These journal entries from 1996 are part of my long ongoing struggle against depression. At this time I was still married to Dana.
February 13
Helpful talk with Dana this afternoon. I was feeling so bad I just needed to tell him. I said the parts of my life that meant something were just drifting away, that I wanted to live but felt like I wasn’t alive. He responded by telling me about the “piscean” time in his life, when all his ideas for what he would do with his life fell apart. He spent about a year and a half in the void zone, being something of a hermit, feeling very lonely, but just waiting for answers which did, finally, begin “to drift in.” The answers had to do with seeing an activity in terms of what he got out of it, or how it transformed him, instead of how he would fit into society, or make a contribution. He talked about exploring the emptiness to see its shape, that the shape of the emptiness is an answer to the question. I said I felt that there wasn’t any emptiness, that it was all clogged with “clum,” that there wasn’t room for anything new to come in. He said that sounded like old things, projects, structures, that used to work for me but don’t any more. He talked about letting go. I said I try to let go, but the stuff is still around. He said it sounds like you’re trying to get rid of it, and I saw that I was assuming that if I had really let go, the stuff would be gone. But no, I can let go and it may still be here. It’s like my assumption that if I could really “be with” a negative feeling it would dissolve or change. Not necessarily. So it looks like I’m doing fine, trying different things, distracting myself occasionally, but mostly trying to just be with myself, practicing not abandoning myself in the face of discomfort and boredom. Sigh.
Breathe, relax, you’re doing fine.
“Piscean” refers to Pisces, the Fish, the last sign of the zodiac.
What Dana says about wanting to find an activity that feeds him or transforms him, instead of one that has to do with fitting into society or make a contribution, was something I didn’t begin to understand until I saw the difference between my motivation for “Written in Blood” and my motivation for Neskaya.
“Breathe, relax, you’re doing fine” is a mantra they gave us at Kripalu.
February 14
I think the talk with Dana helped a lot. I feel more patient and gentle toward my depression. The idea of it’s being part of a 28-year cycle, which seems like a kind of biorhythm, makes it appear to be something I have to live through, rather than something I have to do something about, a natural process that I have to manage as best I can. Dana’s description of his experience, how everything fell apart, how he stayed in “neutral” for a while, how answers finally began to drift in, how his life had changed in major ways — this gives me hope that I’m doing something similar, and will emerge similarly transformed.
Dana also reminded me about structural tension, how I don’t have to know the process in order to heal. I see that I’ve been trying to discover/figure out what is causing the depression in order to know what to do about it. It was comforting to discover yesterday that I did in fact want to live. That was obscured by the fact that I felt that I wasn’t living and didn’t know what to do about it, as though “If you really wanted to live you’d know what to do.” That unhelpful and invalidating attitude infuriates me, and I use it against myself all the time, introjected from parents who didn’t want to take the time and trouble to explain things to their child.
“Structural Tension” is a term from a course in how to create what you want in your life. The idea is to hold current reality — what’s really going on right now — together with your vision of what you want to see instead. Just holding them together, without thinking about the process to get from one to the other, is what works. If you think of a process, you immediately limit the possibilities.
Well, that’s one source for the depression, my parents’ repressed material that they never worked through. So I have to work through it to free myself, and I do this in therapy.
I find it fascinating that, back in 1996, before I ever heard the evidence that emotional stuff that isn’t worked through gets handed down the generations, I somehow knew it. This is my intuition, that I think I don’t have, because if I said something out of intuition, Mother told me I was wrong.
Another source is if trauma alters brain chemistry. Well, there are too many questions in that one. It hasn’t been proved yet that trauma alters the brain, nor that it does it permanently. I’m still not convinced that I was traumatized — o but I do fear that trauma has permanently altered my brain which is why I’m considering taking an anti-depressant. And, even if trauma alters the brain “permanently” there are still possibilities of healing, through “miracle,” through spiritual practice, through continuum.
My mixed response to the idea that I was traumatized is because I was under the illusion that the violence of the event caused the trauma, but in fact it’s the inability of the organism to process the event that results in trauma.
I’m still feeling quiet and patient with myself, no longer pushing to get out of the depression. That feels a little better, easier, the misery doesn’t feel so heavy. More like a soft, quiet, cloudy day.
I see that Dana, who wasn’t dealing with alcoholic parents and early trauma, was able to use this process that didn’t work for me.