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Jesus walked this lonesome valley.
He had to walk it by Himself;
O, nobody else could walk it for Him,
He had to walk it by Himself.
We must walk this lonesome valley,
We have to walk it by ourselves;
O, nobody else can walk it for us,
We have to walk it by ourselves.
We sang this mournful spiritual in church last week. Loneliness is miserable, so why do I feel uplifted by this song?
Is there something in music or poetry or art that somehow ennobles or beautifies sadness?
Or is it the sharing of sorrow that salves the sting?
Perhaps it is getting outside of your experience to look on it with some level of detachment?
Or maybe it is the courage that is displayed by facing into the pain rather than running or hiding?
Why is the experience of a broken heart terrible, but the story of a broken heart strengthening?
**Please give me your thoughts**
“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality” –Andrew Solomon
If you are like me, you feel encouraged by hearing the stories of others who struggle with depression. Loneliness, the sense that others cannot relate or understand or empathize, is both a fuel for and a flame from depression. So hearing others share their own journey is a balm to my weary soul. Here is such a talk by Andrew Solomon.
Kimberly and I know one another’s stories and experiences so well that it often seems there is nothing else to share, like we are trapped inside our own little bubble… it is safe, but offers little chance for fresh input to spark change. It seems that every time we crack the door to let in a little good, a tide of anti-grace is waiting to push its way in. The world is so full of direct and indirect condemnation, which is especially hard for sensitive souls to filter out. Perhaps you can relate.
For 18 years now I have been struggling with depression. It gets worse or better suddenly and without reason for unpredictable periods of time. My latest downturn came in winter. I’ve tried so many different strategies to lift my spirits, pushing myself into things I’d rather avoid, but the fixes never hold. The last few days have been crushing. For two nights running, I bunkered down in my office instead of sitting at the reference desk, coming out only when someone needed my help.
Yesterday Berly emailed me a link to a TED Talk video about community, and I watched it this afternoon. It was very touching, especially the story of a crippled elephant cared for by her herd. Like that elephant I am broken, but in ways no one can see. My depression is far more debilitating to my life than a wheelchair would be. But that 15 minutes shared by a South African storyteller sang some relief into my tortured day. It made me think that maybe I can make a small difference for one person by sharing life on this blog, perhaps a spark of connection, a sense that you are not alone in your struggle. I don’t need to be clever or poetic or memorable. Just being myself, sharing my little scraps of hope and discovery, struggle and pain, may lift someone’s flagging soul, even for an hour.
May we somehow, across the distances, touch one another with compassion and understanding and find a little relief in our shared stories.
I was washing dishes in the kitchen yesterday and thinking. My mind follows me everywhere and won’t shut up. Suddenly I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach as I reflected on a political article I had been reading. The current state of civic engagement in America is deeply disturbing to me, but what drives the stake into my heart is the entrenched position of my own people, the church… at least that part of the church I have always called home spiritually. It feels to me like our world is careening around hairpin turns in the dark and the headlights just died. This is not going to end well. And leaning against the sink with dripping hands I realized another huge source of my depression.
I have known for many years that my personal sense of failure drove me into a deep depression. I gave it everything I had and just couldn’t make it work: the overwhelming poverty of India mocked my attempts to help. It is a great blow to realize your life is meaningless in the greater scheme of things, that your world, even your small corner of the world, will go on as it always has with or without you. Still, though I wasn’t making a difference, someone was making a difference. I had lost all hope for my own personal relevance, but I knew that the good side would win.
Then I slowly realized my pointless life was not in contrast to the overall progress of the world, but was a microcosm of it. All the good in the world–the huge, sacrificial efforts of selfless people–did not and could not ever reverse the direction of this tragic human story. Suffering is alleviated and evil stopped in small back eddies of history, but the world as a whole flows on in its destructive ways.
At some point in my own journey I finally understood that the positive, upbeat message on which I was raised was a false narrative that we told each other to keep us fighting a losing battle. Against all the evolutionary optimism of my culture, the world would never be a better place, and there was nothing any of us could do to change that. One war would succeed another, today’s tyrant would rise on the ashes of yesterday’s, a new disease would always spring up to laugh in the face of all our medical advances. We were doomed to play violins on the deck of our sinking Titanic. I was not just a failure in my own small sphere, but my story was one line in a great tragedy. My impotence was a small, dark reminder of the miserable whole. I was not simply hopeless about myself, I was hopeless about the entire world.
I’m not suggesting we should stop playing our violins. If we are all going down, perhaps we can bring some small comfort to face the disaster. But if we hope that our stringed ensemble will keep the ship from sinking, we set ourselves up for repeated disappointment, and despair at last. We will either strum more and more violently trying to drive back the rising waves or we will pretend the ship is fine and turn a deaf ear to the cries around us. In a crazy way I found hope in hopelessness yesterday. Sweeping away false hope clears a space for realistic hope.
It is not useless to adopt one mangy mutt from a city full of strays, give one store clerk a smile in her long, harsh day, clarify a point for one person on a website crowded with dissenters. It is no small thing to bring laughter to a child’s cancer ward, to give a sandwich to a man three days hungry, to hold the hand of a mother whose son was killed in Iraq. Perhaps I cannot cure Alzheimer’s, but I can listen lovingly to the same story repeated for the fourth time.
We have violins, let us play them.
A week ago I was sitting at the library reference desk and one of my student workers was talking to a couple of friends. We allow this for a couple of minutes, but they kept jabbering. When there was a pause in the conversation I said, “If you want to keep having this discussion, why don’t you take it elsewhere.” The visiting students were clearly embarrassed and immediately apologized and headed out the door. The student worker continued with her shift, but at the end of her hour she got up and left in complete silence. I’m not deaf to social cues and guessed she was upset with me. Sadly, I can come across as more harsh than I feel… something in the tone of my voice, the look in my eyes, the cock of my brows.
I know this because Kimberly regularly yanks my chain about what I have said or done with others that seems completely tame to me–I was not barking, I was not even growling. Apparently my perception of “normal” is skewed towards blunt and angry. I take umbrage easily. I lack grace. And even when I manage to have a gracious mindset, my frown lines still crease–my mom was right: making ugly faces does stick. I have improved a great deal, but Kimberly keeps wincing, so I’ve clearly got a ways to go.
Every plain statement comes with assumptions, context, implications, connotation… in short, the unspoken part of our message is often more powerful and important than the spoken part. This is true not only because we can give it more weight, even unintentionally, but because the unspoken has unusual advantages, being unseen it easily slips past all our defenses.
- It’s often felt, but not identified consciously, so the person falls under its influence without a chance to examine and question it.
- It’s hard to call out because it can easily be refuted with “that’s not what I said” or “that’s not what I meant.”
- The person reacting has no “proof” so he doubts himself and may not even understand why he is reacting as he is, even blaming himself for feeling blamed, a double whammy.
When dad says, “That was a great science project. Next year you’ll probably get first place,” his words are floating in a relational stew. The boy knows his father, knows what he thinks about science versus sports, knows how he weighs second place versus first, knows how he values his son’s achievements compared to his job or favorite sitcom or other kid’s accomplishments. The father’s sentiments override everything else, and his actual words are powerless in such a competition. We are all born intuitively perceptive, remarkably so, even if we cannot put it into words or rational explanations.
No amount of care in choosing my words or facial expressions is going to change the experience others have of me, except in the most superficial interactions. My only hope is to grow more into a gracious heart, for the heart always comes leaking out between and around all my words, my polite behavior, my planned smiles. The truth has an inevitability, even when I try to suppress it, even when I’m blind to it in myself. Sometimes people know me better than I know myself. So I listen to them, even when it sounds like poppycock 😉 .
Kimberly was in a mood yesterday, a “Life Is a Lemon” mood, so she blasted our living room with Meat Loaf. On most days I totally agree with the sentiment, just not the volume, and not really the music. Look at that picture on the left and tell me if she looks like a head banger to you? Who knew? I might have had second thoughts on our wedding day. That and she likes the TV series Scrubs–openly and without shame, like it’s a normal taste. She even forced me to watch Moulin Rouge with her. Well, she asked me to, which is the same thing because: “loving husband.” I would rather stand barefoot in the snow (which I incidentally did today since I had to move my car and was too lazy to put shoes on).
Besides her seriously bad taste in entertainment, she throws away perfectly good things, like dish-washing sponges before they’ve naturally disintegrated on their own. I tell her to think of the starving children in China who have no sponges to wash their dishes with, but it does no good. She claims they stink even after microwaving them (yeah, that’s a thing now). I say, “I don’t smell anything,” and she retorts, “You wouldn’t smell it if the dog pooped behind the sofa.” She didn’t actually say that, but she still had a point about my deficient olfactory nerves.
And speaking of behind the sofa, she’s a complainer. About once a month she complains about the trash around my wastebasket at the end of the living room sofa. I can’t quite reach it, so I kind of toss stuff in that direction, sometimes food, and some of the smaller stuff kind of sticks to the wall. But hey, I clean it up, about once a month coincidentally. I don’t go all commando-clean, like scrubbing the wall, but I pick stuff off with my fingernails. I tell Kimberly to just avoid that end of the sofa and she won’t see it, after all, marriage is about compromise, right?
Hey, I’m not a barbarian–if it were dog poop behind the sofa I wouldn’t wait a month to clean it up. Just sayin’.
This morning I came back from washing the breakfast dishes and crumpled onto the floor, burying my face in the sofa cushions. Kimberly simply said, “Why don’t you take a nap.” So I did, curling up next to her, and it helped. Moved me up the scale from minus bad to “it doesn’t hurt as long as I don’t move.”
Sadness comes in shades so different they seem like contrasting emotions. There is a sadness, like today’s, which is desolate and drains the heart of life and knots up the words. It feels bottomless and endless and inescapable. It isolates, so that even fellow mourners bring no more companionship or connection than fellow prisoners in solitary confinement.
In contrast is the sadness which fills the heart and cascades down the cheeks. It creates bonds of camaraderie and sympathy and understanding. It makes me feel more connected and in tune with my soul, harmony in the minor scale. It feels pregnant with meaning, pain that carries purpose and life, a deepening of my being that opens me up to others. A healthy, hearty grieving.
In the first sadness, the music of melancholy scalds me and the sympathetic presence of others suffocates. In the second, shared melancholy gives me the comfort of allies, of support and hope, even with strangers like Leonard Cohen. Were I a drinker, the first would be a half-empty bottle in a darkened room, the second, a circle of folding chairs at an AA meeting.
The first blocks all means of resolution; nothing I do matters. It stops without warning and starts up again without reason. The second sadness has potential movement, a sense that time and effort will eventually lead to greater peace and maturity. It makes me a better and more whole person. But the first melancholy unmans me. Why?
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I read this to Kimberly so we could toss it around looking for answers–what makes the difference? At least the relational element seemed to come into focus–if there is some disconnect in the empathy of others, then their presence is painful instead of comforting. If they are unsafe or just seem to me to be unsafe, the empathetic connection shorts out. Perhaps they don’t understand or care or don’t have time or can’t be trusted or have too much of their own baggage or too little energy to give. Unfortunately, even a compassionate presence seems to give little relief to a sadness which is indecipherable.
I share my life this way, dark as it is, not because I have answers, but to offer some identification of feeling to those who struggle as I do.
Prayer and I have had a very long, intense, conflicted relationship over the years. I have asked God, weeping and begging, shouting and pounding my fist against the floor, for requests from His own wish list–healing, reconciliation, deliverance, guidance–and more often than not I’ve come away empty-handed. Am I not praying enough? Do I lack faith? Is it not His time? Do we not deserve His intervention? Where are you, God?
What’s the point anyway–if God is all wise and all powerful, why tell Him what we want, especially since He is also all good and will do what is best regardless? It’s not like He needs my advice about how to run the world, or even how to keep me headed in the right direction. Is it just some sly, round about way to get me to admit my own powerlessness and dependence on Him?
I still talk to God… all the time, really. But I don’t ask for much any more. I guess prayer is just my way of reaching out in the dark to reassure myself that He is still there, still with me, still present even if we’re going over the cliff… especially if we’re going over the cliff. I need someone to hold my hand, to love me as I am, even if He doesn’t help. One day it will all make sense, or maybe it just won’t matter. In the meantime, I need a friend.
Maybe I was looking for answers from God when God was the answer.
One of my friends posted this to Facebook yesterday:
Right then I was in an emotional place to find that picture encouraging, but often I’m not. The friend who posted this is gracious and gentle, so I would not take offense even if I were in the throes of despondency, especially since she did not send it personally to me. I only want to underscore the importance of context–my emotional framework shapes my understanding of the message (and this message of positive spin is one of the fundamental tenets of our American culture). Notice how crucial the background picture is to the sentiment–its impact is subtle but powerful. Let me demonstrate:
That is a profoundly different message, hugely dissonant. What was a nice nudge towards contentment is suddenly disturbingly trite. When someone’s inner world feels this broken, thankfulness will not fix it. Gratitude has a role even in tragedy, but it is not the remedy for tragedy. The hungry need food, the homeless need shelter, the lonely need companionship, the vulnerable need safety, the wounded need healing. Sometimes what I have is not enough, even if I’m grateful. Scripture wisely tells us to weep with those who weep rather than give them reasons to cheer up.
I realize some folks want to be pointed to the positives, but for many, the chipper “Be grateful!” can be code for “Stop whining!” and that shaming message discredits their needs and belittles their distress. Perhaps what they need is permission to feel the injustice, encouragement to sit with their sadness, help to empathize with their own sense of loss. Maybe the very words they need to hear are, “Yes, it is bad, very bad. You must feel awful,” rather than, “It’s not as bad as it seems. Look on the bright side.” Perhaps we could all benefit from learning to sit longer with our sorrow.
Emotional shrapnel from old battles tore unexpectedly at my vitals this afternoon, searing my heart from some random twist in my psyche as I drove down Lakeside Avenue. It flares up like this without warning, without any evident cause… something I saw or heard or remembered that touches a place still raw and sore, but too deep to identify. I am learning to live with it like rheumatism. Slow down, ease off, go gently till it lifts in an hour or day or month. Another tough opportunity to learn self compassion.
Janathan Grace Reflections 