7
The Many Faces of Depression
DEPRESSION.
I’m inspired to do a spiritual musing and explore this debilitating state of
consciousness, because yesterday I woke up feeling depressed and I allowed
myself to experience depression all day long so I could analyze my dark and
depressing mood and come to terms with it, but I need help to catch this devil
by the tail; so, as I do with all of my spiritual musings, I’m going to turn it
over to my Muse…
I
woke up yesterday morning from some dreams that affected my state of waking
consciousness. Unfortunately, when I woke up I only had a vague memory of my
dreams; but I knew from the quality of my dreams that they had to do with some
unresolved issues of my life, and that’s what I believe brought on my day’s
depression.
Penny
and I had coffee in my writing den as we always do before she went to work, and
then I tried to get into my writing; but nothing would come. This was unusual
for me; but I had just emptied the well of my creative energies with my last
book The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway,
which was followed by a thorough editing and writing the last chapter of my new
novel The Golden Seed that I had put
aside for several years, so I understood why nothing would come as I tried to
finish something that I had started the day before.
But I
persisted, because I’ve always used writing to work my way through these
depressing states of consciousness that affect me now and then; except yesterday
the wall of my depression was too thick to penetrate and I knew I had to take
measures to pull myself out from under, so I went out to shovel top soil from
the truckload we had delivered to the side of our house before they paved our
driveway, which they did two days ago; and I set to work filling my wheelbarrow
and spreading the soil along the edges of our new asphalt driveway.
From
all the reading that I had done and personal experience, I knew that one sure
way to drive away depression was to DO, because DOING—and it can be anything,
as long as one is DOING something with conscious, willful intent—always drives away
the spirit of depression because DOING is the mortal enemy of depression. But
why?
To
DO, one has to make effort; and effort requires will power. Will power needs
energy, and where does this energy come from if not our core being; so when we DO,
we engage our inner self to perform the task we intend to do, like shoveling
top soil into my wheelbarrow and spreading it along the edges of our new
driveway so I can sow grass seeds and finish off our front yard. But my dark
mood persisted.
Because
of the damage that two heart attacks did to my heart, after bypass surgery several
years ago I can only exert myself so much before I exhaust myself; so I would
fill my wheelbarrow two or three times and spread the black earth and then sit
down to rest. But while sitting the thought came to me to abandon to my
depression just to see what it was all about; so I stopped fighting the spirit
of my dark mood and simply let it possess me.
Writers
are strange creatures. We want to experience everything, if not literally at
least vicariously. I had just done half a year of research on my high school
hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway and written The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, so I knew the extremes that he
went to to experience all the life he could so he could write about it, and I
became very familiar with his paradoxical personality and the reason that he
suffered from severe bouts of depression that he called “black ass” moods, but
I wasn’t Hemingway. My literary mentor had no control over his “black ass,” but
I had broken the back of the dark shadow side of my personality; so I had the
will to drive away the spirit of depression whenever it tried to possess me. But
yesterday I gave in to it so I could analyze why it was so damn persistent, something
like an actor allowing himself to become the character that he is playing.
“Come on,” I said to the unconscious shadow side
of my personality that hung about me like a dark cloud; “have your day.” And I
worked all day long at a pace that I could manage and allowed myself to feel
the bleakness and despair of my own “black ass” until I experienced something
that I never thought I would—the thought of letting go altogether, like my high
school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway
blew his brains out with his favorite shotgun a few days after he was released
from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester where he underwent shock therapy for his depression,
but once I got a taste of total submission to the spirit of depression my
survival instincts rallied and I said, “I
would never do that to Penny. Never!” And my love for Penny drove away the suicidal
spirit of depression. And once I restored my perspective, the clarity of my thoughts
allowed me to see what the spirit of depression was all about; and I came to a
very simple, but astounding conclusion: depression has many faces…
Unlike
Hemingway, writing was never my first priority. God, I wanted it to be; but my
calling to become a writer was supplanted by my calling to become a seeker, and
although I continued to write, my best energies always went into my quest for my
true self.
I had
to work to make a living, so my energies were spread very thin; but thanks to
Gurdjieff’s teaching I learned to make work the biggest part of my seeking,
because by adopting an “esoteric attitude” (Jesus called it not letting the
left hand know what the right hand was doing) I learned to use my trade to find
my true self. This is how I ferretted out the secret of DOING, which has the
inherently self-transcending power to transform our shadow self and lift us out
of debilitating states of depression.
“Therefore
whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto
a wise man, which built his house upon a rock,” said Jesus. But
it doesn’t matter how much we DO, there will always be aspects of our shadow that
we cannot, or refuse, to resolve; and that’s what I realized yesterday as I
analyzed my feeling of depression, because the more deeply I reflected the more
clearly I saw the many faces of my own depression.
It
was like I had deliberately opened the gates of my private hell, and one by one
the little demons of my archetypal shadow self came prancing out to have their
moment in the sun. But because of my unique relationship with life—existential,
literary, and esoteric—I developed a special talent for seeing the shadow side
of life, and I let my pesky demons have their way with me with thoughts of
meaninglessness and despair; that’s why I’ve never been able to buy into the
idea that depression is biologically based, as hard science would have us
believe, and why I believe that pharmaceuticals will never cure depression.
I
have no doubt that our biology affects our psychology and that medication can
stave off depression for a while, but I also believe that our psychology
affects our biology; and I know from bitter experience and all my reading in
literature and Jungian psychology that the dark shadow side of our personality
plays a significant role in affecting our behavior, some days overwhelming us
with such debilitating bouts of depression that one’s demons can drive one to
suicide—which was my inspiration for writing The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway.
“We
all have a shadow,” said the editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams in their
book Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power
of the Dark Side of Human Nature. “Or does our shadow have us? Carl Jung
turned this question into a riddle when he asked, ‘How do you find a lion that
has swallowed you?’ Because the shadow is by definition unconscious, it is not
always possible to know whether or not we are under the sway of some compelling
part of our shadow’s contents,” but I deliberately allowed my shadow to have
its way with me yesterday; that’s how I got to see the many faces of my depression.
It
wasn’t obvious at first because I simply did not have enough creative energy to
see it, what with shoveling top soil and letting my shadow have its way with
me; but for the life of me, I could not figure out why I was so damn exhausted.
The life force was being sucked out of me, and I had to make enormous efforts
of will to continue DOING.
It
was like I had come up against a solid wall of despair, and I felt so enervated
that I wanted to crash on the couch in front of the TV for the rest of the day,
but I didn’t. I had to solve the mystery of my depression, and I persisted; until
one by one the faces of my life-sucking little demons became apparent to me.
I was
sitting in the shade of our maple tree drinking an ice-cold bottle of water,
relaxing from spreading the last four wheelbarrows of soil, when in my mind’s
eye I saw an endless parade of all the unresolved issues of my life, each with
its own face and distinct identity—all of the responsibilities that I had failed
to live up to, own up to, or put off by supplanting them with more palatable responsibilities,
and all of my betrayals, self-betrayals and little deceits and selfish wants
and needs and wilful stupidities and humiliating buffooneries that I had repressed
to my unconscious; and as my little demons strutted their stuff on the stage of
my conscious mind I re-experienced all the guilt and reprehension that I felt
when I failed to do what in my heart I knew I should have done, and in a moment
of spontaneous insight I knew that my
unresolved shadow self was the cause of my depression; and my life force
stopped flowing into my demons and my depression began to disappear.
“Man’s
task,” said C. G. Jung in his memoir Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, “is to become conscious of the contents of his
unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain
identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny,
which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the
sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase
in our consciousness affects the unconscious” (MDR, p. 326).
Which
is why I love to write, because writing shines a light in the dark recesses of
my unconscious nature and keeps me honest. As I wrote in my first novel twelve
years ago, What Would I Say Today If I
Were to Die Tomorrow?—“Self-deception is our greatest threat to personal
growth, happiness, and wholeness,” because as long as we refuse to embrace our
own shadow we will always be subject to unexpected bouts of depression.
