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.