What I Learned from Depression

I recently had a difficult period of depression, triggered by financial stress and the upheaval and questions it forced me to look at. Here’s what I learned from that process:

1. I set out to talk with friends and family in order to get perspective on some difficult choices I’m facing, choices that were plainly depressing my nervous system. The process turned out to be more important than the decisions. It has been extremely rewarding to speak and listen to so many respected friends, family, and loved ones.

2. I’ve put a lot of energy into cultivating relationships with loving and thoughtful people of diverse ages and life experience. This is now a resource of astonishing quality and value. Interestingly, none of these people are worried about me, nor do they need me to accomplish anything important. They already love me. I don’t have to keep earning their respect over and over.

3. I have a tendency to believe I’m over-responsible for the wellbeing of myself and others. I have a very real sense that I owe the world something authentic, lovely, and smart. This is partly the result of my skills and privileges, but also unconscious habits I developed as an infant when my mom suddenly died. It helps me to recognize this, because the world does not operate according to my plans. In other words, bad or uncomfortable situations don’t arise simply because I made poor choices. It’s because life is unpredictable. Blaming myself for the outcome is sort of self-important.

4. I’m superstitious. I could say spiritual or religious, but superstitious is helpful to me because it sounds mundane. Point is, I sometimes think that I make good choices in life and therefore deserve some sort of spiritual or ethical reward. Good things and feelings. Support from on high. This idea is rampant in every religious and spiritual tradition I’ve encountered. It’s the basis of prayer in most cases I’m familiar with. I’ve encountered a lot, and the essence is also rampant in atheist circles, which I also embrace. I really value this stuff, and on rich and deep levels.

I look at spirituality from an evolutionary standpoint, and while that sounds a little pretentious or weird, what I mean is that I recognize that humans have a need or a tendency to believe in an invisible purpose or meaning of life. It’s almost impossible to not think or feel this, and it exists in every culture now and throughout history. True or not doesn’t matter so much to me. It’s a quality that is deeply rooted in us, and it’s a mistake to ignore it.

It’s also, on occasion, a mistake to give it too much attention. I call this superstitious. I’m particularly this way, because my organism has a difficult time forgetting things. Once I set a task or believe a symbol has a purpose – I have a very hard time putting it aside. This is a gift of mine, the reason I’ve done some good and cool things. But I am often trapped in this superstition too. This is why I can’t work very deep with dogma, belief, horoscopes, psychological inventories, enneagrams, rites or rituals, magic, bibles, prayers, angels, songs, mantras, etc. If you tell me that I’m something, I have a tendency to believe it. Or at least wrestle with its truth. It’s worse when accompanied with charts and algorithms. This happens to children too. People do this to children all the time.

So I’ve taught myself to be very careful not to believe people when they lovingly and carefully tell me that I’m an “Aquarius” or “soul” or whatever else it might be. Other people seem to transcend these types a little more easily, and good for them. Some turn to outright anger. I’m just confused about who and what I am. The word I have for this is superstitious. It helps me embrace the spirituality that feels important in my life, while allowing me to break through the symbolism when necessary. Not easy to do that, so I make mistakes a lot.

5. Crying and the release of painful emotions is necessary for a healthy life. Some people use the language of grief and praise, and I think that’s good language. Throughout this recent bought of depression, the transitions I made to healthier and clearer thoughts were always through tears. Not sadness. Tears. It’s absurd and wrong to toughen up and avoid it, but we have a tendency to teach each other around the age of 11 or 12 that that’s for wimps. And it gets real deep. So we need to provide outlets that teach and practice this skill at all ages. It’s far more important than fractions or cursive. Nobody would spontaneously do that either (save Euclid or Leibniz).

We need to normalize grief and tears in our families and cultures. Men in particular need this practice, and we some tough, stubbly guys to model it to young men. And old men.

6. I have a really good dog.

7. It’s reasonable of me, at 42, to work in such a way as to expect it to support me. It’s odd that I might have to say that to myself, but it’s now clear that I’ve occasionally (and more than occasionally) chosen to sacrifice my wellbeing in order to prove myself. I like intense, almost grueling challenges, and one of the toughest has been to love people, raise a daughter, feed our bodies, practice generosity, teach myself humility, develop creative pursuits, and toughen myself against rigorous weather and physical tasks – all while having modest or meagre financial resources or stability. That might have worked at 24. It’s immature at 42.

8. At the onset of my depression, and the resulting discernment, I thought my goal was to determine the right path or choice. Regardless of that choice, I’m aware that it will affect quite a few other people, and particularly the children in my life. That’s why I took it so seriously. However, it’s increasingly clear that the “right choice” isn’t the real goal. In fact, that pursuit is sort of misleading. It was one way I was participating in the internal feeling that I am uniquely responsible for others, or, put another way, that my plans are what are important. Plans are great, but I’m not in control, and neither are my plans. My real responsibility is to face my circumstances with grace, dignity, and respect for others.

Even the worst case scenario – allowing all I’ve worked toward to fall apart and crumble – might have a place or purpose at this time in my life. Allowing the children to witness me doing that with integrity might be worth more than any goal or curriculum I could dream up. In fact, it inspires me.

Children benefit from seeing adults going through struggles skillfully, like not taking it out on anyone else, including themselves. This strikes me as a very important skill for the future of the earth and humanity. It is the lesson, in my opinion, of war and climate change. We need to start teaching ourselves how to dissolve our empires, both personal and cultural, with dignity and mutual respect. Children need to learn that this is okay, because 8 or 9 billion of them are going to need this skill in the coming centuries. We need it right now. We need to learn how to be magnificent, wild, and beautiful without building such lasting and permanent treasures.

9. Silke is the love of my life. My soulmate. I already knew this, but I learn it newly all the time. I can’t believe how lucky I am.

10. My daughter is a gem. I’m proud of her and grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow alongside her. She’s hitting that tween period, and it’s so welcome. I can’t wait till she disagrees with me more. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.

11. The success of How to Tell Stories to Children confused me. I’m proud of it, and there is a ton of integrity in that book. But the success of it tricked me into thinking I was supposed to represent myself as an author.

Part of the challenge of the moment for me is financial. I’m not making ends meet, and I have a real and pressing need to earn a living from my work. Just like I need to earn a living from teaching (or whatever), I also need to earn a living from writing. Or, at least I tried.

In some ways I was surprised at how successful that endeavor was, and this tricked me. At least for a time. I have demons to wrestle with here. Probably always will. At the beginning of that book, I was just striving and shooting for the stars. I had nothing to lose and I tried anything. I don’t regret a single moment of it – because I knew then, and now, that the message in that book has beautiful integrity.

But the fruits of that effort are different. Having to face that the book traveled into 21 languages and dozens of nations and cultures (and that someone as lovely as Jane Goodall would take the time not just to read it, but recommend it). Gosh, I promise you – this is not exactly healthy for me. I wish I could say otherwise. At the very least, it caused me to be confused and occasionally whiny when I learned that I don’t really make any money from it. If you’re an aspiring writer – take this to heart.

It may be that other people handle success better. But this has definitely challenged my integrity. I get full of myself. It’s true. It’s an important challenge for me to face that in honest and humble ways. That’s real work for me. Put another way, in trying to present myself professionally, even in the awkward and sort of ridiculous ways I sometimes do, I distracted myself from some of the authenticity that allowed me to write and publish a book in the first place.

12. Reaching out to people who made a lasting impact on me has been one of the richest experiences of my life. There are people who I visit and talk to in my mind frequently. Some of these people are obvious, but frequently they’re not. Certain teachers, encounters, aunts and uncles, etc., live in me in unique and subtle ways. Ways I would never have predicted. Telling these people that I think about them and appreciate them has been very rewarding. It’s something we should cultivate and teach.

What’s especially interesting is that a lot of these people made an impression on me not because of what they said, or even some magnificent thing they did or gave to me. Most of the time, it’s because I sensed, even as a young child, that these people were real. They were authentic. They shared a presence with me that, when I reflect on it, seems to almost transcend both of us, or anything they might have said.

There’s something very mysterious here, and I have no need to label it or understand it. It’s enough to tell these people, the living people if possible, that it happened. It magnifies the impact, in palpable and (I think it’s fair to say) neurological ways. It helps us remember. As a writer, I’ve experienced this a lot, because far more valuable to me than book sales are the quick notes or emails I occasionally get from people who let me know that what I shared about life meant something to them. That real connection is always the most valuable and tender reward.

13. You can eat ginger like a vegetable, like a carrot. I think it’s doing things for my body that are very good.

14. In late high school and college I was heavily influenced by punk culture. I had a mohawk. I listened to so much screaming music that I have a taste for certain ranges and qualities of screaming voice. It’s a funny thing to say that, but if you give your heart to anything – coffee, wine, friends – you develop tastes. One of the things that attracted me to the punk ethos was this raw and ragged rebellion. I stewed in it for years, even as I attended college and studied engineering and was, by almost all measures, a good and proper citizen. I never felt destructive, and still don’t. In fact I admire almost everyone and everything, especially people who disagree with me.

But I feel a keen yearning to smile in the face of conformity. I’m not suggesting this is good or bad. Just, that’s what I did. And like all things – including my parents, diet, and first neighborhood – it influenced me.

I got away from the punk scene a few years after college, because what I noticed within it was a growing conformity within its own values and structures. Do you know what it costs to dress and act like a punk? Tons. And I don’t mean in dollars. I mean in hours and thoughts. It takes a lot to reject everything so soundly. Anyway, the point is – I still feel a strong connection to those values, but I’ve long ago rejected the symbolism.

What I’m trying to say is this – taking the initiative to speak kindly to one another, to listen and try to understand, even when we might disagree about things – that’s the most punk thing you can do. That’s real rebellion. It’s not screaming into a microphone and having good haircuts. It’s having fun and holding love in your heart for your opposition while challenging cultural norms that need growth.

We need to grow more people who feel healthy in their hearts, so that those people can face the very real impacts our cultures are having on each other and the earth. There’s a lot we’re all facing, and I mean all of us – the air, the plants, the AK-47’s, the ecosystems and frogs. There’s no solution moving forward that doesn’t involve healthy, accountable people. The most important (and rebellious) thing we can do today isn’t to point these things at each other – not the microphones, the frogs, the AK’s, or the values. It’s to live kindly, gently, and help pave the way for people and creatures who can do it even better. Let’s try.