Jackie, my wife, has encouraged me to write about this depression thing with out a censor, so if your squeamish or the sensitive type or easily upset by foul language you probably shouldn’t click the link for my blog, or if you did, you should probably quit reading now.
I can feel my throat tightening as I think about doing this and anger welling up. I’ve learned to be sociably acceptable, to tone myself down and sanitize my language, for my Christian brothers and sisters yes, but also for the rest of the population. Some of this is good, trying not to offend my weaker brother or sister or children.
The reality of me, Mike Lipuma, Christian man, is not pretty. Don’t get me wrong. I know I am redeemed, loved by God, but I am not talking about that side of me right now. I am talking about the side of me that makes it a good thing for me His mercies are new every morning.
Just a bit ago I wrote something to post on Facebook, a simple little statement, and several words were misspelled. (In the interest of clarity I will be censoring that part of me that can’t spell) Anyway, in my endeavor to get into the uncensoring mood, this rift of familiar condemnation went through my head wondering what the fuck I thought I was doing, trying to write when I still spelled like an imbecile, something like that, fucking imbecile was there.
Now I’m spiraling into something about shutting my mouth because I really don’t have anything to say and it’s all a bunch of narcissistic bullshit and I ought to quit bothering people. That bothering thing has been with me for a long time. Every time I want to make a phone call to somebody I know, it’s there, and especially if it’s somebody I want to know. (I’m re-reading this now and I caught myself thinking, God, how pathetic) When I see two people talking, it doesn’t matter where, it’s always a battle to get myself to say something. The idea of what I have to say not being important enough to speak, I’ve had to learn to circumvent. These days it’s a God thing that allows me to open my mouth. My thinking goes this way. God made me to be who I am and to be visible in the world, to speak what is true for me. When I do not speak the truth in love, I am telling God to go fuck Himself because I refuse to be used. Speaking is an act of obedience for me. It is, by the way, a sobering and humbling thing to admit I tell God to go fuck Himself on a regular basis. Maybe I don’t use those words, but you know what they say; actions speak louder.
Every once in a while I tell God things would be a lot easier if He would arrange to put a stray bullet in my head, or maybe a car accident, most typically after a fight with my wife after one of us has said something no spouse should say to the other one. Sometimes I am just so tired of struggling to be alive that a bullet seems like a viable option. Don’t get all freaked out now. I’ve always been too much of a chicken shit to kill myself and if I haven’t done it by now I’m not going to.
I feel like such a cliché now, a whiney little fuck.
Sometimes I wish I could just weep. Sometimes I think if I start I’ll never stop. Sometimes I think I’m not worth the tears. Christianity is sometime such a paradox for me. It gives me hope, but it doesn’t necessarily get rid of the despair. I so want to leave that behind. There is talk of the “now” and the “not yet;” the not yet of the coming kingdom and the now of living through the process of getting there.
In the now we get glimpses of the not yet in the Amish community in Pennsylvania befriending the wife of the man who murdered their children, or in my church helping us out with our mortgage while I convelesce from my stroke, in people like Desmond Tutu leading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, or the part Christianity played in the Solidarity Movement in Poland or the Civil Rights Movement here.
I’m sure I don’t have to mention examples of the other side of the coin. You can come up with enough places where the world and its people are broken all on your own. If you are willing to look, you can find the places where you’re broken. There are plenty of times in life when it is appropriate to weep. I think we all have much to grieve. After all, it is in the now with all it’s fucked up shit that we all have to live. Before conversion I used live trying to make sure things didn’t suck much more than they already did before I died.
I’ve been a Christian for at least twenty years now, all that time learning how to hope and not lean on my own understanding of things, to understand that my despair is not the truth about how things are. Christianity is not opposed to the concept of the yin and yang. My despair, which I despised with a powerful hatred for a very long time, I have learned, is also a coin with two sides. It’s like the theory of relativity: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As much as I have despaired, so I am capable of that much hope. As much as I have felt abandon, it is with that much sureness I am found.
I don’t know if despair and sorrow is where everybody’s art comes from, but it is the source of mine. Slowly I learn to see beauty and hope, that my despair is the mirror I see through dimly. But in the now, the sorrow will always be there, it is the cross I am commanded to pick up. It is the weight giving the rest of my life substance. There is a book I’ve called the most terrible, beautiful novel I’ve ever read. It is called The Last Of The Just. It was written after World War II by Andre Schwarz-Bart, a French Jew trying to come to terms why so many willingly walked into the gas chambers.
Christianity is like that, terrible and beautiful at the same time. Some one said, “Life is hard if you do it right.” I don’t know where my next statement is, theologically, so keep that in mind. I don’t think Christianity is for everybody. If you want a nice easy life with no troubles, my advice is for you is to run the other way as fast as you can. On the other hand, if you want something real and you're willing to put up with some shit, I don’t know a better place to find it. Keep in mind; it’s not no bed of roses. Biblically speaking, there are very few out right commands; you know, do this, don’t do that. One of them is, “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling.” Note it is in present tense. Now. In fear and trembling. Doesn’t that make you just want to jump on board?
Friday, May 21, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
New Mercies
The people with a spiritual bent of the medieval period tried various methods of self-piety and abasement to find their way to holiness. Pebbles in their shoes, hair shirts, ice water baths, and self-flagellation were some of their methods. Anchorites used to wall themselves up with only a little hole to pass food and excrement through. Some ascetics sat in trees, tying themselves in. For some, over time, the coarse ropes would rub and chafe on the skin, dig it self in. They would try and out do each other, going higher in the tree, staying up longer. One famous ascetic stayed up long enough for his skin to grow back over the rope and his cloak, like a tree gown into a chain link fence. When I think about dropping my guard against the depression, I feel like that ascetic: the guard grown into the fabric of my being.
I remember a dream. There’s this pretty little storybook house with closed swinging barn like doors to an upper loft. The house was not taller than I am and as I reach out to the upper doors, they burst open reveling an enraged, terrified little boy. In his fist he’s got a grade school protractor made out of steel, its curved edge a sharpened blade and he’s swinging it at me wildly, screaming, “Get out. Get out. Get out.” The boy is very young, four or five, and of course, he is me.
That’s how the guard works, indiscriminately keeping everything out. I used to live my life with two rules: Don’t fuck with me and we’ll get along,” and “I don’t come out and you don’t get in.” I’ve made considerable progress over the last twenty years, bit by bit opening myself to others with the help of the Holy Spirit and those He has brought into my life; principally the Safe Place/metanoia people, my work groups, New Adam, and by no means last or least, Jackie my wife. But it seems there is always more darkness to bring into the light.
When I was about the age of the boy in the dream my uncle, a fat grease-ball in a suit, watch fob and all, would sit at the head of the kitchen table. He was my father’s older brother, the one who bullied him into adult hood. The man he worked for. He’d come over in his late model Cadillac, walk in like a fat prince. My mother made his something to eat. My father sat at the table with him and poured him shots of whiskey, and call to my mother when they needed a beer. A place setting was set before my uncle and then he would call to me in Italian, “Miguel, vin aquee.” Something like that.
“Your uncle’s calling you,” My father would say.
Eventually I would be standing along side him, just tall enough to see over the table. He made me get him a knife, usually sending me back for a sharper one. The he’d start telling me how much he liked me. In fact, he liked me so much he wanted to eat me up. Fork and knife ready in his hands, “Put you hand in the plate,” he told me.
“He just playing with you,” was all my father said. My mother stood staring into her pot at the kitchen stove.
After much stern cajoling my hand would be in the plate. I wouldn’t jerk it away when he reached with the knife and fork. He’d mention how plump a juicy my fingers looked and witch knuckle he would start cutting at and he put the knife to my finger so I could feel it’s sharpness, and he would say something about not spoiling his appetite and how I was probably to stringy anyway, a scrawny little thing like me. My ma would bring him his food. My father poured him another shot.
“Come on now. Don’t be a baby. Your uncle’s just playing with you. Char? Give him a piece of bread and butter.”
What I wonder is, if I remember that, is there more I don’t remember? Is there still something behind the doors of the storybook house the little boy is afraid to let me see?
I‘ve been thinking about the dream, that the protractor maybe means school, which would fit with the storybook. At Saint John’s, I flunked second grade, every subject, and every category, without exception. I received an unsatisfactory in every little box on the card save one. I don’t remember the exact wording, but basically, it said my grade were satisfactory considering what the child was capable of.
In second grade sometimes we were put in the coat closet/storage room for punishment. I remember hiding in the coats, a wet fur winter smell, and the fur against my face. All the other teachers I had at Saint John’s were nuns. My teacher for second grade I remember as a young girl. I pretty sure she pulled down my pants to spank me now and then and sometimes I got sent home for peeing in them.
It’s hard to tell that far back what is memory and what is a story I’ve cobbled together over the years or if it even makes much difference when you go that far back. I don’t know if I can go deep enough to get to the bottom of thing. When it comes down to it, I don’t know if there’s a bottom to get to. To paraphrase Paul, who will save me from this retched body of memory? Thanks be to God, Whose mercies are new every morning and Who makes broken things whole.
I remember a dream. There’s this pretty little storybook house with closed swinging barn like doors to an upper loft. The house was not taller than I am and as I reach out to the upper doors, they burst open reveling an enraged, terrified little boy. In his fist he’s got a grade school protractor made out of steel, its curved edge a sharpened blade and he’s swinging it at me wildly, screaming, “Get out. Get out. Get out.” The boy is very young, four or five, and of course, he is me.
That’s how the guard works, indiscriminately keeping everything out. I used to live my life with two rules: Don’t fuck with me and we’ll get along,” and “I don’t come out and you don’t get in.” I’ve made considerable progress over the last twenty years, bit by bit opening myself to others with the help of the Holy Spirit and those He has brought into my life; principally the Safe Place/metanoia people, my work groups, New Adam, and by no means last or least, Jackie my wife. But it seems there is always more darkness to bring into the light.
When I was about the age of the boy in the dream my uncle, a fat grease-ball in a suit, watch fob and all, would sit at the head of the kitchen table. He was my father’s older brother, the one who bullied him into adult hood. The man he worked for. He’d come over in his late model Cadillac, walk in like a fat prince. My mother made his something to eat. My father sat at the table with him and poured him shots of whiskey, and call to my mother when they needed a beer. A place setting was set before my uncle and then he would call to me in Italian, “Miguel, vin aquee.” Something like that.
“Your uncle’s calling you,” My father would say.
Eventually I would be standing along side him, just tall enough to see over the table. He made me get him a knife, usually sending me back for a sharper one. The he’d start telling me how much he liked me. In fact, he liked me so much he wanted to eat me up. Fork and knife ready in his hands, “Put you hand in the plate,” he told me.
“He just playing with you,” was all my father said. My mother stood staring into her pot at the kitchen stove.
After much stern cajoling my hand would be in the plate. I wouldn’t jerk it away when he reached with the knife and fork. He’d mention how plump a juicy my fingers looked and witch knuckle he would start cutting at and he put the knife to my finger so I could feel it’s sharpness, and he would say something about not spoiling his appetite and how I was probably to stringy anyway, a scrawny little thing like me. My ma would bring him his food. My father poured him another shot.
“Come on now. Don’t be a baby. Your uncle’s just playing with you. Char? Give him a piece of bread and butter.”
What I wonder is, if I remember that, is there more I don’t remember? Is there still something behind the doors of the storybook house the little boy is afraid to let me see?
I‘ve been thinking about the dream, that the protractor maybe means school, which would fit with the storybook. At Saint John’s, I flunked second grade, every subject, and every category, without exception. I received an unsatisfactory in every little box on the card save one. I don’t remember the exact wording, but basically, it said my grade were satisfactory considering what the child was capable of.
In second grade sometimes we were put in the coat closet/storage room for punishment. I remember hiding in the coats, a wet fur winter smell, and the fur against my face. All the other teachers I had at Saint John’s were nuns. My teacher for second grade I remember as a young girl. I pretty sure she pulled down my pants to spank me now and then and sometimes I got sent home for peeing in them.
It’s hard to tell that far back what is memory and what is a story I’ve cobbled together over the years or if it even makes much difference when you go that far back. I don’t know if I can go deep enough to get to the bottom of thing. When it comes down to it, I don’t know if there’s a bottom to get to. To paraphrase Paul, who will save me from this retched body of memory? Thanks be to God, Whose mercies are new every morning and Who makes broken things whole.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Sunday's Coming.
I don’t really want to write about this, but my wife, Jackie asked me to. She said it was important for me to write it while I was in it.
I’ve fought depression all my life as far as I know. I know some have it a lot worse than me, or I tell my self that. I really don’t know what it would be like if I didn’t fight it and now I have theses pills that are supposed to make it better in a week and a half so I’m trying to let myself feel what I feel, to stop fighting enough to really get a look at it and that’s really scary because I know enough about it enough to know it’s a place of hopelessness, the opposite of faith. It’s the opposite of my faith, anyway.
A guy I knew, or I knew as well as you can know anyone who is really depressed, a fellow believer as far as I know, on a Easter morning, I think, waved to an El train conductor right before he jumped it front of the train. I talk to people afterward to see if I could figure out if we failed him somehow. From what I could tell people better than me, more compassionate than fearful anyway, bent over backwards to try and be there for him. He chose, or did not know how to chose anything else, not to receive the help.
I’ve been telling Jackie I’m waiting for the Zoloft to kick in. To her, it sounds like a choice I’m making. Yesterday she asked me if I was still on my island, giving me the metaphor to describe it. Immediately I saw the island, deserted, bare, and surrounded by treacherous waters breaking on the rocks. I’m still here and I don’t know how to get off. It’s a perpetually gloomy place, with occasional barrages of thunder and lightening. Do you know that opening for ”Mystery” on public television where it’s a graveyard and there’s thunder and lightening and there’s a damsel running back and forth going, ”Oohhhh. Oohhhhh,” really plaintive and forlorn like? That’s sort of what it’s like, if you take all the humor out of it.
So I’m here waiting wondering if I really let my self feel if I’ll just start sobbing and cry all over my laptop enough to short it out. I’m making jokes. I’ve got a very dark sense of humor. I’ve often said, maybe not so bluntly, I make jokes when the alternative is sobbing, when my feelings of helplessness and despair are ready to overwhelm. I’ve known for a long time now, the sobbing I carry very close to the surface, maybe so I can keep an eye on it, so it can’t sneak up on me in public. I’ve learned to compensate in sociably acceptable ways.
That makes me wonder how much of myself I’ve missed. Maybe this is where the grief comes from, the parts of myself I’ve learned to indiscriminately kill. Christianity teaches me I supposed to die to self. It never occurred to me the alternative to that is what I have learned to do, rather then letting Christ put to death those thing that keep me from being fully who I was intended to be, I’ve taken a slash and burn approach. It is no wonder I perpetually feel the desire to weep.
Don’t get me wrong. I know there are many things in this world besides me to weep for. I don’t know maybe we depressives view them as a black hole of grief we dare not get to close to. I know I do guard myself. Vigilance is something I am used to, an old habit hard to put down. Maybe that’s what I’m waiting for, lowering my guard and finally letting others into places not even I’ve been to?
A while ago, before I was married, almost a decade ago, I remember God saying to me, “It’ time.” When I met Jackie, I thought, that’s what He was talking about. Then I thought it was getting married. I keep thinking, oh, that’s what it was about, and then a little time goes by and I realizes it was just another step along the road to a place he will show me, each step needing a bit more faith than the last one. I don’t know. Maybe this is what He was talking about, time to look at these last dark spaces inside me. Even as I write that I know they are not the last ones, just the next ones.
If there’s always more, maybe the Zoloft is like the seventh day. Maybe they’ll give me enough peace with myself I can begin to accept the Sabbath, a day of rest. That would be nice.
I’ve fought depression all my life as far as I know. I know some have it a lot worse than me, or I tell my self that. I really don’t know what it would be like if I didn’t fight it and now I have theses pills that are supposed to make it better in a week and a half so I’m trying to let myself feel what I feel, to stop fighting enough to really get a look at it and that’s really scary because I know enough about it enough to know it’s a place of hopelessness, the opposite of faith. It’s the opposite of my faith, anyway.
A guy I knew, or I knew as well as you can know anyone who is really depressed, a fellow believer as far as I know, on a Easter morning, I think, waved to an El train conductor right before he jumped it front of the train. I talk to people afterward to see if I could figure out if we failed him somehow. From what I could tell people better than me, more compassionate than fearful anyway, bent over backwards to try and be there for him. He chose, or did not know how to chose anything else, not to receive the help.
I’ve been telling Jackie I’m waiting for the Zoloft to kick in. To her, it sounds like a choice I’m making. Yesterday she asked me if I was still on my island, giving me the metaphor to describe it. Immediately I saw the island, deserted, bare, and surrounded by treacherous waters breaking on the rocks. I’m still here and I don’t know how to get off. It’s a perpetually gloomy place, with occasional barrages of thunder and lightening. Do you know that opening for ”Mystery” on public television where it’s a graveyard and there’s thunder and lightening and there’s a damsel running back and forth going, ”Oohhhh. Oohhhhh,” really plaintive and forlorn like? That’s sort of what it’s like, if you take all the humor out of it.
So I’m here waiting wondering if I really let my self feel if I’ll just start sobbing and cry all over my laptop enough to short it out. I’m making jokes. I’ve got a very dark sense of humor. I’ve often said, maybe not so bluntly, I make jokes when the alternative is sobbing, when my feelings of helplessness and despair are ready to overwhelm. I’ve known for a long time now, the sobbing I carry very close to the surface, maybe so I can keep an eye on it, so it can’t sneak up on me in public. I’ve learned to compensate in sociably acceptable ways.
That makes me wonder how much of myself I’ve missed. Maybe this is where the grief comes from, the parts of myself I’ve learned to indiscriminately kill. Christianity teaches me I supposed to die to self. It never occurred to me the alternative to that is what I have learned to do, rather then letting Christ put to death those thing that keep me from being fully who I was intended to be, I’ve taken a slash and burn approach. It is no wonder I perpetually feel the desire to weep.
Don’t get me wrong. I know there are many things in this world besides me to weep for. I don’t know maybe we depressives view them as a black hole of grief we dare not get to close to. I know I do guard myself. Vigilance is something I am used to, an old habit hard to put down. Maybe that’s what I’m waiting for, lowering my guard and finally letting others into places not even I’ve been to?
A while ago, before I was married, almost a decade ago, I remember God saying to me, “It’ time.” When I met Jackie, I thought, that’s what He was talking about. Then I thought it was getting married. I keep thinking, oh, that’s what it was about, and then a little time goes by and I realizes it was just another step along the road to a place he will show me, each step needing a bit more faith than the last one. I don’t know. Maybe this is what He was talking about, time to look at these last dark spaces inside me. Even as I write that I know they are not the last ones, just the next ones.
If there’s always more, maybe the Zoloft is like the seventh day. Maybe they’ll give me enough peace with myself I can begin to accept the Sabbath, a day of rest. That would be nice.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Resurection
I use to work at the North Suburban Postal Facility, a two-city block long mail warehouse in River Grove, Illinois. Sometimes I’d work in a cubical in front of a compartmented stand with slots for all the north suburban zip codes. Somebody would come by with trays of miscellaneous mail that did not get sorted by the letter sorting machines and I would sort it manually. If you’ve read Post Office by Charles Bukowski you have some idea of what that was like, but that’s a story for another time.
I think of the brain as somewhat like that stand of compartmented slots, each with a category to store information. In the stand at the PO was a miscellaneous slot for mail I didn’t know what else to do with, say a piece of mail from Peotone, clearly not north suburban. I figure there’s a miscellaneous slot in my brain, too, for information I don’t know how to categorize.
I used to have what I called blank spots. In them I was very confused and I couldn’t figure out what was going on with me at all. When I came out of them, days, weeks, sometimes months later, it seemed I had figured things out I didn’t know before they started. Eventually I figured the blank spots were my brain shutting down because the miscellaneous slot in my head had got to full. At the PO, someone came around to empty the micsilanious slot every now and then. In my head I figured the way it got emptied was for my brain to kind of go off line, except for the thing that got me through my day, and reexamine all the information and experiences and reshuffle and make new categories to fit and explain the new information and how it related to the old.
Thinking this, I had an idea. What If I could induce the blank spots artificially? Wouldn’t that make me figure out thing faster? I decided to give it a try. Better living through chemistry, I figured. Work or not, it became my rationalization for getting extremely high every now and then, once or twice a year or so, until the experiments gradually merged with my everyday life style. I ended up in Wisconsin in a crummy farmhouse with retreads on a car that wouldn’t start without a jump. For a while though, from my perspective the self-induced black spots actually seemed to work.
A word of warning, though; along with the bad car in Wisconsin, I figure I lost ten years of economic productivity doing this, so it is not something I would recommend, not to mention the risks involved when not thinking clearly in the blank spots and the very real possibility of overdose. I consider myself very lucky to have survived my experimentation and one of the reasons I undertook them is I probably figured it would be no great loss if my brain shut down permanently.
That said, I hadn’t noticed a blank spot for a very long time, decades. Now, looking back, I think I’ve been in one for quite some time and I’m wondering if it started with the first stroke. If this is so, the implications are quite astonishing, especially when I think about the Christian walk and brokenness and resurrection. Add to this the Zoloft, which is, for the first time, supposed to take away the negative aspect I’ve been putting on things all my life, and give me the ability to concentrate more and think more clearly. This puts me on the verge of the biggest paradigm shift and leap of understanding I’ve ever been through.
I find it quite exciting and interesting to be in the unusual position of witnessing my own resurrection.
I think of the brain as somewhat like that stand of compartmented slots, each with a category to store information. In the stand at the PO was a miscellaneous slot for mail I didn’t know what else to do with, say a piece of mail from Peotone, clearly not north suburban. I figure there’s a miscellaneous slot in my brain, too, for information I don’t know how to categorize.
I used to have what I called blank spots. In them I was very confused and I couldn’t figure out what was going on with me at all. When I came out of them, days, weeks, sometimes months later, it seemed I had figured things out I didn’t know before they started. Eventually I figured the blank spots were my brain shutting down because the miscellaneous slot in my head had got to full. At the PO, someone came around to empty the micsilanious slot every now and then. In my head I figured the way it got emptied was for my brain to kind of go off line, except for the thing that got me through my day, and reexamine all the information and experiences and reshuffle and make new categories to fit and explain the new information and how it related to the old.
Thinking this, I had an idea. What If I could induce the blank spots artificially? Wouldn’t that make me figure out thing faster? I decided to give it a try. Better living through chemistry, I figured. Work or not, it became my rationalization for getting extremely high every now and then, once or twice a year or so, until the experiments gradually merged with my everyday life style. I ended up in Wisconsin in a crummy farmhouse with retreads on a car that wouldn’t start without a jump. For a while though, from my perspective the self-induced black spots actually seemed to work.
A word of warning, though; along with the bad car in Wisconsin, I figure I lost ten years of economic productivity doing this, so it is not something I would recommend, not to mention the risks involved when not thinking clearly in the blank spots and the very real possibility of overdose. I consider myself very lucky to have survived my experimentation and one of the reasons I undertook them is I probably figured it would be no great loss if my brain shut down permanently.
That said, I hadn’t noticed a blank spot for a very long time, decades. Now, looking back, I think I’ve been in one for quite some time and I’m wondering if it started with the first stroke. If this is so, the implications are quite astonishing, especially when I think about the Christian walk and brokenness and resurrection. Add to this the Zoloft, which is, for the first time, supposed to take away the negative aspect I’ve been putting on things all my life, and give me the ability to concentrate more and think more clearly. This puts me on the verge of the biggest paradigm shift and leap of understanding I’ve ever been through.
I find it quite exciting and interesting to be in the unusual position of witnessing my own resurrection.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Invisible Monkeys
Depression is something I have acknowledged fighting all my life. My stroke has exasperated these struggles and so I sought a prescription of sertraline, the generic name for Zoloft. A friend of mine in my men’s group mentioned it after hearing of my emotional response to my wife and having a similar response helped by the anti-depressant.
My stroke rehab doctor prescribed 25MG a day and recommended I see a psychiatrist in conjunction with it. I figured why pass on free therapy from the VA?
I had my evaluation on Monday. It was, to say the least, an eye opener. The first thing the psychologist I met wit first mentioned is that this is not my first stroke. The MRI’s I had taken while in the hospital showed a previous stroke on the frontal lobe. Apparently, sometimes they don’t tell you. It was the neurologist decision, I assume, so as not to freak me out. My rehab doctor did not know. There is no way to tell when it was, only that it was old; three months, three years, they can’t tell.
I’ve talked to my wife about it and we think it happened during the spring of last year, when I lost all my patience and started feeling really tired all the time. I also remember some confusion at work and an inability to concentrate.
The previous stroke was revelation enough, but it was also suggested that I have long term, low-level depression. It was first broached as a possible negative aspect in my view of things, the question being weather it was long term or brought on by the strokes. In the men’s work I do we often as each other to try something on, to see if a thing fits. As soon as I heard it, I knew it fit.
I can best describe it as a nagging question, a constant asking if I am enough, and the answerer being, not quite. You can see where the fatigue comes from, the never ending striving for something jut out of reach. Is it Sisyphus? Or is he the guy continually rolling the rock up the hill? I looked it up. He’s the rock guy. All day long her rolls the rock up a hill. Every morning it’s back at the bottom. I think there another guy chained just out of the reach of food. Same difference. A never-ending, never fruitful labor.
The new information answerers a lot of questions for my wife and me, like why, from my wife’s point of view, I went off the rail last spring. I didn’t catch it. I notice now in retrospect. For my wife, she doesn’t have to take my moodiness and outburst of anger personal. It’s a brain thing. Chemical imbalance, maybe. She knows it’s not directed at her.
For me, I can understand she was not making everything up and, with the sertraline; I have something of an answer on the horizon. I’m actually beginning to be excited about it. It seems I don’t know what it’s like not to be depressed, that learning to live with it, to function in a basically sociably acceptable way is not the same thing as living. I had been asking myself why I couldn’t figure this marriage stuff out, why I couldn’t get hold of my emotions.
I don’t like finding out I’ve been carrying this low level depression thing all my life, like an invisible addiction I couldn’t quite make out, a nagging suspicion I’d catch glimpses of every once in a while, a monkey on you back is one thing. An invisible one is something else. There’s something wrong but you can’t quite put your finger on it. You suspect sometimes you’re just making shit up to give yourself an excuse. I recognize knowing is better than not, but I feel like the hole I sometimes suspected I was in just got confirmed and it’s a lot deeper than I thought it was.
The up side is the sertraline. They increased my prescription to 50MG. I’m wary of it, but they say it’s supposed to help; it addresses the chemical imbalance or whatever. I have this idea that it’s going to fix the not quite, that for the first time in my life I’ll like myself with out reservation, that I’ll be able to trust myself, that my thoughts will be clear and not a confusing jumble I’m forever trying to sort out. That’s a scary thought. I think I’m on the edge of it. But I’m not there yet and I don’t know how to live over there and I feel like for the first time I’m about to find out what I really think.
Ready or not, hear I come.
My stroke rehab doctor prescribed 25MG a day and recommended I see a psychiatrist in conjunction with it. I figured why pass on free therapy from the VA?
I had my evaluation on Monday. It was, to say the least, an eye opener. The first thing the psychologist I met wit first mentioned is that this is not my first stroke. The MRI’s I had taken while in the hospital showed a previous stroke on the frontal lobe. Apparently, sometimes they don’t tell you. It was the neurologist decision, I assume, so as not to freak me out. My rehab doctor did not know. There is no way to tell when it was, only that it was old; three months, three years, they can’t tell.
I’ve talked to my wife about it and we think it happened during the spring of last year, when I lost all my patience and started feeling really tired all the time. I also remember some confusion at work and an inability to concentrate.
The previous stroke was revelation enough, but it was also suggested that I have long term, low-level depression. It was first broached as a possible negative aspect in my view of things, the question being weather it was long term or brought on by the strokes. In the men’s work I do we often as each other to try something on, to see if a thing fits. As soon as I heard it, I knew it fit.
I can best describe it as a nagging question, a constant asking if I am enough, and the answerer being, not quite. You can see where the fatigue comes from, the never ending striving for something jut out of reach. Is it Sisyphus? Or is he the guy continually rolling the rock up the hill? I looked it up. He’s the rock guy. All day long her rolls the rock up a hill. Every morning it’s back at the bottom. I think there another guy chained just out of the reach of food. Same difference. A never-ending, never fruitful labor.
The new information answerers a lot of questions for my wife and me, like why, from my wife’s point of view, I went off the rail last spring. I didn’t catch it. I notice now in retrospect. For my wife, she doesn’t have to take my moodiness and outburst of anger personal. It’s a brain thing. Chemical imbalance, maybe. She knows it’s not directed at her.
For me, I can understand she was not making everything up and, with the sertraline; I have something of an answer on the horizon. I’m actually beginning to be excited about it. It seems I don’t know what it’s like not to be depressed, that learning to live with it, to function in a basically sociably acceptable way is not the same thing as living. I had been asking myself why I couldn’t figure this marriage stuff out, why I couldn’t get hold of my emotions.
I don’t like finding out I’ve been carrying this low level depression thing all my life, like an invisible addiction I couldn’t quite make out, a nagging suspicion I’d catch glimpses of every once in a while, a monkey on you back is one thing. An invisible one is something else. There’s something wrong but you can’t quite put your finger on it. You suspect sometimes you’re just making shit up to give yourself an excuse. I recognize knowing is better than not, but I feel like the hole I sometimes suspected I was in just got confirmed and it’s a lot deeper than I thought it was.
The up side is the sertraline. They increased my prescription to 50MG. I’m wary of it, but they say it’s supposed to help; it addresses the chemical imbalance or whatever. I have this idea that it’s going to fix the not quite, that for the first time in my life I’ll like myself with out reservation, that I’ll be able to trust myself, that my thoughts will be clear and not a confusing jumble I’m forever trying to sort out. That’s a scary thought. I think I’m on the edge of it. But I’m not there yet and I don’t know how to live over there and I feel like for the first time I’m about to find out what I really think.
Ready or not, hear I come.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Rau Wood
Rau Wood
For the past several years I have been a part of a weekend Men’s retreat held mostly at the Rau Wood Retreat Center on the banks of the South Harpeth River west of Nashville, near Franklin, Tennessee. On May 1st, Saturday about one o’clock, half way through our retreat, the lights went out at Rau Wood. This gave us time to pause and asses the situation, take note of the rising river, current Doppler radar, a massive line of rain storms coming at us.
Scott, our designated leader for the weekend, made the call. We would leave. I thought the decision premature. I was not the only one. But it was Scott’s call. There was no dissention. We had thirty-one staff, and ten, what we call disciples. We bill the weekend, more or less, as an initiation into Christian manhood. Since we started, over 160 men have gone through the weekend.
It was a chaotic departure in the downpour. Later that day, on the news, I would hear it called a once in 500 years rain. We sent the disciples on ahead to a grade school one of the staff leaders worked at in Franklin. We loaded up cars, suv’s and pick-ups, with as much of our gear as we could; we left five or six guys behind to finish packing up. I got in the back seat with Scott and Steve. The most direct route was a straight shot up highway 96. Scott and Steve were locals and, knowing the roads, chose a different route over higher ground. I sat in the back staring out the window at roadside ditches turned into rivers, occasionally crossing over the road. A half an hour after we left, those who remained behind, with water beginning to come into the kitchen of the main building were we all met, abandon what was left of our equipment and gear and drove out through knee deep rushing water while they still could. About a half hour later the South Harpeth River reached record flood stage, inundating the Rau Wood Retreat Center.
After about a three and a half hour interruption, with tornado sirens going off and rain pounding on the roof of the school, figuring we were in the safest place we could be, we went on, as best we could, with our retreat activities. They stopped for the night that Saturday around midnight. We sent our disciples to one of the local staff’s house near by. Closed roads were an issue. Then we searched all the cars for something very important we could not find. The search of cars and trucks and our trailer was fruitless. Most of us scattered to different local houses and a group of four, in the best suv for the job, went back to Rau Wood.
They could not make it all the way in as a huge tree had fallen across the long gravel drive. The main building, where the staff slept, was full of mud. Water had come up to the light switches, maybe five feet. Our sound system was trashed, as was a motor scooter. In the kitchen the refrigerators were on their sides and an island counter was shoved against a wall. The two-story, log bunkhouse was missing two outside walls and the upper story, where the disciples would have slept, was sagging down. The four who went back did not find what they went to look for. They only found devastation.
We met back at the school at 9:00 AM, Sunday morning. Considering what we’d lost, we thought the disciples would want to end the weekend. Unanimously, they chose to complete it. Some of us tried to go back to Rau Wood. We all failed to make it because of closed roads due to flooding and a mudslide on 96. The scope of the ongoing disaster was becoming apparent. A good section of Franklin was flooded, water rushed over the roads at every turn. It was still raining like mad. I 24 and I 40 were closed. There was a video of a building floating down one of the interstate pushing cars out of its way and braking up next to an inundated semi.
We finished our retreat, ending on time at one o’clock in the afternoon. It was a good weekend for the disciples. I was supposed to fly out at six-thirty that evening. Reports were that all the magor roads were closed and the authorities were telling people to stay off the streets. Flash floods were predicted in three states. Rivers and creeks were raging and rising over their banks at record levels everywhere.
Another staff guy from Kentucky was going to try and make it home in his pick-up. He had to go by the airport. Some flights were getting out. He offered me a lift. I took it. Things were still getting worse and if I declined the offer I didn’t know when I’d get out. We all said our good-bys, half of us not knowing if we could get home, some of the locals not knowing what they’d find when they got there.
Trying to make it to the airport, in retrospect, was a stupid thing to do. Route after route was blocked by high rushing water. We made contact with two staff guys who had made it out to I 65 by car and they told us how they went. We made it to the interstate airport. It was drizzling. Many flights were canceled. My flight took off about forty-five minutes late.
I’ve seen current pictures of Rau Wood. The only thing left of the bunkhouse, a rather substantial log building from the 20’s, was the foundation. I keep wondering what would have happened if the power had not gone out when it did. I imagine someone noticing the water creeping over the floor, the forty of us braving the strong current to take refuge in the second story of the bunkhouse, and the exterior below us giving way to the rushing water and our weight bringing the second story down. Though I did not see it, the image of that building collapsing, I keep seeing over and over. Images of Franklin flooded and Nashville flooding, water rushing over the roads, keep running through my head. I hope they stop soon.
For the past several years I have been a part of a weekend Men’s retreat held mostly at the Rau Wood Retreat Center on the banks of the South Harpeth River west of Nashville, near Franklin, Tennessee. On May 1st, Saturday about one o’clock, half way through our retreat, the lights went out at Rau Wood. This gave us time to pause and asses the situation, take note of the rising river, current Doppler radar, a massive line of rain storms coming at us.
Scott, our designated leader for the weekend, made the call. We would leave. I thought the decision premature. I was not the only one. But it was Scott’s call. There was no dissention. We had thirty-one staff, and ten, what we call disciples. We bill the weekend, more or less, as an initiation into Christian manhood. Since we started, over 160 men have gone through the weekend.
It was a chaotic departure in the downpour. Later that day, on the news, I would hear it called a once in 500 years rain. We sent the disciples on ahead to a grade school one of the staff leaders worked at in Franklin. We loaded up cars, suv’s and pick-ups, with as much of our gear as we could; we left five or six guys behind to finish packing up. I got in the back seat with Scott and Steve. The most direct route was a straight shot up highway 96. Scott and Steve were locals and, knowing the roads, chose a different route over higher ground. I sat in the back staring out the window at roadside ditches turned into rivers, occasionally crossing over the road. A half an hour after we left, those who remained behind, with water beginning to come into the kitchen of the main building were we all met, abandon what was left of our equipment and gear and drove out through knee deep rushing water while they still could. About a half hour later the South Harpeth River reached record flood stage, inundating the Rau Wood Retreat Center.
After about a three and a half hour interruption, with tornado sirens going off and rain pounding on the roof of the school, figuring we were in the safest place we could be, we went on, as best we could, with our retreat activities. They stopped for the night that Saturday around midnight. We sent our disciples to one of the local staff’s house near by. Closed roads were an issue. Then we searched all the cars for something very important we could not find. The search of cars and trucks and our trailer was fruitless. Most of us scattered to different local houses and a group of four, in the best suv for the job, went back to Rau Wood.
They could not make it all the way in as a huge tree had fallen across the long gravel drive. The main building, where the staff slept, was full of mud. Water had come up to the light switches, maybe five feet. Our sound system was trashed, as was a motor scooter. In the kitchen the refrigerators were on their sides and an island counter was shoved against a wall. The two-story, log bunkhouse was missing two outside walls and the upper story, where the disciples would have slept, was sagging down. The four who went back did not find what they went to look for. They only found devastation.
We met back at the school at 9:00 AM, Sunday morning. Considering what we’d lost, we thought the disciples would want to end the weekend. Unanimously, they chose to complete it. Some of us tried to go back to Rau Wood. We all failed to make it because of closed roads due to flooding and a mudslide on 96. The scope of the ongoing disaster was becoming apparent. A good section of Franklin was flooded, water rushed over the roads at every turn. It was still raining like mad. I 24 and I 40 were closed. There was a video of a building floating down one of the interstate pushing cars out of its way and braking up next to an inundated semi.
We finished our retreat, ending on time at one o’clock in the afternoon. It was a good weekend for the disciples. I was supposed to fly out at six-thirty that evening. Reports were that all the magor roads were closed and the authorities were telling people to stay off the streets. Flash floods were predicted in three states. Rivers and creeks were raging and rising over their banks at record levels everywhere.
Another staff guy from Kentucky was going to try and make it home in his pick-up. He had to go by the airport. Some flights were getting out. He offered me a lift. I took it. Things were still getting worse and if I declined the offer I didn’t know when I’d get out. We all said our good-bys, half of us not knowing if we could get home, some of the locals not knowing what they’d find when they got there.
Trying to make it to the airport, in retrospect, was a stupid thing to do. Route after route was blocked by high rushing water. We made contact with two staff guys who had made it out to I 65 by car and they told us how they went. We made it to the interstate airport. It was drizzling. Many flights were canceled. My flight took off about forty-five minutes late.
I’ve seen current pictures of Rau Wood. The only thing left of the bunkhouse, a rather substantial log building from the 20’s, was the foundation. I keep wondering what would have happened if the power had not gone out when it did. I imagine someone noticing the water creeping over the floor, the forty of us braving the strong current to take refuge in the second story of the bunkhouse, and the exterior below us giving way to the rushing water and our weight bringing the second story down. Though I did not see it, the image of that building collapsing, I keep seeing over and over. Images of Franklin flooded and Nashville flooding, water rushing over the roads, keep running through my head. I hope they stop soon.
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