10 Things About Being Not-Depressed Post-Depression

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For almost two years, this post has been sitting unrevisited and unrevised amongst the drafts of my blog. It's especially interesting to me now to rediscover it and read what it felt like to be no-longer-depressed right on the heels of depression, because I'm currently in a funny combination-state of health and grief and possibility, along with a sense of the changing season and anticipation for all that might mean.

In short, my point-of-view today is vastly different from my perspective while deep in depression but even a little different from when I wrote this list at the end of 2013. And that's why I'd like to share this. Not just to revisit it myself, but to preserve and make visible one more nuance of such an experience. Writers and artists have done well in recent years to show others what depression looks and feels like for them, and I think it's helpful to understand not just the moments during, but also in-between and before and afterward.

I'm revising the writing now for "publishable clarity," but I'm channeling my 2013 self to maintain the dignity and authenticity of the content as though I'm my own ghost writer.

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To quote Joni Mitchell, "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" (Big Yellow Taxi).

Living in the state of not-depressed is so unfathomably different after the experience of depression that I can't help but notice the contrast on a visceral level. At this point, I feel like I can identify what depression "was" for me better than I could ever identify what it "is" while still in the midst of it.

But I'd like to take this opportunity of clear-mindedness to describe 10 things I'm experiencing right now, at this stage of "shortly after" - this odd moment of vivid awareness and general wellness.

Of course, this is only my list of 10 things. This may or may not look anything like what others experience.

1. It will happen again.

-This is threefold: sort of fear/dread, sort of resignation, sort of identity crisis. Who am I with/without this illness? How much a part of me is it? When will it strike and what will it disrupt next? With all of these, there's an underlying sense of "when, not if" it will happen again.

-I'm also still trying to differentiate depression and grief and dark night of the soul. I know I've experienced all 3 within the past 3 years, often overlapping, but in some cases, how do I know what was which? What can I expect in the future?

2. Survivor's guilt.

-The ever-constant questions: Why me? Why did it recede for me and not for others?

-The guilt of healing is tightly entwined with the occasional disbelief that healing actually happened at all, or a disbelief that the experience was as damaging and painful as it felt at the time. Knowing the ways that other people suffer in depression, I sometimes look back and minimize my own suffering by thinking things like, "it 'only' compromised my academic career and social life." I know I should know better - that it's possible for it to have been both debilitating for me and different from others' experiences.

3. Control and lack of control.

-I feel mostly grounded and steady again. And yet, despite my consistent efforts toward health and healing, the improvement seems almost as incomprehensible as the depression itself. How did this happen? Why have I reached this point without using any drugs or medications? What ultimately made the difference, or was it just another change in the seasons of life? Will I ever know?

4. Breadth and depth of perspective.

-Despite the survivor's guilt, I have a relatively realistic and holistic perspective on the past. Except in my moments of doubt, I grasp the reality of the pain that I experienced and the kinds of things that happened in the midst of it - grief, shattered world views, injured pride/self-esteem, community transition and communal suffering. All of it makes sense in a way that defies even those doubts and feelings of irrationality which still linger.

5. Awareness of joy.

-Like painting with a full palette of emotion and sensation. Like the world is in color and motion, and I can actually tell. And it's not that I'm suddenly confined to happiness. Having the full range of emotions is liberating, and getting lost in any one emotion at a time does not feel particularly defining of who I am.

-I also now understand that, mid-dark night of the soul, I was still able to experience non-sunshiny forms of joy even if I wasn't always attuned to them or didn't know how to create them myself, so it was not necessarily an absence of joy as it was a matter of redefining and contextualizing it. Hence the "awareness."

6. Appetite and nostalgia.

-I have not only an interest in food again, but even sentimentality for favorites and specifically for nostalgic meals, like a pub's beef stew that made me homesick for the UK. Rarely could I experience any of that while depressed. It makes me look back and wonder, what was I eating? Was I eating? I don't even know.

7. Reading comprehension and memory.

-Words on the page actually register. I'm still a (lifelong) slow reader who doesn't always skim well, especially when I get invested in something... but I can actually get invested in something I read now. And remember it!

-Even if I don't remember all the details, I can generally recall how and where to access information I've recently seen. My work no longer feels like a literal impossibility.

8. Coherence in conversation and writing.

-Even audible words have recognizable meaning in a way that they didn't before, like my vocabulary has been restored. I can comprehend what other people say, express myself, and participate in actual conversation.

-I have a willingness to ask questions again. I didn't realize how much I'd missed it, how much a part of me and my learning style this usually is.

9. Creative arts and hobbies.

-Just recently I've played piano, painted, finished a novel-length draft and several short stories, and composed my first full song with lyrics and music. Mediocre quality as all of these projects may be, I don't even care. It just feels good to create. I had been doing some writing and piano-dabbling during the depression, but not to this extent, and those things were more of a lifeline than a joy.

10. Unconditional love.

-I'm experiencing boundless love and mercy for others' imperfections as well as my own. Right now no one can disappoint me, and I'm slow to see fault where there may only be a matter of unpredictability or circumstance. I want to hear all sides to everything, or even just be present to people when they can't articulate their experience. Obviously I'm in school for ministry, so I've always wanted to do both of these things, but now they have a new urgency and depth to them.

Loving Bodies

Yes. it is beautiful. But not exclusively important,
and that's what took me a regrettably long time to learn.

It has long been an interest of both feminism and religious groups to foster an understanding of human worth that's not just skin-deep.

As a 20th-21st century woman, I consistently learned from guardians, mentors, and no small amount of media (or counter-media) that I should find a mate who would love me not only for my body but also for my mind.

This, I think, has been a good thing. But even good things have their limits.

Part of me may have always known this, but I really began to think about such standards for love in earnest a few years ago when my grandfather was dying.

He had Parkinson's disease, and by the last years of his life the capabilities of both his body and his mind were irreparably diminished. He was a strong, smart man who eventually could not recognize his loved ones or find his way home or feed himself.

It was not a love for his mind (what it was then or what it once had been) that made my grandmother and the rest of my family continue to care for him until his final moments.

This tangible caring may have stemmed from emotional connection, but they understood what we understand when we care deeply for any human being. They tended to him and gave him every dignity they could. Not just because he had done the same for his parents and children, or because he was once a hardworking and self-sufficient intellectual. They did it because they knew and loved a human being, regardless of circumstance.

When I experienced grief and depression around that same time, my partner and friends and family loved me not because they were in love with my mind (as it was then or what it once had been), but because they loved me, the whole me, no matter what changes I faced, and they were determined to show me that as best as they could.

(Circumstances never define the human being we love, just the ways in which we might show love to them.)

And that's when I knew how beautiful it could be to love a body.

So I'm not willing to let measures of beauty - even ostensibly honorable measures like in the image above - strip me of any amount of my humanity. And I'm not willing to privilege emotional love and mental love so consistently over physical love, whether that physicality is sex, or snuggling, or caring for someone when they're ill, or massaging someone's aches and pains.

For those who know that I'm demisexual, someone whose attractions depend almost solely on an emotional connection, this anti-hierarchy of love may come as a surprise. But the commitment to owning our own reality and affirming others' realities, whatever they may be, is marvelously compatible with seeing oneself or someone else as a whole person. In fact, many of us on the asexual spectrum appreciate physical acts of love as part of our own everyday reality, and our personal values will vary as much as in any other group.

For those for whom this is not a matter of innate preferences but of spiritual edification, consider what "loving bodies" looks like at its best in your religion. For Christians, even traditional marriage vows have included "to have and to hold" and "in sickness and in health," and remember how consistently that incarnate Jesus fed bodies, washed bodies, healed bodies. If we disembody our partners and our communities, we risk losing significant portions of what it means to be people of faith in relationship.

I'd like to challenge anyone wrestling with the merits of physical love to take note of it when you see it over the next few days. It could well be platonic or familial or neighborly, but notice some tangible interaction of profound caring between two or more fleshy humans. Notice how some acts are inextricably interwoven with mind and emotion, and how some are the embodiment of love in their own right.

Will you love some-body?

An Open Letter to My Classmates in Prison

A letter written to the inside students in a course that I'm taking as part of my Master's degree. The course emphasizes that students from Drew and those within the Correctional Facility are all classmates, studying together. It is not traditional "prison ministry" but in fact a partnership.

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Dear Inside Students,

I am an Outside Student who may never know what it is to be an Inside Student, or even what it is to be on the inside. Studying in a prison setting is a new experience for me, and I admit that it was just a little bit easier to do it because I was going in the company of friends I already knew and faculty I already trusted.

Maybe you didn't know anybody when you first went in. I imagine it might have been difficult not only to be sentenced but also to be sent somewhere without a familiar face, especially the kind of loved one who knows who you are so well that they can remind you from time to time when you're down and out. For better or for worse, my identity is wrapped up in the relationships I have, the jobs I do, the clothing I wear to portray a certain image of myself—professional or casual or colorful or quiet. So much about these parts of your life might have changed when you got to the premises—old relationships reshaped by new circumstances, new relationships forged, new jobs assigned, personal fashion minimized. Individual identity as we know it in the contemporary western world is difficult to express under such limited parameters. This, at least, is my understanding so far, though I would rather hear your experience from your perspective, and I hope to do so over the next few months.

It's just that, as you began to talk about some of these things, even as briefly as we spoke before we moved on to discuss our actual course material for the term—music's role and expression in different world religions—I began to realize just how much certain elements of your current experience remind me, in some way, of my own. With that, I began to realize how much you could teach me and nurture me in even a few short hours. And lest you think I'm just getting sappy and waxing poetic here, let's just say the potency of the whole thing knocked me on my ass. So that's why I'm writing this. Because, sooner or later, potential energy turns kinetic. Sometimes.

You see, I had never been to prison before this week, but I've been locked up for about five years now.

The officials who give names to such things call my prison grounds Depression. I and others here have known it to be Hell.

Maybe you are locked up here, too. Maybe you know many prisons. As far as I can tell, knowing one is one too many.

Whatever built the walls around you, I can't possibly imagine that I know what you are experiencing. No two prisons are the same, nor are two people's dealings with depression. Incarceration and depression are not the same. But they share common ground. I think you and I may share common ground.

I may have shown signs of anxiety and depression in childhood, but I was what The Powers That Be consider high-functioning in most aspects—yes, I was (am) awkward and content to spend inordinate amounts of time alone, reading or writing or messing around with art supplies to no remarkable end except personal relaxation. But I had some extraordinary friends and high marks in school and a surprisingly positive attitude, which all mostly outweighed the low self-confidence and the phobias and the panic. So maybe that's why the first major lockdown five years ago still took me by utter surprise.

Since then, I was paroled a few times—had brighter days, months, seasons here and there. For a little while I thought I'd even gotten out for good. But somehow I keep finding myself in Depression. It's not always exactly the same as before; the way that the pain and the exhaustion and the loneliness manifest changes a little every time, I learn a new lesson now and then, and what exactly I am able to accomplish while in the thick of it varies, but it's just a different circle of Hell. It's just a different cell on the same old block.

It's a place where sometimes it doesn't even matter that I have relationships and work and clothing to identify myself; because my relationships become strained with heightened conflict or in my isolation, my work suffers in the midst of mutism and fatigue, and dressing myself becomes either a mindless ritual or a burden. These are just outward signs of the inward loss of identity, an inner hopelessness in the realization that I am not me, or at least I suspect that I am not me but I'm having trouble remembering who I was in the first place.

Even worse, I begin to wonder, what if? What if this is me now? What if I am stuck with this me for the rest of my life? What if signs of healing and hope aren't even real, like a mirage in desert heat? What if I'm only healing because I'm too scared of being broken, and in my haste, I'll put the pieces back together wrong?

Maybe I don't need to worry too much about being hasty. These days I am undergoing some sort of really long, drawn-out parole process. One step forward, two steps back, and a splurge of two steps forward when even I don't expect it—makes it hard to replicate it when I want to. I am not quite in but I am not quite out, either. I still haven't figured out how to earn my way out, how to prove myself worthy of freedom. It seems kind of arbitrary, if you ask me.

I imagine it may take longer than usual, because this last bout really threw me for a loop. I've never been so thoroughly stripped of what I thought made me who I am. I've never been so voiceless and vulnerable. I've never had so little concentration and common sense—utterly unable to retain information, picking up a hot baking pan with my bare hand, falling asleep and boiling off a whole pot of water, forgetting things and forgetting that I've forgotten things. I've never failed so damn perfectly to care for myself with the most basic tasks or to complete the coursework that I've had my heart set on doing ever since I discerned a call to ministry, a call which thus far refuses to go away in spite of my inabilities and failures. And I've never felt so scared of the next time I'm going to end up here; scared that someday I won't make it out.

When I first sought help, a school administrator asked me to paint a verbal image of what I was facing. It was no easy task since so much of my depression was and often still is a sort of mutism, a struggle for words.

One of us, whoever it was, eventually described the proverbial pit. In the midst of this metaphor, she talked about how hard it can be to climb the ladder and get out.

I looked at her in genuine awe, because the part of my brain that was visualizing the pit suddenly short-circuited: "There's a ladder?"

Not in my pit! At least, I didn't see one there, even while actively seeking help. I knew I needed to start talking to people about what was going on, but I still didn't see the way out.

I guess I wonder if no amount or type of treatment is going to get me entirely out of Depression. And even if I do get out, I'm always going to carry around this record. It's going to make people look at me differently. It's going to make it easier for some people to know and trust me, but it's going to make it harder for others. The more I try to bury it, the more persistently it will sow doubts in me about what I'm capable of doing and whether or not other people love the real me. The more openly I speak of it, the more authentic I will feel; but the more authentic I feel in that, the clearer it will become that this struggling, fragmented person is in fact who I am.

Before we left for the correctional facility to meet you, we heard from a former inside student who said she eventually realized: "I wasn't who people in Blue said I was. It was a bump in the road that didn't define who I am or could be." She said that we outside students would be gift-bearers, bringing hope; bringing your minds outside of the wall—to our everyday world, to the worlds of the texts we read and the music we hear. She said it's easy for a person's mind to become trapped along with her body and to become immersed in despair and loneliness and uncertainty because of where she is.

What you may not realize is that I am in the opposite situation: my state of mind easily incapacitates my body, and I don't know how long I will live in this situation. I do know that partnering with you in this course that has everything and nothing to do with liberation—this foray into the music of the world's religions—is already helping to liberate me in some small way. That's because this program challenges the very definition of liberation.

In my case, my mind is locked up, and coming to see you and work alongside you means that my body is not imprisoned by the state of my mind.

It means that I have something meaningful to go and do; bright, friendly people to speak to and listen to, even when my inner consciousness tries to persuade me to shut down and shut people out.

It means that I will spend a few hours of the week with people who value freedom as much as I have come to.

It means that even my mind will be freed in a way I may not have known was possible; learning your insights and seeing the world anew through your lens, just as the outside students share our ideas and perspectives with you.

You may want the freedom of stepping off the premises more than anything else. Maybe a freed mind, as our orientation speaker called it, is just one small freedom you willingly accept for now. I want to step out of the grounds of Depression and free my mind as much as I want my next breath. But if it turns out that I reside here all my life, or if it follows me out the door like any complicated past that one would rather leave behind, it does not need to mean that I am lost to it.

That is what I have learned from you already. And I have learned that we are not so different, you and I, in at least this much: We are not who they say we are. And if someone has convinced us otherwise, then we must help each other to remember who we are and imagine who we will be.

See you in class,
The Outside Student Inside Different Walls

The Garden: A Revelation

When Hilary Rhodes of Woman at the Well sent me the post she wrote for this blog based on one of mine, her theological and historical exploration originally culminated in a beautiful personal testimony, which I loved even more than the insightful analysis of grace. I told Hilary that these parts' length and content (related, yet quite different) suggested to me that they should indeed be two separate pieces, so what you've seen this week is that first portion.

Because the second part is so personally meaningful, Hilary would like to make WATW its home, and I agree. It moved me, though, and so I'd like to make a point of recommending it to you and directing you over to WATW to read the full text. It's a descriptive piece about a spiritual vision she experienced; a story of depression and consolation, fear and grace.

Hilary and I differ in much of how and where we were raised and the theological and political landscapes around us. We have walked individual and intersecting paths. But I feel a sense of camaraderie in both her writing voice (particularly in her more personal writings) and in many of the issues she confronts. The blend of ideological differences and similarities between us, in fact, serves to remind me how simultaneously unique and intricately connected the parts of the Body of Christ truly are.

And so it is my pleasure to introduce to you Hilary's visionary tale:

I can’t tell you the moment I lost my faith. Sometime when I was about 14, when I was old enough to understand how shallow and fear-based and resistant to questions and dismissive of real need my experience of it had hereunto been. This was followed with six years of becoming an increasingly angry atheist. I can, however, tell you – almost to the hour – the moment I found it again:

The night of Thursday, September 6, 2008.

It was two months before one of the most heated presidential elections in history. I’d just come off a tearingly difficult, lonely, and isolated sophomore year of college, where I’d battled depression so severe that if I didn’t have anything to do, I’d stay in bed until 3 PM with the shades shut. I was saved by a deep friendship with an absolutely wonderful guy in my psychology class. (Matt, shout-out time.) But I’d been struggling over the summer again, and although I was about to take off to Oxford University and fulfill one of my longtime dreams, I was faced with a dialogue that was (especially on the right wing) about nothing but fear and despair. About the “destruction of America.” About this scary dark-skinned guy with the scary “Muslim” name. About how there might not be time for me, and my future family and children and grandchildren.

I was lying in bed in the darkness, crying. Just so scared. So scared. I was screaming in my soul. I was in agony. I couldn’t even breathe.

I couldn’t do it alone. I just couldn’t. It was too big for me. It was too much. It was beyond my ability to bear. And so I did the only thing I could:

I asked for help.

I listened to it echo in the walls. I watched headlights pass on the ceiling.

I eventually subsided into a troubled sleep.

And that night, the Word came back.

This is what I remember...

Read more.

The War of Art

Before one of the last races of the Christ Church regatta (fall 2008), our team warmed up, rowing south along the Isis toward the starting line.

My legs became stiff, locked, almost physically unable to move. Part of me, a very athletically- and physiologically-ignorant part, worried that I had overdone it and that if I continued I could do some sort of irreparable damage. It seems silly to say it, but the fear was real enough. I finally confessed to the captain, who cycled along the shore to cheer us on and, when necessary, communicate with the marshalls on our behalf.

She told me to work through it, to use it, and I did. I put more force into my legs than ever, driving hard through the water if just to spite them. Each time I have trouble writing or working or doing anything, I remember that moment, that triumph - not just the victory, but the fight for it.

During that same year my writing prof realized that my creative energy was beginning to dwindle. I think if one day we ever meet again and decide to play Pictionary or Charades, I want her to be on my team:

"This" - she said; I don't even remember what nondescript noun she called it - "is it light or heavy?"

Stuck. Honestly had no idea. Whatever it was, it felt like nothingness to me. Is nothingness light or heavy?

"To me it feels like the heaviest thing," she said so earnestly, almost forlornly, gazing out the window of her study to the vast meadows across the street. And so the questions continued. "What does it smell like? Does it have a taste?" I didn't know. I must have conjured up something unappetizing to satiate her curiosity. "Give it a name," she said finally.

I felt my skin flush. I eyed the door. I remembered the feeling of being cornered and remembered I didn't really like it.

"A name!" she said. "Give it a name, like..." [Here insert a nonsensical name for a fictional character in the 2088 Novel of the Year, or the name of your favorite circus troupe's star clown. Either one.]

I sputtered uncertainly, "Stan?"

"Stan! Good. What does he look like?"

Perhaps it was only colored by my own discomfiture, but this interaction was nearing bizarre, and I was not responding all that creatively. I summed up what I called the Archetypal Emo Guy, upon her confusion as to what that actually meant. And then for specificity's sake I doodled him, pretty black tresses hiding his little eyes and all.

Apparently the purpose of all this was to give me something to work against. I wonder if fiction requires an extent of friction, both inside (the story itself) and out. Conflict, driving force, motivation. So my perpetual task from the prof throughout the year was this: to fight Stan. It was like playing a video game with my own badly conceived villain, made slightly better with my own shuffled music collection for a soundtrack.

But she had quite a point. Naming it - even naming it Stan (or Juggernaut... but more on that tomorrow) - that's the first step.

I fought Stan. I fought him hard, but never entirely defeated him. Stan fancied himself a stowaway and traveled home with me. He has since popped his hairy little head in now and then, and I'm devoting the first year of grad school to squishing him between my frenetically-typing fingers.

When I was about six, I drew a picture of Superman flexing his graphite biceps and captioned it with a phrase that had caught my eye: "What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger." My mother kept it on her bulletin board, and I think seeing it there made an impression on me. It wasn't just a display of her kid's art. It was a statement of conviction. It was a battle cry. It earned a notable place in her own work area, her own Stress Central.

So cue the music. Something to play while Superman kicks Stan's butt.



Or something like that.

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Battling your own creative blocks? Fighting resistance? Be it in writing, art, business, sport, or anything at all, I wholeheartedly recommend the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Check it out at StevenPressfield.com or find it on Amazon.