Hello. My name is John, and I am a sufferer...
...just like everyone else.
In some way, suffering nips at each of us, whether it takes incessant, gnawing insect bites or huge, meaty chunks. No one escapes--we all have the -itis. Knowing this, our reaction to whatever ails us becomes the only thing we can control. And perhaps that's where my experience in 2015 can help you.
Let's start at the start. January. I placed a call to my parents for my father's birthday.
Now, a little background. My mother, at this point, had been ill for more than a year, but it seemed an illness more inconvenient than life-threatening--she complained and struggled to get around, but the doctors found nothing wrong, so there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel. She just didn't display any desire to take care of herself (or to get better), and she had reached a point where she ceased taking any apparent joy from anything. Being an only child with a young daughter (and another soon to arrive, at this juncture), it was beyond frustrating. Of course, living 500 miles away from my parents and functioning as the sole breadwinner for my nuclear family made it impossible to spend enough time with them to help. Instead, I reluctantly left everything to my father, confiding my deepest concerns to him and him alone. He worked his 60-80 hour work weeks, then cared for my mother with every other waking moment. At least, that's how I imagined it. And that's probably how it was. But I digress.
Back to the phone call. When I called, Mom sounded the worst I had ever heard her. Sounded like she'd be dead in a week. Just this unfathomable frailty in her voice. As always, I mentioned my worries to Dad. As always, I made some suggestions, and asked what he needed me to do. As always, I came away thinking I didn't do nearly enough.
He just said he'd let me know, his usual response. A week later, he called to say she'd been rushed to the hospital. I cut out of work and raced there as fast as I could, dragging my pregnant wife, our two-year-old, and our cat along with me on a nighttime trek across the 500-mile divide. Aside from the cat, no one complained too much, to their infinite credit.
Once we arrived, the wait began. I never heard my mother's voice again, but her shell lived on for another week, hooked up to all manner of machines. It was an easy decision when the time came to take them away.
Of course, her body fought on. The dying took days. When I got the call that it was done, I was watching an episode of Daniel Tiger with my daughter. I clutched her to me with sudden, grief-stricken strength, shaking both of us with a fit of sobs as she shrieked and struggled to get away. Afterward, I felt awful for scaring her in that moment, but I'll always be thankful she was there when I needed someone to hold.
My mother, gone at 61. Ten in the morning on Valentine's Day.
The parade of friends and family was a welcome distraction from what came next, but it was all finished in a week-long blur of ceremony and signatures. By the time I returned to work 3 weeks later, I felt like I needed a year off. And worse, I didn't give the faintest whiff of a shit about anything that I was supposed to do.
Of course this was all part of the normal grieving process, right, Dr. Kubler-Ross? But that didn't make it any easier.
March and April devolved into a war between the allied forces of Responsibility and Guilt and my mounting legions of Disdain. Frankly I barely remember any of it, besides my pervasive sadness and a suffocating irritability with all things normal. I did what I had to do at work, and I barely talked to anyone. Seeking help was the last thing on my mind. I'd say Disdain waged a pretty potent campaign until May rolled around.
Mid-month we welcomed another baby daughter, and I took another 3 weeks off of work. Almost exactly 3 months after my mother passed. I suppose the parallels could be construed as significant, if you put stock in that sort of thing. I don't. I do love that girl, though. She was born without consequence, and for the 3 weeks I stayed home, I felt almost happy. At the very least, I was distracted. A pleasant respite, but terribly finite. Just as the fog began to clear, our helpful visitors departed, and I returned to the grind.
If anything, my give-a-shit-o-meter dipped even lower the moment I sat back down at my desk. But it hadn't quite bottomed out yet. In the coming weeks, I found the floor--in textbook griever fashion, I became viciously intolerant of everyone else's petty work-related concerns. I wanted people to stop treating me as if everything was normal. As if I could be normal. I wanted to be left alone, but somehow I also craved their pity.
Thankfully, summer was a bit slow, and I spent most of my private time on long walks humming sad songs, or on the internet doing deep delves into arcane sports statistics related to the sudden and meteoric rise of Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors. A rise that culminated in a championship, and one I enjoyed immensely, but not as much as I should have.
Curry is by far my favorite basketball player, but my mother was the real fan, and as much as I loved seeing him win an NBA MVP and a ring, I felt her loss more keenly because of how much I missed sharing the victory with her.
The months trundled on into the deep summer, and I learned that my father was in the early stages of exploring a new relationship. At face value, I suppose I found it a good thing, but of course it ate at the recesses of my feelings for Mom. Around the same time, I was asked to go to a wedding. I chose to wear the same suit I wore to my mother's funeral.
In my defense, it was my only suit that really fit. Still, not my sharpest decision. With all the restraint of a peer-pressured teen on a dare, I gave into the culmination of emotion and drink in such a way that I found myself rolling around on the sidewalk at 1 AM flanked by a fleet of flashing sirens, having fallen out of the taxi I took home. Nothing bad came of it, except the broken hand I failed to notice until I woke up.
In a year full of tough breaks, this one was by far the most punitive, but the one for which I maintain the most gratitude, because it could have been so much worse. Despite having a displaced fracture, it barely hurt, and only needed 3 weeks in a splint/cast and another week or two after that to feel fully healed. Somehow my hand returned to full strength and felt pain free merely a month after the injury. Of course, the recovery did come complete with a massive calcium deposit. In that way, the experience was almost a microcosm of the year at large, in that every bit of damage done was quickly mirrored--but not perfectly repaired--by an equally powerful blessing.
Still, I had never broken a bone, and with my hand came a broken dam of feelings I'd been trying to sort out and compartmentalize behind the veil. Guilt. Shame. Self-loathing.
I called myself weak. Irresponsible. A bad father. A bad son. I felt my own hate crash into me, and I assigned labels and limitations to myself wherever I felt like they fit. Flawed. Pessimistic. Gloomy. Lazy. Misanthropic. Pitiable. Pathetic. Irrelevant. Worthless.
Amusingly, as I look back on it now, the one thing I never considered was the one thing I actually was: Depressed.
Outwardly, my injury (and relatively quick recovery) consumed me. I rarely talked about anything else, and the main reason was that I really couldn't see anything else positive in my life at the moment, besides the fact that, well, at least my hand wasn't permanently damaged by my idiocy. I have a wonderful wife and two amazing daughters, but in the wake of everything, I didn't truly see them. I felt the burden of responsibility to them, and that enabled me to keep functioning, but any emotion I brought to the table felt phony. Perhaps even dead.
I didn't realize this until much later, but at some point before I got hurt, I had stopped processing my emotions. I had managed a sort of functional stalemate; my heart had made a deal with my head. "I'll keep quiet while you go through the motions," it said. "I'll wait until you're all by yourself before I render you senseless and make that face leak."
For awhile, that worked well enough to feel like the new normal. The trouble was, my mental state went completely ass-up after the broken hand, long after I ceased working through my grief. It was not until months later, in the fall, that my wife made a comment that helped me realize what a stranger I had become.
It was a simple statement, almost a throwaway--so seemingly inconsequential I don't even remember the exact words. The essence, though, was "Your depression is not you."
The brilliant gift she gave me with that comment was this: I no longer had to feel like a jerk for being so insufferably negative. I had BEEN an asshole, yes. But not because I WAS an asshole.
This new understanding simplified the dreadful fight I had unknowingly waged with my own mind for months. Instead of hating myself for all my nihilistic behavior, I suddenly had a new target. I had no way to purge myself from myself, aside from the unthinkable. But I could beat the shit out of depression.
You know basically every martial arts movie where the angry giant gets sand in his eyes and is subsequently beaten half-to-death by the tiny hero with a bunch of fancy kicks? Well, one, that really just isn't going to happen in real life without a pretty substantial equipment advantage (swords, grenades, attack drones, etc). Two, being able to visualize depression attacking me felt exactly like that, except I was the blinded giant. And suddenly I could see.
Now, I certainly wasn't able to work through this foe overnight, and in some ways I still wrestle with it in lingering ways. But for the most part, being able to slap a target on it and call it my enemy enabled me to throw mental punches almost every time it reared its monstrous head.
Now that we've tolled the final bell for 2015, I would like to think I've learned something. For the most part, I hated last year. And I will continue to hate my depression well after its insidious tentacles have loosened their grip. But I will vigilantly guard against the temptation to hate myself (thereby allowing all my worst traits to transform me into some kind of Captain Planet/Voltron-esque Super Douche), and try to employ the same mentality my younger self used while playing football--it's not whether you get knocked down, or how hard you get hit, but how long you stay down that matters. Pretty much just like Rocky says. Because the longer you stay down and let that depression prey on you--the longer you live in a state of, let's call it, patheticism--the worse it gets for you and everyone around you.
What I hope to add to this space as time rolls inexorably forward may not pertain to you, and it may not be helpful to anyone, but hell, I'll put it down for posterity anyway. It will be about the struggles evident in daily life; difficulties both petty and weighty, and ideally, I'll share how I dealt with them, ignored them, or otherwise put them to bed. At the very least, I'll write about how it feels to suffer them.
I hope you found this worth your time. Even if you didn't, maybe it helped at least one person escape patheticism.
Either way, we're on to 2016. Happy New Year!
...just like everyone else.
In some way, suffering nips at each of us, whether it takes incessant, gnawing insect bites or huge, meaty chunks. No one escapes--we all have the -itis. Knowing this, our reaction to whatever ails us becomes the only thing we can control. And perhaps that's where my experience in 2015 can help you.
Let's start at the start. January. I placed a call to my parents for my father's birthday.
Now, a little background. My mother, at this point, had been ill for more than a year, but it seemed an illness more inconvenient than life-threatening--she complained and struggled to get around, but the doctors found nothing wrong, so there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel. She just didn't display any desire to take care of herself (or to get better), and she had reached a point where she ceased taking any apparent joy from anything. Being an only child with a young daughter (and another soon to arrive, at this juncture), it was beyond frustrating. Of course, living 500 miles away from my parents and functioning as the sole breadwinner for my nuclear family made it impossible to spend enough time with them to help. Instead, I reluctantly left everything to my father, confiding my deepest concerns to him and him alone. He worked his 60-80 hour work weeks, then cared for my mother with every other waking moment. At least, that's how I imagined it. And that's probably how it was. But I digress.
Back to the phone call. When I called, Mom sounded the worst I had ever heard her. Sounded like she'd be dead in a week. Just this unfathomable frailty in her voice. As always, I mentioned my worries to Dad. As always, I made some suggestions, and asked what he needed me to do. As always, I came away thinking I didn't do nearly enough.
He just said he'd let me know, his usual response. A week later, he called to say she'd been rushed to the hospital. I cut out of work and raced there as fast as I could, dragging my pregnant wife, our two-year-old, and our cat along with me on a nighttime trek across the 500-mile divide. Aside from the cat, no one complained too much, to their infinite credit.
Once we arrived, the wait began. I never heard my mother's voice again, but her shell lived on for another week, hooked up to all manner of machines. It was an easy decision when the time came to take them away.
Of course, her body fought on. The dying took days. When I got the call that it was done, I was watching an episode of Daniel Tiger with my daughter. I clutched her to me with sudden, grief-stricken strength, shaking both of us with a fit of sobs as she shrieked and struggled to get away. Afterward, I felt awful for scaring her in that moment, but I'll always be thankful she was there when I needed someone to hold.
My mother, gone at 61. Ten in the morning on Valentine's Day.
The parade of friends and family was a welcome distraction from what came next, but it was all finished in a week-long blur of ceremony and signatures. By the time I returned to work 3 weeks later, I felt like I needed a year off. And worse, I didn't give the faintest whiff of a shit about anything that I was supposed to do.
Of course this was all part of the normal grieving process, right, Dr. Kubler-Ross? But that didn't make it any easier.
March and April devolved into a war between the allied forces of Responsibility and Guilt and my mounting legions of Disdain. Frankly I barely remember any of it, besides my pervasive sadness and a suffocating irritability with all things normal. I did what I had to do at work, and I barely talked to anyone. Seeking help was the last thing on my mind. I'd say Disdain waged a pretty potent campaign until May rolled around.
Mid-month we welcomed another baby daughter, and I took another 3 weeks off of work. Almost exactly 3 months after my mother passed. I suppose the parallels could be construed as significant, if you put stock in that sort of thing. I don't. I do love that girl, though. She was born without consequence, and for the 3 weeks I stayed home, I felt almost happy. At the very least, I was distracted. A pleasant respite, but terribly finite. Just as the fog began to clear, our helpful visitors departed, and I returned to the grind.
If anything, my give-a-shit-o-meter dipped even lower the moment I sat back down at my desk. But it hadn't quite bottomed out yet. In the coming weeks, I found the floor--in textbook griever fashion, I became viciously intolerant of everyone else's petty work-related concerns. I wanted people to stop treating me as if everything was normal. As if I could be normal. I wanted to be left alone, but somehow I also craved their pity.
Thankfully, summer was a bit slow, and I spent most of my private time on long walks humming sad songs, or on the internet doing deep delves into arcane sports statistics related to the sudden and meteoric rise of Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors. A rise that culminated in a championship, and one I enjoyed immensely, but not as much as I should have.
Curry is by far my favorite basketball player, but my mother was the real fan, and as much as I loved seeing him win an NBA MVP and a ring, I felt her loss more keenly because of how much I missed sharing the victory with her.
The months trundled on into the deep summer, and I learned that my father was in the early stages of exploring a new relationship. At face value, I suppose I found it a good thing, but of course it ate at the recesses of my feelings for Mom. Around the same time, I was asked to go to a wedding. I chose to wear the same suit I wore to my mother's funeral.
In my defense, it was my only suit that really fit. Still, not my sharpest decision. With all the restraint of a peer-pressured teen on a dare, I gave into the culmination of emotion and drink in such a way that I found myself rolling around on the sidewalk at 1 AM flanked by a fleet of flashing sirens, having fallen out of the taxi I took home. Nothing bad came of it, except the broken hand I failed to notice until I woke up.
In a year full of tough breaks, this one was by far the most punitive, but the one for which I maintain the most gratitude, because it could have been so much worse. Despite having a displaced fracture, it barely hurt, and only needed 3 weeks in a splint/cast and another week or two after that to feel fully healed. Somehow my hand returned to full strength and felt pain free merely a month after the injury. Of course, the recovery did come complete with a massive calcium deposit. In that way, the experience was almost a microcosm of the year at large, in that every bit of damage done was quickly mirrored--but not perfectly repaired--by an equally powerful blessing.
Still, I had never broken a bone, and with my hand came a broken dam of feelings I'd been trying to sort out and compartmentalize behind the veil. Guilt. Shame. Self-loathing.
I called myself weak. Irresponsible. A bad father. A bad son. I felt my own hate crash into me, and I assigned labels and limitations to myself wherever I felt like they fit. Flawed. Pessimistic. Gloomy. Lazy. Misanthropic. Pitiable. Pathetic. Irrelevant. Worthless.
Amusingly, as I look back on it now, the one thing I never considered was the one thing I actually was: Depressed.
Outwardly, my injury (and relatively quick recovery) consumed me. I rarely talked about anything else, and the main reason was that I really couldn't see anything else positive in my life at the moment, besides the fact that, well, at least my hand wasn't permanently damaged by my idiocy. I have a wonderful wife and two amazing daughters, but in the wake of everything, I didn't truly see them. I felt the burden of responsibility to them, and that enabled me to keep functioning, but any emotion I brought to the table felt phony. Perhaps even dead.
I didn't realize this until much later, but at some point before I got hurt, I had stopped processing my emotions. I had managed a sort of functional stalemate; my heart had made a deal with my head. "I'll keep quiet while you go through the motions," it said. "I'll wait until you're all by yourself before I render you senseless and make that face leak."
For awhile, that worked well enough to feel like the new normal. The trouble was, my mental state went completely ass-up after the broken hand, long after I ceased working through my grief. It was not until months later, in the fall, that my wife made a comment that helped me realize what a stranger I had become.
It was a simple statement, almost a throwaway--so seemingly inconsequential I don't even remember the exact words. The essence, though, was "Your depression is not you."
The brilliant gift she gave me with that comment was this: I no longer had to feel like a jerk for being so insufferably negative. I had BEEN an asshole, yes. But not because I WAS an asshole.
This new understanding simplified the dreadful fight I had unknowingly waged with my own mind for months. Instead of hating myself for all my nihilistic behavior, I suddenly had a new target. I had no way to purge myself from myself, aside from the unthinkable. But I could beat the shit out of depression.
You know basically every martial arts movie where the angry giant gets sand in his eyes and is subsequently beaten half-to-death by the tiny hero with a bunch of fancy kicks? Well, one, that really just isn't going to happen in real life without a pretty substantial equipment advantage (swords, grenades, attack drones, etc). Two, being able to visualize depression attacking me felt exactly like that, except I was the blinded giant. And suddenly I could see.
Now, I certainly wasn't able to work through this foe overnight, and in some ways I still wrestle with it in lingering ways. But for the most part, being able to slap a target on it and call it my enemy enabled me to throw mental punches almost every time it reared its monstrous head.
Now that we've tolled the final bell for 2015, I would like to think I've learned something. For the most part, I hated last year. And I will continue to hate my depression well after its insidious tentacles have loosened their grip. But I will vigilantly guard against the temptation to hate myself (thereby allowing all my worst traits to transform me into some kind of Captain Planet/Voltron-esque Super Douche), and try to employ the same mentality my younger self used while playing football--it's not whether you get knocked down, or how hard you get hit, but how long you stay down that matters. Pretty much just like Rocky says. Because the longer you stay down and let that depression prey on you--the longer you live in a state of, let's call it, patheticism--the worse it gets for you and everyone around you.
What I hope to add to this space as time rolls inexorably forward may not pertain to you, and it may not be helpful to anyone, but hell, I'll put it down for posterity anyway. It will be about the struggles evident in daily life; difficulties both petty and weighty, and ideally, I'll share how I dealt with them, ignored them, or otherwise put them to bed. At the very least, I'll write about how it feels to suffer them.
I hope you found this worth your time. Even if you didn't, maybe it helped at least one person escape patheticism.
Either way, we're on to 2016. Happy New Year!
