PopcornJackTerry

Eight years ago I wrote a paragraph that I have kept with me all these years. I think about it from time to time, and go back to read it every so often. Yesterday, after hearing about Robin Williams, I went back and read it again. It’s about depression, and the moment I finally understood that depression wasn’t just a mood, a bad day that could be shrugged off, but something chronic that had to be confronted, treated, dealt with. I was going to include it with this blog, but when I went back to copy it, I found something else I wrote almost as long ago that struck me as even more, for lack of a better word, appropriate:

Confronting sobriety is like trying to find the specific sunlight of a late afternoon in October as the sun falls behind the buildings and colors the street just so.  But it isn’t just any street, and it isn’t just any time.  It is a street in Greenwich Village, north of Washington Square park, one of the streets running between fifth and sixth avenue.  It is the time where lights are just becoming necessary inside the houses so as to read the day’s news, or to prepare the evening’s meal, but there is still the brilliance of the setting sun coloring everything red.  This time is never to be again.  This time happened only once, I’m sure, perhaps twice, but not likely.  It happened just the one time that I was there for it, and it burned its way into my memory, and it can never be found again anywhere but there, as a memory of a lost time, something that no longer exists.  This is the sobriety, the longing for the moment that is gone.  To be spoken of in wistful tones, reminiscing of what used to be.  “I remember a time when the sunset was so beautiful I knew it would never be like that again, even though I hoped it always would.” is the safe way to think about the ugly truth of failure.  “I remember a time when I could drink, and not have it controlling my life, when it was only a part of who I was and not the trait which most defines me, when I could enjoy it and still be the most powerful force I had ever known.”  It is no more than the changing of the guard, the aging of the man as one world slips away to reveal the next.  Just as we let slip from our fingers the toys of our youth when we have outgrown them, so too shall this be shed as the next phase of my life begins.  It is only the haunting of the future that makes me long to hold on to the past.  I fear nothing greater than I do my own mortality, and I try so very hard to avoid it, it’s perpetual movement towards me, so I long to hold onto those items and ideas that should have long ago fallen to the way side.  “If I do not grow up,” I rationalize to myself, “I will not grow old.  If I do not grow old, I will not die.  Therefore, I must not surrender those totems from my youth, but rather wear them as talismans to keep death away.”  The desiderata tells us to take kindly the council of the years by gracefully surrendering the things of youth, but I have not learned this grace.  I cling to them, misguided in my belief that they are my saviors, even though I know deep in my heart that I will not be saved until I learn not to fear.  I can not grow until I know that at some point I will die.  In trying not to die, I am not living.

With both of these being written eight years ago, you can get a sense of how long both depression and my dependence on alcohol has been a concern for me, and it also shows just how strongly I fought in the shadow of denial to pretend that everything was all right. like the chicken and the egg, part of me wishes I knew what came first, if only for my own curiosity. In the end it doesn’t matter. They’re both here now and the three of us have come to an uneasy alliance as I try to move forward.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, the best way I can describe what depression feels like is that there is a quota of it, that everyday or every week I’m going to feel a certain amount of it. This means that if I have a good day or two, where it drifts into the background and I’m not thinking about it or feeling it drag me down, I will inevitably have a period where it doubles up on me, where it weighs much heavier than it normally does, where it clouds my judgements and perceptions. These are the moments where hope seems lost, where everything appears to be futile, where the dark answers are the ones that seem to make the most sense.

I know what it is like to raise a garden, that is full of beautiful flowers everyone compliments you on and yet all you can see is the few random ones that have died. I know what it feels like to not be able to accept your successes, to know enjoy the fruits of labor, but instead to focus on your shortcomings, to obsess over what you should be doing better, all the time ironically knowing that even if you do it better the next time, you will still manage to find your faults. And if somebody can achieve the kind of professional success, the worldwide love and adoration that he did and still lose the battle, I find myself thinking what chance to I have?

The same chances as everybody else.

I am lousy at taking a compliment, and learning to do that is possibly one of the most important steps of what I’m going through. People congratulate me on what I’m doing, the steps I’m taking to right my ship, mend my sails and find new seas, and my first reaction is to think “If I was really smart I never would have gotten myself in this position in the first place.” I have always believed that I could “think” myself out of any situation, and depression is no different. My ceaseless refrain to my therapists have been “I can understand the reality of a situation, but I can’t make myself believe it.” In other words I can think it, but I can’t feel it.

So now I try and take the time to listen to people when they tell me that, and I try not to feel like there is a judgement behind it. In that sense my chances are better than most, because of the number of friends and family members who believe in me. As I learn to really listen to them, slowly, with the clear-headedness I am living with and the therapy and medication I am taking, hopefully the sheer weight of their words will take up residence within me, crowding out the shadows and replacing it with light.

Sometime this past January, right before I discovered the unholy combination of Effexor and copious amounts of alcohol as a surefire way to build an out of control freight train to send my life careening off the rails, I stumbled across “Dead Poets Society” right as it was starting. I remember telling my therapist later that week that I should watch that movie at least once a month to remind myself of how I used to live, how I should live. Ultimately if I did at the time I’m not sure how effective it would have been, living as I was. And now I am brought back to the movie for all the wrong reasons.

Robin Williams seized the day. He changed the industry, he raised millions for charity, he won awards, he entertained the world. He lived a life of envy. He was a modern day Richard Cory, a man that so many looked up to and wished they had his life. And, like Richard Cory, he couldn’t see the glory of what he had, he couldn’t enjoy the life he had, he couldn’t quiet his demons, and finally, one day, he listened to them a little too closely.

There but for the grace of God…

Today’s sound track is more than just something to listen to. It is something to watch. And it isn’t Robin Williams, although I was thinking of him a couple of weeks ago and his riff on cocaine and golf, thanks to the suspension of Dustin Johnson. It is a little something about not knowing what goes on inside people’s eyes, how we won’t get to know people unless we try, unless we make an effort, and how we are only reminded that it is getting late when it has already become too late. Click here to watch.