Reflections on Depression

2009-10-05T15:00:00.001-07:00

There are the canons of existentialism and then there are the subjective experiences of each of us as individuals. I’m more interested in my subjective experience because it’s mine.

On the day before yesterday, I felt enthusiastic about my prospects in life, developing new plans such as taking the Brazilian Bar exam and thereby having access to work within my field, where I live. Although I might not succeed at working within the profession, (law is hard for the heartiest of people), I could take the Bar here simply because time will pass whether I do so or not. Why not accomplish something in that time?

By yesterday, I rode my bicycle along the streets of my adopted town and involuntarily remembered my saddest times here and elsewhere. I have learned that I have a right to decide simply not to think about these sad times, and I have learned that these sad thoughts sometimes follow me whether I decide to think about them or not.

There are some eight recent months which I have chosen simply to forget and pretend they did not occur at all. And yet, I recall dreams from when I was three or four years old, in which our house was full of snakes that slithered on the banister as I walked downstairs. I was afraid.

Memories are as real to me as my own breath, if not more present, because they are in my mind, rather than occurring autonomously in my chest. Sometimes these memories torment me, like a hale storm, with no available shelter. I know that is a symptom of depression, these persistent and undesirable memories. I admit that, at times, I have nursed them, cultured them, and collected them like the obsessive-compulsive collectors of old newspapers and magazines that crowd out all possibility of pleasure in the present.

And yet these memories are so compelling, they act as milestones in my development, no easier to forget than the passage over the Brooklyn Bridge, or to Block Island by ferry in a stiff winter wind and swollen sea.

I try to describe to my wife the interactions between my depressions; anxiety; the medications I take to relieve them; and the collateral effects of those medications. The antidepressant works well enough, but the anxiolytic makes me tired and listless. I am not fully awake until eleven in the morning or one o´clock in the afternoon.

Depression takes all joy from that which once was pleasurable. Antidepressants bring back the potential for joy, but anxiolytics have the unfortunate side effect of leaving me too weary to want to do anything at all. Or perhaps it is life itself that has left me weary.

Sometimes, I wonder if ending my own life will be the only way to end the subjective experience of my life as it is. Perhaps it is inevitable, like the death of a small insect caught in the sticky web of a much larger spider. I admit that self-help programs enabled me, eighteen to twenty four years ago, to modify my subjective experience and achieve objective accomplishments that I had never dreamed possible, like graduating from college magna cum laude, finishing law school, and being admitted to the state and federal bars.

And then I lost my mind, or more aptly I lost control of my mind in the same way that some people temporarily lose the ability to control their legs. I lost my mind and could not find it, and did not find it for ten years or so.

It is a terrible thing to lose one’s mind. Just imagine losing your only car keys, in the snow, on a lonely road in the mountains, where they are no tire tracks in the snow in front of your car and only your own tracks in the snow behind. As you look for your keys, which are somewhere within your reach if only you knew where they were, the snow continues falling and making those keys harder and harder to find. At some point, you despair of ever finding them again. Eventually, the snow will melt and the keys will sparkle with the light of spring among the dead leaves and detritus of winter. By then, however, you might be dead.

So, you set out through the woods, following only your vague sense that you must do something, while your tracks disappear behind you and the branches of the trees fill with snow. As your toes become numb from the cold and then frost-bitten, you fear that you will freeze to death.

Unfortunately, you will not die; because you are living in a metaphor whose ability to torture you is unbound by the normal measures of reality.

So, you try to look at the bright side: If you can find your way back to your car, you may discover your car keys among the millions of flakes of newly fallen snow.

Depression and Existentialism

Reflections on Depression