A Pilgrim's Digression

On our WoW guild forums recently, a guildmate asked us to describe one of our best or happiest moments from high school. It took me a little more than a day to think of something I might write about, and when I finally finished my post, I realized I hadn’t really written about something happy at all.

I wrote about how good I felt watching a bully be humiliated.

This got me to thinking, Why can’t I remember happy things? Why don’t I have many truly good memories? I know for a fact that there were happy moments in my childhood. I know that for a fact, but when I try to think of good times, few come to mind.

I can’t figure out exactly what causes this in me, but I tend to remember incidents of pain, loneliness, despair, and embarrassment, but no joy, pleasure, or just simple happiness.

I can tell you about the day when I was 18 and my Mom secretly took my dog to have him euthanized. He probably needed to be euthanized, but she could have told me she was going to do it.

I can’t tell you about one happy moment I had with my mother. Not a kind word or a moment of tenderness, or even a simple, happy moment of being with her. There must be moments like that from my childhood, but no, I remember only the bad times. Same with my memories of my father—anger, neglect, humiliation; these feelings characterize my memories of him.

I do have good memories of my grandparents, and in fact when I try to think of good memories, they are in all of them. However, these memories aren’t the most accessed files in my databank. I also have negative memories of them, as well. My grandma had these little passive/aggressive ways of making a person feel like a piece of crap, someone who is not quite normal, just a little off. She called it being “backward.” That was her country term for me. I was backward.

Even the negative memories are not free from guilt and self-loathing, however. I ask myself, do I raise the ghosts of these memories out of a desire for pity? By relating these incidents, do I make myself appear even weaker and more foolish than if I had kept silent?

A man keeps his secrets. A child tells all, without inhibition, out of a desire for approval, pity, or love.

I have to ask, too: Is this unerring focus on the negative merely a trait of the depressive personality? Is it legitimate to feel depressed? I don’t know. On the one hand I can accept the point of view that a feeling is legitimate, if I am actually feeling it. But I don’t even know what I’m feeling anymore. Are my feelings real, or the product of a diseased mind?

In terms of the question at hand–good school memories–I can’t think of a single one after elementary school, and even the elementary school memories are contradictory. However, I can tell you any number of stories about how miserable I was in junior high and high school.

I do work hard to put the past to rest. I go to therapy regularly. I take my medication. But then something triggers this retrospective on my part, and it all comes flooding back again and I spend a day or so hating myself and my life.

I wish I could be one of those people who look at life and see the bright side. They don’t think much about the past, or if they do they remember only the good times. If they were ever hurt by someone, the wound healed over completely, leaving no scar.

Sometimes I feel that, in military terms, I am a walking wounded.  I hate it. I want a pill that will selectively wipe out certain parts of my brain I don’t want active, any longer. I don’t want to struggle with this anymore. I dont want to know myself, and Socrates be damned. The whole philosophical exercise of thinking about my existence is pointless. I’m 35 years old and I am still a child, brooding over childish things.

The results of grandma’s CT scan were not heartening. The tumor has grown; her doctor suggested that she try another form of chemotherapy, and yesterday she had her first treatment.

I called her around 4:30, and knew when I heard her speak that the news wasn’t good. She sounded different, tired. After she told me the results, I said, “You sound more tired than usual. Is this new treatment worse than the other chemo?”

She said no, that the treatment is actually easier than before, taking only two hours instead of the usual four to five. She said she has some chest congestion she can’t get rid of which has made her tired. The doctor said it was just an ordinary cold, however.

I asked about the side effects of the new chemo. She said the only thing the doctor mentioned is that she can’t drink any cold beverage for about a week after treatment. She has to drink liquids at room temperature or warmer. Apparently cold liquids will results in a kind of long term brain freeze that, as you can imagine, would be pretty uncomfortable. Grandpa made the joke that she will no longer be able to drink cold chocolate; it will have to truly be hot chocolate.

Grandma said that what she was really going to miss is ice cream. She and grandpa have made a habit of going out for ice cream in the evening, and now she won’t be able to do that, at least not the first week after treatment. Since her chemo is every two weeks, that gives her a window of about a week to indulge, but the threat of a painful side effect might make it difficult to enjoy her treat even when she knows she should be safe.

We didn’t talk long. She seemed glad when I asked her about the weather, and she talked a little about grandpa’s vegetable garden and all the good beans they are getting. No tomatoes just yet. Maybe by the end of the month.

Finally, as we were saying goodbye, I said, “Well I am glad you are continuing treatment. You have to fight.”

She said, “Yes, but you know it’s just something we have to accept. I’m not going to get better.”

It. Accept it.

True enough, but it’s like consenting to live with the person who you know is going to murder you one day.

I slept reasonably well last night. I still woke up about every hour, but was able to go back to sleep easily. Then I woke up about a half hour before the alarm went off, and I didn’t go back to sleep. But I don’t feel too bad, today. Just normal. About average. I don’t remember my dreams.

At the bus stop last week, I found a little pink Croc, probably this one. It’s infant-size, and I thought, “Someone will miss that.” So I hung it from its strap on a screw on the back of the bus stop sign.

Today, it was lying in the grass. I picked it up and put it on the curb. Maybe the pink will catch someone’s eye as they drive by, but maybe not. It’s a very small shoe.

If not, I’ll get to see how long it remains on the curb. I am betting it will only last until winter, and then the first snow will cover it, and a snowplow will bury it even more with the sooty ice scraped from the street, and then it will either be swept away by the street cleaners or washed away in the dirty winter rain.

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.