7: The Many Faces of Depression

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.