Depression and anxiety act like shutters on my mind’s eye. I become less focused on the world around me and the people I love. Instead I become myopic, paranoid, and fatalistic. How can I break the cycle? Can I break it?
Pearl Jam’s 1993 song, Daughter, describes the abuse of a child. The song ends with the line, “the shades go down” hiding the abuse from the neighbors. I do this to my inner self, or rather, when my mind gets sick with depression and anxiety, it falls into a cycle of internal self-harm. I shut myself off from the world. I retreat and tear myself apart.
What right do you have in speaking your mind? What creative future do you have? Point to a single critically acclaimed ANYTHING you have accomplished. Just burn down your connections to other people, you are helping to save the from your toxicity. Delete your website. Delete your instagram. Delete your comics. The world doesn’t need another middle-aged white guy talking about his thoughts and feelings. You will pass along this disease to your son. People who say they love you are just being nice, eventually you will be what you always have been, nothing of any significance whatsoever.
I needed help. I’ve only begun to get help for my clinical depression in the last eight years. I see a therapist who has helped me begin to heal from these deep internal wounds. I also take a pretty heavy anti-depressant which keeps the more deadly manifestations of my mental illness at bay. Yet, continuing to ask for help or even asking the first place, is very hard for me.
Another voice has been increasing in volume in my heart. It is calm and full of compassion. It helps to steady me in the midst of a mental illness episode. Like the voice of my mother when I was young, it hold my hurting heart and whispers,
Gentle, gentle. Breathe, child. It takes time to heal. It takes time to grow. Gentle.
American culture has become dominated by zero-sum absolutist thinking. If at first you don’t succeed, well, then just burn it all down and move on to the next thing. If you aren’t a raging success you must be a hopeless loser. You either win or lose. No exceptions. The future will be brutal. Only the strong survive. No gray areas. Only right and wrong. As Childish Gambino reminds me, “This is America, don’t catch you slippin’ now.”
The trouble with this thinking is how it chokes out gentleness, grace, and authenticity. All or nothing choices are rare in life. Usually there is some space to express agency. I loathe when I see absolutism expressed by other people, but I allow my inner self to suffer under imposed rubrics of “success” and “failure.” It makes grace and care a revolutionary act.
A quick scan of my last post and the preceding paragraphs will show exactly how many times the word “I” has been used. My shades have been down while depression and anxiety have their way. The world outside lost focus. The truth of my friends’ love for me has been twisted. All that surrounded me was myself and my hurting ego. Reality ended at the tip of my nose. All that mattered was me and my pain.
“The only way out is through” is one of those truisms I often forget about and hate when I remember. It’s much easier to avoid something, or distract myself, than to deal with it. To get back to health, I need to get out of my head and into my heart.
A beautiful little medieval book has helped me recently. It’s called “The Cloud of Unknowing” with an author who is vaguely anonymous, a very on-brand thing to do. It is a mystical expression of a type of prayer called simply, “Centering Prayer.” The book claims that to experience the presence of God in our hearts we must not lean on intellect or any of our notions of “knowing.” To enter the cloud is to enter into the unknown with no logical knives out to dissect the experience. If God is God, then what little I can claim as knowledge is relevant in the quiet of centering down. It pulls me out of my head and into my heart.
The Cloud of Unknowing has forced me to plunge through the grit and gunk of my sickened mind to enter a calm in my heart. A calm I did nothing to create. A place where my value is not dependent on the number of likes I receive, how much money I earn, or how many professional accolades I do or do not possess.
It sounds a little arrogant to say, “I found a place inside myself to experience a deep sense of love and grace with the creator of the universe.” Yet, Quakers would say this “inner light” is not an exclusive experience only available to the well-educated or spiritually enlightened. We all, regardless of theology or social standing, can have access to this calm and grace. One just needs to be willing to let go and open up.
Once I pass through my center, I can begin to see again. Like leaving the dark, loud intensity of a concert for the cool open air of the night, centering down provides freshness and grace. I am surprised to find the world around me is not full of people who actively hate me. It is filled with people who need love. Genuine, healing love.
My God. There is a world outside my own head, and I don’t need to be the only one to fix or save it. I am only required to share what I have been given: grace, love, and hope.
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Today I am throwing open the shutters of my ego. Letting the light in, and taking deep breaths to restore my battered self. Rest is restorative and allows me to care. For myself. For others. For creation. And in the caring and the loving, the darkness in my mind is softened to smudges of shadow, mere wisps of a dissipating cloud.
Whither Shall I Go? 