And Then It Got Better
A follow-up to And Then It Got Bad, a story about depression.
“The only thing standing between you and your goals is you.”
It was the middle of the night. I had only just woken up, when this thought popped into my head, like something you might hear from Tony Robbins. But it was voiced without sarcasm or loftiness. The thought came in and simply seated itself as fact.
I’d been having thoughts like this trickle in in increasing amount over the previous weeks. They would just show up, at random, disconnected from anything I had been consciously thinking about. Sometimes they would show up in the middle of the night, when insomnia would spring me wide awake at 4 a.m.
This thought was one of them. Nearly a week later, I woke up again in the middle of the night, like a light switch had been turned on.
“Perspective is a doorway.”
I didn’t know what the hell that meant, and I did my best to go back to sleep. After I woke up, the thought was still there.
“Perspective is a doorway.”
When things had been bad, my perspective had been severely limited. At one point, I could not even conceive of a concept like “universe” or “world” or even “reality outside of this room”. It’s not that I didn’t believe or understand that those things existed, I just couldn’t hold the idea in my mind. These are abstract concepts, that you probably never thought of as abstract concepts. But when the mind is injured, such constructions of complex ideas break down.
And then, things had turned around. As my health improved, my perspective widened. I could perceive that there was a city around me, full of people. The next day, I understood that there were countries with cities like this one. Some time later, the Earth popped into my head. Ah, of course, I thought, there’s an entire planet that we live on. Then, there was the universe. The idea of it had seemed perplexing the day before, and then it wasn’t.
If all of that sounds quite strange, I can assure you it was stranger to experience. So much of the mind’s ability to construct ideas we take for granted. It grants us a perspective on things we are not directly observing, and may have never directly observed. I didn’t understand that things that seem “obvious” could suddenly become not obvious, that one might have to work to even conceive of them.
But then I didn’t have to work at it. And then things became obvious again. Concepts that had, for a time, seemed terribly complex were astoundingly simple.
I had a newfound appreciation for my work as a programmer. Since programming had always been fairly easy for me, I didn’t fully understand how complex of an activity it was, until I witnessed how difficult it became, and how long it took for me to feel comfortable again in that activity.
The normalities of life began returning. My sleep improved. The fuzziness in my head began to lessen. Even my eyesight seemed to improve because, after all, it is the mind that sees.
Yet, as I “returned” to health, I also began to notice that I was arriving at a different place from where I had started. In the course of my experience, I had been plucking out pieces of what might have been contributing to depression in the first place: traumatic events over the course of my life, contributors of stress, unrealistic expectations of self, fear of failure, unprocessed emotion. As I did so, I began to connect my present self with my past self. I saw my past self as more directly related, in a way, to the present. I had not even known that I was not very connected with my past until I saw the devastating effect in the present of things I had experienced in the past.
And so, as my awareness of the present returned, and my connection to the past increased, I suddenly found myself connected more, as well, to my future self, and acting on his behalf. I did more things that seemed of little benefit to me in the present, but would be of greater benefit to my future self.
Should I do the dishes now, or later? Well, to do them now was trivial. But later, I might not have as much choice. I might be tired. I might need to do something else at the same time, and feel stressed to try to finish both. To not do them now was to inevitably damn my future self into not having as much choice.
You might think that such a shift that causes you to change at what point you wash a dish is trivial. I can tell you unequivocally that it is not. It abso-fucking-lutely is not trivial. Force your future self to deal with a dish once? Sure, that may be trivial. But what if you do that 1,000 times? Will your future self be forgiving? What if you do that 10,000 times? May you start to resent your past self, when you arrive at that point in time? May you start to resent you? May you begin to feel that you can’t trust yourself, that you make poor decisions? If you did this over a lifetime, made decisions in this way, would you even remember that you were making a choice at all? Or would you begin to assume that you were simply “this way”?
Might you begin to feel that change was not possible?
Might that make you depressed?
While I understand a little more now about the importance of these seeming-small shifts, at the time they just seemed like oddities. I was exhibiting behaviors that I didn’t really understand. As my mental health improved, I began to care about certain things or certain outcomes that I hadn’t before, but I didn’t know why.
At first, I thought maybe it was the drugs. At one point, Celexa had started to lose its effectiveness, and once I finally was able to see a psychiatrist, she recommended adding Wellbutrin as well, which we did.
I realized as I was writing that last sentence that it was time to talk about something else: the stigma of mental health.
You’ll find it uncommon for people to talk about taking anti-depressants, and its probably for the reaction it often produces. I remember when a friend of mind said something along the lines of: if I could heal some of the contributors of depression, I wouldn’t need anti-depressants, or could at least get off them sooner.
I didn’t say anything then, but something about that statement bugged me. I realized later that part of the reason was because it wasn’t really true. One had nothing to do with the other. Addressing the contributors of depression has nothing to do with treatment of depression, any more than taking preventative measures to avoid a car accident has anything to do with how you treat a car accident victim. Paramedics don’t arrive on scene, see someone who’s been thrown out of a car, and immediately take that person back to their car and put their seatbelt on.
Yes, it is important to learn from that experience to always wear your seatbelt, to prevent such things in the future. But, well, at the moment, that information is not really as relevant as trying not to bleed to death.
Secondly, why does it actually matter if I’m on anti-depressants, and why does it need to be the shortest time possible? This is where we run into the idea, especially in alternative medicine circles, that such drugs produce a kind of “unnatural alteration of self”. The person you know is sort of the same person, but of course they’re on drugs, so they’re not really their full selves, and won’t be until they’re finally off the drugs. So, it’s in your best interest to get off the drugs quickly, so that you don’t lose touch with your real self.
Frankly, that kind of stigmatizing is a pile of horse shit. No one believes that if you take a Tylenol, you are disrupting your natural state of being, which is Person With Headache™. No one believed that when I couldn’t see very well as a child that I should find a “natural” alternative to glasses, or that to improve my vision was a fundamental alteration of who I really was, and therefore not my true self. In fact, when I had my body permanently, surgically altered to change its shape, I encountered no stigma at all. After all, lots of people have LASIK surgery. What’s wrong with that?
Sure, it would be great if I eventually didn’t need anti-depressants—it was great when I didn’t have to wear glasses anymore—but it’s not my goal. My goal is to be healthy.
More importantly, I feel far more like myself now than I did just before I started on anti-depressants. I’m actually extremely grateful that such medical interventions exist, because I feel like these particular interventions returned access to myself, and all I know of myself and beyond.
Having said that, I understand more now why such stigma around depression (and other mental injuries) exists. If you’ve never experienced it, you’re probably going to connect it with the closest thing you have experienced, which is likely having a low mood. For me, depression had little to do with mood. Low mood was simply a common side effect.
What complicates this is that, because a low mood often accompanies depression, it’s commonplace to call a low mood “feeling depressed”. The confusion in how we talk about depression then becomes a natural consequence of language. Different people talk about depression (the illness) and depression (the mood), and many think they are talking about the same thing. It’s utterly confusing that one can have depression and not feel depressed, and one can feel depressed and not have depression. One is an ongoing condition of the brain that chronically produces a low mood, and one is that low mood itself (or something like it), which can sometimes appear one day and leave the next, as moods often do.
However, what is wonderfully more complicated (</sarcasm>) is that having a low mood for a prolonged time can contribute to the mental illness of depression.
Or to say that another way in our confusing Earth language of English: depression can lead to depression, which often causes depression.
So, is it any wonder that stigma around depression exists, when we don’t know what the hell we’re even talking about when we say the word? Inevitably, well-meaning friends, trying to offer helpful guidance, will talk about what helped them recover from depression (the mood) when they find out you are experiencing depression (the illness), not realizing that even though you are both using the same word, there is little common experience between you.
That’s why cartoons like this exist:
Or this:
Even friends who understood my experience and had gone through something very similar still sometimes contributed to the stigma. I was advised to not talk about this subject too much, lest it become something I became “known for”, something that had become problematic for them. I received messages that sometimes seemed like whispers, of people covertly sharing their story of what they had experienced.
Don’t get me wrong, I deeply appreciated those stories and I felt they had a right to their privacy, and I don’t begrudge people for trying to help protect me from being stigmatized.
And despite any misunderstandings friends might have had about depression, I know they were coming from a place of love. In fact, over the last few months, I’ve received so many messages of love from people that I haven’t even been able to thank all of them. So please don’t think that if you’ve never experienced a mental illness, you should say nothing to someone who is experiencing it. Yes, it’s possible you will say something dumb. (See above comics.) But when it’s increasingly difficult to grasp the concept of friendship, and find the perspective of the Other Side Of This Experience, those connections with people can be of tremendous help.
And then, one day, with the help of awesome drugs and the support of wonderful people, I saw the Other Side Of This Experience.
It’s hard to describe the gratitude I felt when I could gain the perspective of there being more than just today, of a string of experiences in a lifetime, of which this was only one. As my perspective widened, I could again see possibilities, and choices. As it widened more, I again saw hope. I saw dreams. I saw that there were things that I could achieve, and perhaps the only thing standing between me and my goals was me.
All of these things had always been there, but without a healthy perspective, for a time, they had not been accessible.
And then, a funny thing happened. My perspective had taken such a journey, in such a relatively short amount of time, that I began to see the entire trip it had made. And it became immediately obvious that were I to completely regain the totality of what I previously knew of as a perfectly healthy perspective, and a perfectly healthy mind, that it was perhaps half the distance of what I could travel, if not less.
In other words, I saw that there was something beyond healthy. It was possible for that perspective to continue to widen, and even more possibilities and opportunities and choices could become accessible. Andrew Solomon says that the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.
I don’t disagree, exactly, depending on what you’re measuring. I think that’s a very astute statement. Vitality makes one feel connected to the world, and as a result, to see much of what that world can bring you.
But, in moments when I’ve lay awake at 4 a.m., I’ve begun to think to myself: what if vitality is only the beginning?
Vitality is essential, yet only one piece. Despite our vitality, we still only take the paths we can see. We still make our world into what we can see of it. Our immediate world, then, changes with our perspective.
Depression narrows the world into a frighteningly tiny box, to such a degree that the possible actions one can take become equally, frighteningly limited. For some, the box shrinks so much that one cannot conceive of any action that can create change except death. I no longer believe that any depressed person wants to end their life, even if they end up doing so. No more than someone who cannot see a way to leave a job they hate “wants” to be in that job. Or that a woman who can’t see how to leave her abusive husband secretly wants to be abused. We act only according to what we can perceive as possible, and therefore, our perspective is everything.
Sometimes that action is small. Sometimes it’s as simple as the dish washed today instead of tomorrow. But when we can see a different way, a different way of being from where we’ve been, finding the ability to perform that one action can open to an entire path of like actions, and the cascade of those actions can lead to tremendous change.
And what starts us onto that path, what opens us to it in the first place, is our perspective.
Or, to put it another way:
Perspective is a doorway.
