A Pilgrim’s Digression

Even after refilling my Wellbutrin prescription this weekend, I forgot to bring my pills back to Washington with me when I left on Monday night. My therapist gave me a suggestion a long time ago when I told him I was having trouble remembering to pack my pills: “Leave them in a place where you can’t help but see them before you leave. Don’t put them in the medicine cabinet.”

Well, that worked well…until I put them in the medicine cabinet for no particular reason, this weekend.

I’ve spent the better part of the past two days carefully evaluating my emotions and thoughts for signs of declining seratonin levels. There’s a line from a Bruce Cockburn song that keeps running through my head:

“Trying to keep the latent depression from crystalizing…”

It’s hard to know if what I am experiencing is a crystalizing depression or not, though. I often wonder–sometimes aloud to my therapist–whether the medicine even works at all, or if it merely acts as a placebo upon the brain. He reassures me it does work, and that I need to be diligent about taking my wonderful pill every day.

I will say that therapy itself has been great at helping me recognize the thought patterns of my depression, and helping me to dispel them before they do crystalize. I noticed this morning that my thoughts were starting to run in circles of ever increasing negativity. Previously, I would not have recognized what was happening, and then when too late, I would not have known what to do about it.

As I have described it to my therapist, it’s not just that I have negative thoughts–about my grandma dying of cancer, for example–but that the negative thoughts become obsessive and repetitive, and then I translate the depressing thought of someone I love dying into obsessive, repetitive thoughts about my own death. I start thinking, over and over, about the worthlessness of my life, the pointlessness of getting up every day, the hopeless years ahead of me…and round and round I go, all day, the clouds growing darker and darker until finally I go home to my rented room and to bed, where I find some small relief in a dreamless sleep.

I see the pattern now. I didn’t really see it before; or perhaps better put: I didn’t question the validity of the pattern.

The way I break it is simple: I tell myself, “That’s just the disease. Ignore it.” Then I try to think about something else. This morning, for example, I could feel myself beginning to chase the tail of my depression, the pessimism and self-disgust building steadily as if there were someone following me, loading a wheelbarrow of bricks onto my hunched back, one brick at a time. So instead I started thinking about bringing in the trash cans.

Monday afternoon, when I was still on my medicine, I went out to bring in the trash cans and the recycling bin, and it was a lovely afternoon and I had the dog with me on a leash, and I just had this overwhelming feeling of good will and rightness. It all stemmed from the simple thought, “I am bringing in the trash cans. I am bringing in the recycling bin.”

The only explanation I have for it, really, is that at that moment it felt good to be right there in that place doing something simple; something not particularly productive, but something necessary, in a small way. I had no other thoughts at the time, just a feeling of well-being that I couldn’t pin down.

Since then, I’ve thought to myself, “Well, it’s the pleasure of domesticity that I felt.” To be sure, there can great pleasure in domestic chores. Sometimes I think about my family, my wife, my son, our house, the dog, the cat, even the bills, and I am overwhelmed by this feeling of peace.

I don’t know if that was what I was feeling Monday, a feeling of peace brought about by doing something domestically necessary. But it felt good, and I accepted it for what it was: a small gift from my subconscious, or perhaps from God though I tend to be skeptical that God deigns to intervene even in my moods; but it was a gift, nonetheless, and something to think about on darker days.

I often think about a conversation I had with my landlady here in Washington, probably two or three years ago. She is 94 now, so she was in her early nineties at the time, and she asked me how old I was. I was depressed at the time, and I told her I was 30 or 31 or whatever, and added that I felt much older.

She looked at me as if I were a fool, which I was, really. She was lying there in bed, ancient-looking and ancient-feeling, having out-lived nearly every member of her immediate family except her three children, and I was telling her I felt old at age 30.

“I’d give anything to be 30 again,” she said. “My husband would be alive. My children would be home again. I could go out when I felt like it, work around the house, take the bus into town and go to a museum, and I’d come home and we’d have dinner as a family like we used to. Afterwards, maybe we’d have some friends over and my husband and I would play bridge with them.”

She looked teary-eyed, probably remembering exactly what it felt like to be that age again, and especially to have so many of the dead alive again–her husband, friends, family, all the people who had gone before over the past century.

“It’s awful to grow as old as me,” she said…as she often says.

“Don’t grow old!” she sometimes commands me.

A truism isn’t called a truism because its false. No matter how obvious it may be, it’s not a falsehood: we don’t appreciate what we’ve got until it’s gone.

So when I feel the latent depression begin to crystalize now, I try to think about what I’ve got. I think about my wife, my son, my dog, my home. I think about how good it feels to come home on Thursday night and kiss my wife, kiss my son, and go through the routine of unpacking my things, putting my dirty clothes in the washer, making sure the pets have food, maybe taking the dog out for a walk. I try not to think about how my son is growing or how he just turned seven, because that will turn my thoughts the other way–to how old I sometimes feel, and down that road lies the darkness.

And after Monday, I will try to grab hold of that feeling of peace and joy I felt bringing in the trash cans and recycling bin. Simple pleasures can sometimes be as good as a simple pill.