Define "a Life"...

... still searching for a clear definition of that thing people keep telling me I need to get...

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Location: Springfield, PA

Saturday, April 26, 2008

This Thing of Darkness

Listen to NPR at your peril; it can get you thinking.

Generally, I consider that a virtue. Sometimes, though, it gets me thinking on things that I’m not necessarily all that comfortable thinking about. I’m not talking about topics like Darfur, which ought to make one uncomfortable. I’m talking about things that I’m not comfortable thinking about.

Like my depression.

Even the basic problem of language is frustratingly tricky, defining as it unavoidably does one’s relationship with the Thing. Do I have depression? Am I depressive? Or am I a depressive? Parts of speech aren’t happy making commitments here. Am I a person with Depression? Or just a depressed person? When I find myself referring to it as “my depression,” I feel a catch of inaccuracy snag somewhere in the language. It sounds too much like “my foot” or some such, implying a relationship that is certainly not the case. My foot is my foot; its presence does not define me. Although I suppose its absence would define me to a much greater extent. So in that respect the relationship is almost the direct reverse: the presence of my depression does define me.

Or, at least, at this point in my life it feels as though it does.

And here we get to the NPR bit. The topic on a recent Talk of the Nation was the physical and psychological effects of taking anti-depressants long-term. It’s a fact that none of these drugs, including SSRIs, have been in use – or existence – long enough for any sense of truly long-term physical effects to have presented itself. So when you’re talking about the prospect of being on a drug permanently you’re touching on a big unknown. The thing that caught me, though, was the psychological effects. One specific focus was people who’re prescribed anti-depressants in their teens and remain on the drugs through much or all of their adolescence. Is this chemically effecting their development as individuals in ways that extend beyond merely controlling the depression? And in a more general sense, how does a dependency on a drug like this effect your sense of self and define your identity?

This is a situation distinct from, and essentially different than, being on cholesterol or blood pressure control medication. At least I see it so. If I drop my cholesterol medication, my bad cholesterol will probably go up. But the way in which I view the world is not likely to change as a direct result. Every time I’ve gone off anti-depressants that exact change has been a consideration. Will dropping the drug nudge a return of the depression? In other words, will dropping the drug alter my perception of reality, effectively changing the world? Have I reached a point where the presence of the drug is the only thing preventing the constant and controlling presence of the depression?

In retrospect, it looks like I’ve been cycling through bouts of recurrent depression since at least my teens; I can’t be sure of identifying things before then. Back in the good old days, things moved faster – a full cycle could manifest and pass in a matter of weeks. Somewhere in, I think, my freshman year of college I began seeing this, and actually started thinking of things as a sort of growing outward spiral. As I moved around the circle I’d pass the same things again and again. At the time it didn’t occur to me that this could be a perspective of perception; I thought of it as a sort of cycling of life. The model holds up better than it has any right to, though. If a depression lasted, say, 12° around the circle twenty years ago, and still lasts for 12° today, we’re talking about a lot more line now than we were then. Each spiral outward needs a longer line to circumscribe all of the concentric circles within it. What took a few weeks when I was 15 would take months at 35.

And that’s pretty much exactly what’s happened. It didn’t take twenty years to become a problem, though. Only seven or so, then I hit a depressive trough that lasted long enough to have an impact. Before, I’d never been non-functional for so long a time that I couldn’t catch up once the depression broke. Then I got hit with a depression that kept me down for so long that once I got out from under it I was so far behind that there was no way I’d ever get caught up. And that was the first major change in my relationship to “my depression” and, I guess, the beginning of this problem of identity.

The NPR program had a few callers, talking about whether or not they felt that their “me” on anti-depressants was their “real me.” Having been on and off and on assorted anti-depressants since 1991, this has become a valid question for me. My answer is far from satisfactory, and makes me rather uncomfortable. Hell, it freaks me out.

No, I don’t feel the “me” on anti-depressants is the real me. I don’t feel like the “me” that’s utterly under the sway of the depression is the real me, either. So I find myself in the awkward position of depending on a treatment that forestalls the advance of the illness but does not restore me to my unafflicted state. I can’t help feeling that it’s a situation where the drug masks the symptoms but does nothing to eradicate the illness itself.

For that matter, a whole pile of the known potential side-effects of the drug are exactly the same as symptoms of the depression itself. The constant fatigue – unrelieved symptom of the depression or side effect of the medication? Who knows?

You see how this can be a problem. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the depression hits things that have been essential to my identity. It takes away things I enjoyed in as much as I don’t – can’t – find the enjoyment anymore. It impedes – or outright prevents – my reasoning and critical faculties from functioning as they ought, or at least as they otherwise did. It leaves me feeling disconnected from everything and everyone.

The drugs do not restore that feeling of connection; the drugs don’t clear away all the impediments to my thinking; they don’t bring back the missing enjoyment. What do the drugs do, then? They allow me to continue in this unsatisfactory condition. They allow me to function. They allow me to existent in a state of being that, frankly, has little intrinsic to justify itself. It’s like some sad echo of Civil War medicine – the leg wound is festering, so we cut off the leg to prevent it from spreading. Congratulations! You don’t have gangrene. You don’t have a leg, either, of course. But, hey, at least you don’t have gangrene.

It feels like the options are gangrene (and death) or hobbling around without a leg. Actually being what you were before the leg wound is simply not an option, not a possibility.

But this isn’t a wound, it’s not an infection. It’s me. If I’m at a point where being off medication means being in the grip of the depression, then I’m really not sure where to look for the “real me.” I feel like the real me is neither depressed nor medicated. I also feel like the real me hasn’t put in an appearance in quite some time. Between the depression and the drugs, I feel as distant and disconnected from that “real me” as I do from everything else, probably more so in some ways. It’s like a sort of experiential amnesia – I can remember doing a thing, and enjoying it, but I cannot recall what it felt like to enjoy.

So it’s like there were two real mes before the drugs. One was the me who actually enjoyed things. He’s more or less an historical figure at this point. The other was the me who could bear not enjoying things. Or perhaps just detach and compartmentalize and not feel the ache of absence and the presence of pain. Whatever it was, there was a me who could abide and endure, and whose existence did not conflict with or contradict the other’s.

Anymore, it feels like the real me is the Greg with the unendurable depression. That’s what’s real. So, yes, the real Greg is on drugs, because the real Greg maybe can’t function otherwise. But this isn’t either of the mes from before the drugs. This doesn’t feel like it’s the real me. Because at this point the depression isn’t an aspect, one characteristic among many; at this point, the depression is the characteristic; at this point, the depression is the defining characteristic, which has either overshadowed or eliminated all others.

I guess the difference is that I used to be able to accept the depression as a part of my life, because that was what it was. At some point, the proportions flipped. Now there’s no part of my life remaining that is not effected, definingly effected, by the depression. It’s no longer just a part of my life, and I am not able to accept that.

There’s a world of difference between “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” and “This thing of darkness I acknowledge me.”

Friday, April 25, 2008

The sublime and the just plain sub

Again, a post that's mostly passing on quotations.

First, from my friend Sam:

Sorrow can take care of itself, but to get the true benefit of joy, you must share it.
-- Mark Twain
(1835-1910)

Everyone knows how flinty and incisive Twain's humor could be. The big cuddly humanist heart that beat beneath the lapel of that creme coloured suit is less widely known.

Second, from the tall scary guy with the creepy big teeth:

Two step formula for handling stress:
1. Don't sweat the small stuff. 2. Remember that it's all small stuff.

-- Anthony Robbins
(1960~)

God, how I hate Tony Robbins...



Friday, April 18, 2008

Quote o' the Day

I recently signed up at www.just-quotes.com to get a daily e-mail with -- what else? -- some quotations in it. It's long been a sort of innocent vice of mine that I enjoy finding quotes and sayings in rather random ways. (I used to love the boxes of Celestial Seasonings teas for this, until the formerly small private company got big, went corporate and lost its personality.) I call this a vice because I'm enough of a rhetorician that I cannot in good conscience avoid acknowledging the perils of quoting out of context; my real vice, then, is the fact that I hardly ever hunt down the original context for these things.*

Anyway, today's e-mail contained the following, which I particularly like. (And which, I think, holds little risk of great misrepresentation or misinterpretation when taken on its own.)

"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe."
-- Edmund Burke
(1729-1797)
Irish Orator, Statesman


Oddly enough, one of my other frequently-visited quotation sites had this today:

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
-- Clarence Darrow
(1857-1938)
American Lawyer


Both thoughts well worth remembering.



(*I am also guilty on rare occasions of knowingly taking a quote out of context, although this is usually only in the most casual of uses. The most acute exception is a snippet from Augustine with which I fell in love at first sight. It was, as I first saw it: "Love, and do what you will."
Of course it was inevitable that context was going to constrain it. What saddened me more deeply was the discovery that the out-of-context quote was also a sloppy -- or at least loose -- translation. The phrase is "Dilige et quod vis fac." The "love" referred to is not from amo -are [to love (passionately); fall in love with, be fond of] but rather dilige, from diligo -ligere [to choose out; to prize , love, esteem highly]. The distinction -- and this is coming from my extremely rusty undergrad Latin -- seems to steer the intention away from the romantic or passionate love with which I'd originally associated it. This ought not be surprising, given Augustine's post-conversion attitude towards the passions of his youth, but I was nonetheless disappointed. In my heart, yet restless though it most definitely is, I want it to be Ama et quod vis fac.)



Wednesday, April 16, 2008

And so it begins...

It's taken me a few months to get rolling on any of what for lack of a better term I shall call my resolutions for the new year. Plans. Goals. Whatever.

My truck was in the shop for several days this past week, leaving me pretty much stranded. Stranded, and faced with a question of what to do around the house -- Read? Books? Comics? There are waiting piles of both. Watch some of those unwatched DVDs? (Marathoning Series 2 & 3 of Doctor Who in preparation for the start of Sci-Fi's broadcasting Series 4 this Friday did occur to me.) Do laundry?

Well, I did do a little laundry. I also cleared out all three closets on the first floor of the house. It's been more than a year, and I'm finally starting on the process of getting rid of my mom's things. This closet purge generated two big trash bags of clothes to go to Good Will, a pile of assorted stuff to go the to White Elephant sale at St. Francis, and at least six big trash bags of plain old trash to get, well, trashed. That's not counting the amount of stuff that went into the paper recycling -- I don't have a clear sense of that, since that bin was already filling up.

The trash went out on Monday night, along with the recycling, so that's gone. Now my next task is to get the Good Will and Elephant stuff out of the living room and off to its respective new homes, where those folk can, frankly, do with it what they will. None of it is among the things I feel that I actually need to find good homes for.

And the frustrating thing is that this didn't seem to make much of a dent in the volume of stuff that I need to deal with.

But it is, I suppose, a beginning.

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Tuesday, April 15, 2008

My kingdom for a...

My truck was in the shop from lunchtime Friday until late this afternoon. (Inspection turned into a bigger repair than I'd anticipated, but that's another story.) Being without my get-in-it-and-go transportation for a few days turned out to be a real splash-of-cold-water-to-the-face lesson in how utterly dependent I am on it.

It was also a reminder of how limited a selection of food I routinely keep in the house. I hardly ever eat all three meals at home, and often it's only breakfast. Good thing I like oatmeal.

Sure, I could have walked the few blocks to the trolley and gone grocery shopping at Trader Joe's in Media, right by the trolley tracks there. But then there's the prospect of toting the stuff back to the house from the trolley stop, uphill all the way. And we had such "nice" warm weather for part of the weekend. (<-- Note sarcasm, referencing the fact that once it gets much over 70° I consider it hot.) Maybe if I'd had once of those little collapsible carts...

Anyway, the dependence on the truck is even more sobering when I consider that a recent story predicted gasoline prices over the summer spiking past $4 a gallon in sections of the country.

Perhaps I ought to look into getting one of those little collapsible grocery carts...

Friday, April 11, 2008

Enable much?

When I updated my mood on Facebook from "tired" to "lonely," I'd no idea it would result in exactly this showing up on my Facebook page:

Uhhh... "Send him a drink to cheer him up?" Qua?

Surely this isn't an entirely healthy suggestion in all cases.

Ah, what the Hell? I oughtn't take things so seriously. It's just Facebook, after all. I'm going to go chill out and knock back some Fekin Irish Whisky.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Damn right


"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead earth, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."


-- T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Does This Make Me a Bad Person?

22



Perhaps it's the fact that picking up one child and using it as a weapon against the others would be one of the first tactics to occur to me. Maybe that's what got me such a high score...