The Rope

It sometimes helps to reach the end of your rope.

For most of 2006 I’ve been struggling, sometimes mightily, other times lethargically, to understand this depression thing that’s settled over my life.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been depressed, nor is it the first time I’ve entered therapy, but it’s the first time I’ve actually tried to get better. The other times I resisted, never really investing myself in the process, taking advantage of the first rebound in my mood to declare a cure and be done with it.

This time is different. Or so I tell myself. You reach the end of your rope, it gets your attention. Urgency enters the equation.

Now I’m unwinding myself, trying to look without flinching, surrounded by these strands, once tightly wound, now loosely splayed about for us to see. It isn’t easy. And it isn’t pretty.

Sitting on the couch, staring at him, I just shrugged. My goal? To not be depressed. Can I be more specific? No, I can’t. What do I want to work on? I have no idea. Think of a time when you were happy. I can’t. Well, we have to start somewhere. Maybe you should identify the differences between me and normal happy well-adjusted people, prepare a chart or something, figure if they do x, y and z, and I don’t, maybe I should do x, y and z too.

That’s a depression test? What do those questions have to do with depression? They’re perfectly normal. Everyone feels that way. Well, a lot of people do. Okay maybe it’s a minority position, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Or abnormal, or whatever it is that test thinks it’s trying to test.

And for some reason my mind wanders back to the Pleistocene, our formative years, the time we grew up, and I’m noting what we did, and didn’t do back then, all those hard-wired traits that persist to this day, traits I’ve done my best to suppress. And it feels wrong.

And I drift back over my life, retracing my path through my decision tree, this time pausing at the branches, questioning my actions, trying to understand. I’m sympathetic, I’m making allowances, but it feels wrong.

And I capture my initial reactions, assessing them, turning them over this way and that, seeing where they lead me, learning where I should intervene, but in the end I no longer trust myself. I just feel wrong.

And I shine a light on my conceits, life’s little lifts to get me through the day, and they dissolve. They were wrong.

My normal is abnormal, and my abnormal is severely abnormal.

I’d been resisting all these years, trying to preserve this “me,” concerned if I succeeded I’d lose myself. I’d become my disease. Is it any wonder? I’ve had it my entire life. It really is me.

So I unravel. I talk. I evaluate. I think. And, for the first time in my life, I’m taking an anti-depressant, concerned it will completely rewind me in some strange pattern, but more concerned that I’m at the end of my rope, it's torn and frayed, I've nowhere else to go.

I do not know where this is going. I am not sure I should even be writing about it. But these days this is what I am, and I can’t separate what I write from what I am, so the decision is either to write it or shut up. Shutting up has much to recommend it, especially when you doubt everything you say. But today I’m writing it. Tomorrow? Who knows?

These days, it's like that, here at the end of my rope.