Depression ( Part 1)

This is an entry about depression. It is not pretty. I have written it in part because it helps me gain some closure on the most recent episode. This illness has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. It is part of who I am. It has shaped my life in many unforeseen and terrible ways. But it has been followed by periods of happiness and contentment beyond what I could have ever imagined I would experience, and with self-knowledge that would not have come any other way, in all probability. It is more than a physical illness. It is also a sickness of the spirit, of the soul, as Kierkegaard might say.

But I can write about it. The intensity of the actual experience does not even begin to lend itself to words, and so this is, at best, an imprecise and inadequate depiction of what actually happened to me. It was painful writing it, but in a strange sort of way, I felt compelled to. I will probably write more.

Finally, I have written what follows also to reveal that in the midst of seemingly unending pain, there is hope, and as long as one is living, one can seize hope and endure, and finally, overcome.

*****

It was late winter in 1994. A not particularly cold winter, but instead mild and containing those kinds of South Carolina February days where bare trees, leaves, and empty fields beckon you to the countryside. And there, I found the strangest kind of refuge in a most terrible period of time when I had returned home from years of wandering to settle in South Carolina for good. A job was found and lost due to an old and monstrous foe. It had attacked with a vengeance a couple of months before. What ensued was a frightening spiral into the blackest hole of depression and accompanying loss of the very person I was, so it seemed. Loss of those dear to me from whom I felt completely cut off. And loss of any real interest in anything, actually. With all that came a despair that rose and fell during long days as I struggled to hold my mind together and to steer it through those storm-tossed emotional shoals toward calmer water.

Days followed days. Week upon week. No break in the weather. Dark clouds and roiling skies. Fear gripping tight. The fear of never coming out again. The shock of being barely able to write a sentence or a check for the health insurance you know you desperately need to pay the premium on. Facing the unknown with no confidence that things will get better any time soon, if at all. No ability to concentrate on anything. Every paragraph a laborious effort to read. Books mere memories. The newspaper was about all I could tolerate with my attention span, but the news was so bad it only made my predicament seem blacker. Don’t try to read the newspaper when in a period of depression.

How can I describe it? The days are like a vacuum you become sucked into at first consciousness of morning. It becomes too long to endure. You long for the night. The walls of your room become too hard to touch.

Gradually you are stunned into a kind of mental oblivion where, through no fault of your own, you see yourself at the center of this greatly disordered and disturbed world all around you. You want to get out, and so you hope that by escaping your present surroundings, even if momentarily, you can stave off the waves of agitation and fear.

At last, in that late winter of 1994, with time and distance from the epicenter starting to have their beneficial effect, when I was starting to seem some little sparkles of light at the end of the tunnel, I could get into my car and drive out into the countryside. This offered me a few precious moments, maybe an hour, of freedom and the kindest sort of distraction for a fevered mind seeking relief — anywhere.

Five miles out of town, I turned along a dirt road. I didn’t care if it was private or public. I drove a half mile or so to the edge of a cotton field, now only stubble but filled with little white, puffy balls of dirty cotton the harvesting machines had missed.

I stopped the car at the edge of that field one late, late afternoon nearing sundown. It was quite cool, but not cold, and the wind was blowing over that pretty country scene out in the middle of nowhere. I had a warm jacket on. I was comfortable.

I stood there alone in that huge open area with my head upturned and my eyes closed, and the cool wind caressed my face, and I breathed deeply and looked up toward the bare trees in the distance. The wind was steady. A friend I loved so much at that moment of rescue. I remember this like it was yesterday. I pulled a few clumps of cotton from the dry stalks in the field and held them for the longest time, examining them closely, breaking the dry stalks and tossing them into the wind. I didn’t want to leave. I could have stayed there for hours. I didn’t care what anyone thought of me.

I repeated this ritual visit to that field for three days in a row. I went to the same spot toward dusk and always got out of my car and stood there breathing deeply of that sweet country air, absorbing every molecule that entered my lungs. Again, I didn’t care at all if anyone saw me standing alone in that field in the still twilight of day, receiving back a portion of the Earth. As self-conscious as I am. I can’t describe the energy I received, or the sense of oneness and belonging with the Earth and the elements that I felt on those three days. It is literally indescribable to this day.

The raw cotton from that picked-over field will forever symbolize a few brief moments when I was, for a time anyway, no longer deadened by waves of anxiety and depression. I could look up ahead of me to a time when I would know the first real semblance of wellness and, hence, healing. Although I didn’t realize it at the time. And although I still had a long way to go.

(Written Oct. 16, 1999)