happiness

how to be depressed

"Depression was, indeed, the hand of a friend trying to press me down to the ground on which it was safe to stand--the ground of my own truth, my own nature with its complex mix of limits and gifts, liabilities and assets, darkness and light."
- Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

I don't think I've ever been "clinically" depressed. Well, maybe I have, but it certainly didn't feel clinical. It felt morbid, cosmic, and unavoidably essential. When I was thirteen, my parents split for the umpteenth and final time and a few months later, my dad brought it to my attention that I'd been wearing the same hockey jersey for weeks and that I needed to start doing the dishes again. I was definitely depressed.

And there was the dark night after Magic Man flew back to London and the apartment felt like a keyless heartbreak hotel with barred windows. But my last extended dark night was about ten years ago. It was a new depth of crushing aloneness. Another break up, this time with Hot-but-Needy Actor Man in LA (I was equally needy, duh,) which triggered an exorcism of self doubt and psychic bile that, being thirty-something and ambitious, I just needed to get out of my system. {Note: it's often not the actual loss that causes the depression - it's all the crap that's tied up in it that you needed to deal with anyway.}

In that spell of depression I wore the same pair of butt-ripped Levi's for weeks. I'd lie in my backyard at two in the morning in nowhere New Mexico, smoking Marlboro's, looking up at the stars, wondering about the fatality of scorpion bites, and praying for aliens to abduct me. {Not joking in any way.} I cried every single day, sometimes twice a day, for weeks. I felt profoundly unheard...empty. As I'd fall asleep I felt as though chunks of my being were decomposing into the bed. It was a brutal ordeal of the psyche, but I knew I was being reborn. I did have faith that whatever new face was emerging, she would eventually smile back at me.

I learned a thousand subtle and mighty things about Life from those existential passages, but what I learned about depression itself is that, the more you resist it, the longer it lasts. When depressed, I find it's best to just be...depressed. Happiness returns more quickly when you give yourself permission to be blue...or any shade of black you need to be. (more...)