welling up of extreme anger, to the point I find myself gritting my teeth and barely restrained from smashing the phone. Much of the time, I don’t even answer her calls. My anger is also directed at my Dad, my grandparents, even my wife and son, for reasons I cannot express, even to myself.
I often feel like spiritually and mentally I am shrivelling up into a piece of dried jerky. There is no emotion left in me that is not dessicated and destructive.
Why is this happening to me? Why do I feel this way? Why can I find no relief anywhere, not even in the usual things that used to make me happy?
When I put my thoughts and questions in writing this way, I despair at finding answers. I have serious misgivings as to whether a therapist can help me. What is he going to tell me? What drug is he going to prescribe to cure the symptoms of neurotic, existentialist angst?
My hope is that there is a drug I can take, a happy pill just for me. If so, I want some, and side effects be damned. I would prefer impotence, insomnia, involuntary twitching of the muscles in my face, anything, to the hell of depression.
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Well, I’m glad you found some sort of appointment and I hope you are pleasantly surprised by the therapist.
Comment by Scrivener — Thursday, 8 March 2007 @ 7:11 pm
Thanks, Scrivener, and I also want to thank you for your excellent advice from the earlier post. You clearly spent a lot of time thinking and writing about my situation, and offering your best opinion on the subject. I appreciate that.
I am going to take some printouts of blog posts with me to show the therapist. Beyond that, I don’t know what I am going to say. That was part of the problem with the therapy I sought fifteen or more years ago. I knew I was depressed and I knew I had no clue why, or how to deal with it, but I did not know how to express it. Where do you start? What do you say? Do you tell even the embarassing bits, the things one is most ashamed of? Or do you try to make yourself into some sort of Byronic hero, dark and brooding?
I opted for the latter, to my detriment.
Comment by greypilgrim — Thursday, 8 March 2007 @ 9:57 pm
A bit difficult to reply to that. I think I’m going to have to let it sink in some.
In the meantime, I had been wanting to tell you that I wrote my latest blogpost thinking of you. It’s not particularly good, and I didn’t necessarily spend a great deal of effort, but I was thinking of you and your short stories both before and while I wrote it. I attempted to make it a bit more decent of a story.
Anyway, I’m afraid to go back and read it now, and was almost afraid to tell you about it as it might insult your sensibilities as a much better writer. Still, I feel relatively good about the process, so maybe you should know that your blog helped inspire me to spend a little time thinking about how to make the story fun to read instead of just fun to write (not saying I accomplished that, just that I made an attempt
).
Now, to figure out how to actually reply to your post . . .
Comment by Step — Thursday, 8 March 2007 @ 11:43 pm
I’d love to take a look at it. You may need to provide your blog URL in a comment, though. When I click your name to visit your website, I get an error, “Problem loading page.”
Also, please don’t feel obligated to reply to the particulars of my post. Over the past couple months, this blog has come to replace my private diary as a medium for me to address some of my personal issues.
Having mainly written about impersonal issues, such as politics, over the years, these posts are highly embarrassing for me. I often write them and then let them cool for hours while I debate whether I really want to publish them or not. It’s the same issue as when I went to the therapist so many years ago and felt like he was sitting there in judgment of me: I can’t help but feel that people are reading these and judging me, or rolling their eyes and laughing.
Sometimes I feel a bit like George Costanza on Seinfeld, someone who is obviously pretty neurotic and troubled, but who is meant to be laughed at rather than sympathized with. There’s an episode of Seinfeld where George and Jerry are sitting in the diner and George is going on and on about how unhappy he is, and how he thinks about death all the time (meanwhile the laugh track is playing), and he asks Jerry, “What makes you happy?” And Jerry replies (paraphrasing), “You make me happy. Fifteen minutes of conversation with you and I am on top of the world.”
I wonder if that is how others see me, as well. Just a buffoon who complains about things constantly when really, he ought to be grateful to even be alive. Hell, I know I should be grateful for all that I have. I know I should be happy. No one has to tell me that. I don’t need to be patronized by anyone. I do need help, though.
Comment by greypilgrim — Friday, 9 March 2007 @ 8:22 am
Heh. That’s because I mis-typed the name. It’s http://ransomedhome.com, and I dropped the d somewhere.
Someone suggested to me last night that some questions I am dealing with right now meant that I’m having a mid-life crisis. I’ve always thought those were a load of hooey, so that was both embarrassing and insulting - another example where I need to deal with my pride. Anyway, I don’t judge you - not my place, not my role, and anyway I can feel (and have felt) a little of your pain, and enough other pain that I know better than to judge you.
I’m glad you post them. As long as you’re being honest, it’s much better “getting it out there” than it is to keep it to yourself. It might cause problems with your family or friends who read this, but then again there are probably already problems there and at least this is starting to acknowledge and deal with them.
My RAW group (a group of guys from my church, Real Authentic Warriors is sort of our mission together) challenged me last night on the questions I’ve been dealing with last night: it was nice, honestly, to have some friends that could straight-up confront me, as I’ve never really had that.
Having said that, last night I told most of them they were wrong (also new to me). They were telling me that maybe I needed to make some decisions and get off the fence. I said I couldn’t do that yet, it wasn’t that easy, and I’m not ready. I think that’s true, yet even I can hear the excuses and whining implicit in that.
So I’m not passing that message on to you - the “be a man, make your decision, and act like it’s true even if you don’t feel it” message. First, I don’t even know if it would apply to you. Second, it sounds like you’ve been fighting this a long time, and have some real issues you need to deal with. Third, you probably already know that anyways.
I just want you to know, really, that you’re not alone in thinking about life in ‘a little different way’, and you’re not alone in struggling with life and issues.
I’m glad you don’t mind me hanging around, reading your diary. Bit of a strange thing, that. But I wish and hope the best for you. I’ll be praying for you too.
Peace,
Step
Comment by Step — Friday, 9 March 2007 @ 9:46 am
I’ve never met you in real life, but on your blog at least you don’t strike me as even the slightest bit like George Costanza. The comparison would honestly never have even begun to cross my mind. I think that sort of self-criticism is both part of the depression itsef and part of the defense mechanism. It’s scary as shit to unpack all those issues, and one of the ways we stop ourselves from being honest is by saying “oh I’m just whining” or “people will judge me if I say that” or whatever.
As far as where to start in therapy, I don’t know that I have any answers. I’m glad you’ll bring in some posts, that should give your therapists some avenues of exploration. I would say that a reasonable goal for the first session of therapy is to tell your therapist that you’re dealing with depression, that you have for a long time, that you’ve got some resistances to therapy that he’ll need to help you deal with, and that you’re having issues with expressing anger. You might not even get through all of that in the first session, to be honest, b/c he’ll probably have some things he wants to do to start and he will probably have some follow-up questions on some of these points. You will need to do some of the basic family of origin discussion over the first few visits. Oh, and tell him that you’re interested in the possibility of taking anti-depressants.
Of course you know that you should be honest in therapy. Try not to think of him as judging you but as trying to help you recognize patterns and come up with alternate strategies.
You’re welcome for the advice, for whatever it’s worth. I’ve been reading your blog off and on for almost two years now or so, and even though we haven’t met I feel a lot of respect for you. I admire your empathy and your willingness to be self-analytical.
Comment by Scrivener — Friday, 9 March 2007 @ 10:39 am
I have come to consider you as a real-life friend despite the fact we haven’t met. And I appreciate being able to see some of your inner workings.
Sodsbrood, despite the fact that it apparently has shrunk down to a core, has been a useful place to let us share in a way we probably wouldn’t do/have time for in person. Your blog is an extension of your introspection. And even getting your friends to read about it and talk about it must be helpful.
I hope you also can talk to the counselor about guilt. That seems to be an overriding theme.
It’s weird because I’m finding a similar lack of interest in writing, and wonder if my time just hasn’t past. Or if I’m making excuses, because I still love reading more than anything, and WoW. WoW seems to take up too much time. It allows me to live in the fantasy world I always wanted as a kid, and at the same time, it has become frustrating to me.
Maybe we’re all trying to find lives we’re more comfortable with. And you haven’t let go of the one you somehow imagined you’d have, even subconsciously.
In the mean time … read some of those books I recommended.
Comment by Mel B. — Saturday, 10 March 2007 @ 1:54 pm
I’d like to read some of the books you recommended, but I just don’t enjoy it anymore. I read a page or two, and my attention wanders, and I grow bored. I re-read some of Philip Larkin’s poetry, recently, and it got me to thinking that maybe I could stimulate my brain a little by reading poetry. Poetry is short and requires minimal attention and dedication; maybe I just need to read something like that, which accomodates my reduced attention span. I’ve been thinking about re-reading some of the Romantics I enjoyed as a kid–Byron and Shelley in particular.
As for WoW, it does seem to take up an inordinate amount of my free time. Part of the reason I don’t feel like reading anymore is that I’d rather be playing WoW in my spare time. Reading just can’t compete with that.
Also, WoW certainly does fulfill some sort of fantasy of escape, and I imagine that is true for a lot of people. Otherwise there would be no news stories about the lives destroyed from people playing it compulsively. With the death of Jean Baudrillard recently, I wonder if he were alive what he would make of a game like WoW. It is approaching the kind of simulacrum he wrote about. People get drawn in and, ultimately, would rather spend time in the simulation than actually living a “real” life.
Comment by greypilgrim — Saturday, 10 March 2007 @ 3:17 pm
I noticed B’s obit just yesterday. I’m not sure exactly what he would say. I have not read him or any serious theory in a few years. But I admit to falling for the image rather quickly when I am in the zone of WoW.
Incidentally, is there any one book of poems by Larkin I should read? I am teaching modern bit lit next semester and have been thinking of teaching him. He seems to have already been colonized and I have been needing to teach some poetry for some time now.
Comment by Todd — Monday, 12 March 2007 @ 9:29 pm
His book “High Windows” is very highly regarded and has several of his best poems in it, but you will miss other poems that are just as good
“The Whitsun Weddings” is my favorite and has my favorite poems in it, including “Sunny Prestatyn”, “Mr Bleaney”, “Dockery and Son”, and “The Whitsun Weddings.” I’d probably teach his book “The Whitsun Weddings,” if it were up to me. If you just want individual poems, teach the ones I’ve listed, adding the poem “High Windows.”
The main reason to do “High Windows” is because it contains the word “fucking,” always a shocker in poetry.
Comment by Matthew — Tuesday, 13 March 2007 @ 6:07 am
I haven’t read poetry in awhile. The only thing I’ve an interest in lately is technical reading, which makes me sad sometimes. But not for very long, as there is plenty more technical stuff to read.
Your blog, and other internet stuffs, are the exception to the rule of course.
Comment by Step — Tuesday, 13 March 2007 @ 11:03 am
Glad to hear you’ve made an appointment. For what it’s worth, I’ve never felt inclined to either judge or laugh at you over these posts, and your honesty about where you find yourself is appreciated. I’ve always been mystified by the “How can he/she be depressed? There’s nothing wrong” perspective on depression. As if it can be explained away or solved by locating and “fixing” a particular tangible “problem” in a person’s life. Such a perspective can also put a tremendous amount of pressure on the depressed individual to take charge when there’s not necessarily even one thing that needs to be taken charge of. Depression tends to be more pervasive, more amorphous than that, I think, so I’d encourage you not to enter therapy with the desire to fix what’s wrong in a few sessions (though a “happy pill” certainly might help you begin to sort through and put issues in perspective).
Comment by Dawn — Tuesday, 13 March 2007 @ 9:59 pm
A problem I had with my attempt at therapy back in the early nineties was that it seemed pointless, in terms of “healing” myself. I saw no results from going in there every week and paying ninety dollars to talk to myself. I want to see some results this time and am going to tell the therapist up front that I want his advice. I want him to direct the therapy, not just sit there passively letting me ramble. I am also going to tell him that I want drugs, if he thinks drugs will help.
I may not be able to expect a cure in only a few sessions, but I do expect to see some results early. I am also going to be more active in seeking results, this time.
Comment by greypilgrim — Wednesday, 14 March 2007 @ 4:26 am