Depressed thinking

There are few straight lines in nature. Right now I think this does not speak well for nature, which is a chaotic, pathetic excuse for a system unless you're the sort of person who likes chaos or its exuberant cousin creativity.

I find myself of two minds about nature, curved lines and creativity. One mind manifests when I am at the top of my game, healthy, alert, engaged and active. Then I am a nature nut, a chaos champ, a creative fountain of ideas.

The other manifests itself when I am at the bottom of my game, depressed, anxous, stupid and ill. Then I need straight lines, defined borders, organizational predictabilty to the point of boredom. I need security because I need control.

When I first saw the sculpture above at the Chicago Art Institute I thought it was wonderful. Now it looks quite terrifying to me.

Depression and I go back a long way. I cannot say we are old friends, but we are well acquainted. It always surprises me when people refer to depression as a mental illness. I never think of it that way. Winston Churchill called it "that black dog that lurks in the corner of every room." I think of it as a storm of black cloud just over my horizon, rarely visible, but sometimes, sometimes it creeps in and I realize it is suddenly upon me.

It is suddenly upon me. I know my blogging about it will distress my children because they will not like to think of me suffering from anything at all. But I can manage depression, and I will blog about it because so few people who suffer depression ever dare tell anyone about it. They suffer in dreadful silence thinking that something is wrong with them, (there is but not in the way they think,) they feel confused ("I have nothing to be depressed about!") and/or weak ("I feel so stupid!")

It's a very very common disease and very treatable.

The hardest part, I think, is realizing what's wrong. This time around it first showed up as an inability to complete very simple tasks like making lists or paying bills. Combine that with a growing sense of dread - anxiety growing to fear with no particular object, just the fear itself, palpable, oppressive, cruel in the way the ocean is cruel - it is completely unaware of your existance. The fear couldn't care less about you. It simply swallows you whole.

This time I caught it early enough, I think, to avoid the worst of it. I was sitting in my office yesterday bewildered (again) about my inablilty to address this one simple task that I've been putting off for weeks. The task will take an hour or less. It requires no intelligence, but it requires the ability to choose. And I suddenly remembered that, for me, that has always been a symptom of depression, the inability to make choices, even simple ones.

Then a whole bunch of other things popped up on my radar screen. Last weekend I had found it necessary to promise myself that I would accomplish one thing - either mow the lawn, pay the bills, anything at all just so the weekend wouldn't be gone without my having accomplished something, anything at all. I accomplished nothing. The previous weekend had been exactly the same. And there has been an undercurrent of fear in my belly for a long time now, fear with no object.

If I leave this untreated I can predict exactly what will come next. Over the next few weeks my ability to think will diminish - I will become stupid, really, unable to follow thoughts or conversations. Then the idea of suicide will begin to cross my mind. In the early stages I will recoil from it, but after a while it will begin to look like an old friend. After a while it will become welcome. In the meantime the entire atmosphere of my life will continue to darken until all is black, all is heavy, all is suffocating and poisonous.

I've never got past that darkest point without getting better. It's not so hard to figure out what would come next.

Yesterday, after I realized what was happening, I called my surfer-dude doctor friend. He's a good listener, and asked a lot of questions. He sat back and said, "Well, there's no question that you're suffering a significant depression." Notice that he did not say "severe." He's right. It's significant but not severe. Nice catch on my part! He went on to say that, if I could look back and start identifying problems starting two weeks ago, the depression has been growing a lot longer than that.

Depression is a chemical issue, not an illness of the spirit or a failure of the heart. It is a chemical issue and is treated effectively with chemicals. I started taking zoloft yesterday. I feel better just knowing what's wrong, and that it's being treated. In a few weeks the zoloft will kick in and the darkness will lift and I'll be fine again.

I won't need straight lines, I will love to look at the crazy Chicago sculpture, I'll embrace chaos, I'll generate ideas and I'll look fondly on the nuttiness of nature again.