I missed you, too.

I don’t know how to describe this thing in me, this thing I have lived with all my life. I don’t know if I should even try. Regardless of the validity of my perspective on my life, the one thing I can lay claim to is that I am survivor of depression. The duration and course of the illness has not only taken a toll on me, but everyone around me. It still profoundly shapes my relationships and the course of my life. One of the tenants of depression is isolation. Real or perceived, there is a ‘disconnect’ between the person experiencing depression and the rest of the world. My personal experience is no one fully recovers from this; even when engaged with others, there is part of them that is still held apart. The barriers frequently seem insurmountable and every interaction is a daily exercise in overcoming the urge to retreat. The expectations of others, again, especially past players, valid or not, tend to reinforce the barriers, guaranteeing all relationships stay static at best, or increasing the separation at worse. This is not a complaint. The damage toll on all relationships, existing or prior, is what it is. Few people can let go of their grievances. Even in letting go of grievances, which is a daily affair, probably why it is written “take up you cross daily,” there are those who want to remind you of how often and how much you have failed. (To pick up a cross, apparently you have to put everything else down. If you didn’t know, crosses are unbelievably heavy. (And I am not asking for sympathy or for anyone to help me carry mine. It’s my burden, my own personal journey, and I am doing the best I can.))

 

All of us have certain strengths we employ to overcome and survive in the present insanity. I say present, and I would add ‘collective’ insanity, because there is no escaping the fact that present day society if F*&#’ing nuts. The very technology that increases the opportunity to connect decreases the actual ability to engage because with increases in opportunity there is also an increase in expectation that there will be correlated increase in reasonable discourse, and that the other will initiate. Few people are engaging in rational, human discourse, which has been in decline before the invention of cell phones and facebook. I am not blaming. I recognize I have participated in my own decline in civil, social discourse, some of it necessarily so. I am not asking for it to be repaired. I made choices, on an emotional level, in order to better survive.

 

“Shaming” is a part of this thing I am presently exploring. Shame is more than the guilt a person holds for the failures they secretly or publicly own, but is also how “love” is used against a person as the other players employ manipulative tactics to get their needs met and or express their anger, valid grievances, of how their needs weren’t met in this dynamic engagement we call “family and modern life.” It’s funny, isn’t it, how we all promote freedom until someone pursues that privilege in a way that takes them further afield from someone else’s agenda.

 

Sometimes survival seems insufficient, but, there is no alternative. I survive daily in small increments not because I want to, or I have to, but because I haven’t found a better way to do it. And believe me, I have spent no small amount of my personal resources studying this thing called ‘health’ just so I could do it marginally better. I suspect just like everyone else, I am micro-managing my life on a daily basis coping the best I can just to make this present moment work. It is also amazing how precarious it all seems and I have frequently been at the edge of saying ‘screw it’ let it fall as it may. I meet each day with as much humility as I can muster, I reflect as much love and joy throughout my day as I can, and at the end of the day, I return to the solitude of my room where I re-group and prepare to do it again. If I have neglected friend or family, it isn’t because of hate, or that I am clinging to past grievances, but because I am doing the best that I can with what I have. I am doing so much better, qualitatively and quantitatively, than I have ever done. I experience a range of emotions from joy to profound loneliness. Just because I am healthier than I was, that doesn’t mean that I have the strength of voice to yell across the chasms that have formed in the process of surviving that I can hold a reasonable, positive discourse with you. And if you’re the type to hurl stones or spears every time I am approach the abyss between us, you guarantee I will retreat. (This is clearly about me and my response to someone specific, but if you know someone with depression, you can apply this to them, if not everyone. As long you have an agenda or an expectation in how other will or should respond, you’re not embracing where they are, or how difficult it might be for them to be heard over your own broadcast.) I do not retreat, hang up the phone, because I am a coward and can’t tolerate anger or disparagement, or because I don’t care, or because I don’t hold love, but because, in that moment, I am trying to survive and I have limited time and resources, and I am suffering more than you. I hear that you’re suffering. Yay. That means you still love.

 

If the Serenity Prayer is a measure of success, then I am doing well because I am letting go of what I know I can’t fix and leaving it to the hands of someone better than I. I accept the possibility that perhaps I am just avoiding or delaying due to the fact I don’t know how to do this better. Then again, isn’t that the very definition of surrendering, accepting, the ‘things you can’t change?’ If you’re mad at me because I failed to live up to your standards, again YAY! you. I am not where you are. I may never be where you are. But here is another part of this truth. I didn’t evolve in a vacuum. Every single person in my life has contributed to this present way of being, for better or worse. Do we even use ‘for better or worse’ anymore? Again, not complaining. In this dance of life I got spun out and sped up and my present orbit has me so far out from where I was that I could be the poster boy for Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” I am not even unhappy about it. It is what is. The way I see it, yeah, it’s lonely out in space burning my fuse up here alone, but it’s a spectacular view.

 

From this height, I have learned we all suffer. We all fail. We all do the best we can. I am sometimes unhappy because I feel alone, and I am reminded of that when I reach out and find nothing in common other than we shared a moment twenty years ago. That and there is time delay in delivering messages this far out in space. (Translation: you may tell me something, but I may not hear it, process it, till after the conversation has concluded.) That’s significant. There was a time when I was present there and available in the ‘now’ and it wasn’t good and so we all diverged and that was our story and not all stories are Disney where we end up finding our peace and coming back together. That’s a lovely dream, it’s why I still go to movies, but that’s not us. I have no regrets, only love and admiration that we made it this far, because there were many a moments when I nearly gave up. Serious giving up, like marrying death happy dying serious. I have gratitude for the opportunities, the success and failure of the things we tried. Again, I think I am better man for those experiences; i can accept I am just a different person. The time to grieve for me was yesterday. The person you knew is gone. What survives is never the person who was. He, too, is just a person I once knew. It’s not a sad thing, but don't take my word for it. Listen to the Beatles, “In My Life,” and remember, not with sorrow, but with the promise of love renewed, accepting that it can never be what it was. I hear your complaint. I missed you, too, ah so long ago.