Intersect: Hope and Despair

Every day a theme arises. Words appear on pages of the books I've got piled and shelved around my home; sometimes I choose a book at random, open it, and a passage will leap out, leading to other passages. Today my meander began with Gail Caldwell, then moved on to David Whyte, then to Dylan Thomas and on to a poem I composed yesterday.

Thomas' "force that through the green fuse drives the flower" surges up through each of us. Caldwell, in her book New Life, No Instructions, writes that "we are engineered to rise up, in every developmental sense."

We are made to aspire, like flowers and other green lives. As babies, we raise our heads, our necks, our torsos ... and then, one miraculous day, we fumble to our feet and stand. We toddle, walk, and run. A day will come when we can cradle buttercups in our hands during an amble though a wood, as I did in this photo.

Buttercups ... hope in tiny yellow bowls. Hope for spring arising through us, no matter what. Hope is a pivotal power, entwined with our vital force. Who cannot be attracted to buttercups, to the little suns that they are? To their brief perfection, to their proof of Life insisting on expression?

I write of hope today because for so long, I've felt so close to being bereft of it. Every day for about the last seven months, I have vowed to stay alive despite poverty, loneliness, and long illness and injury. The last straw seemed to be the death of my most beloved cat, Vida, who died just over six weeks ago. She was my mainstay, my closest bond, my cuddler, my bedmate. I used to joke with friends, "You know that VISA ad? -- 'VISA. It's everywhere you want to be.' My take: 'VIDA. She's everywhere you don't want her to be -- on the kitchen counter, the keyboard, the top of the fridge, the edge of the balcony!" The truth: she was everywhere I wanted her to be: in my lap, on my chest and belly, my shoulder, under the covers with me. She was my primary reason for being after I was divorced five years ago. She and I kept each other alive. After three years of deepening, unrelenting illness, her time to be freed of pain and suffering arrived. I had to make the agonizing decision to reqlinquish her, and I howled at Life: "How will I go on?"

I write to stay alive. I vow to stay alive because of how David Whyte understands despair. His book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, arrived by surprise in my mailbox last week, gifted to me by a dear friend who understands the sustaining power of the written word, and how it tethers me to life.

Whyte's thoughts on despair are unique; he uses the word "beautiful" three times in his meditation on despair. Beautiful?

He begins: "Despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go; when we feel the heart cannot break anymore, when our world or our loved ones disappear, when we feel we cannot be loved or do not deserve to be loved ... Despair is a last protection ... a necessary and seasonal state of repair." A state of repair?

We experience despair as the musty, cob-webbed cellar of our soul, a dead zone of psychic winter, a winter that we perpetuate when we refuse to admit any warmth to our lives, when we refuse to recognize that spring, like winter, is inevitable. Despair, writes Whyte, stagnates in us when we decide "that the seaons have stopped and can never turn again." We can chain ourselves in that existential cellar with a single thought, by abstracting reality into morbid fantasy, by freezing our bodies and breath, by refusing relation. Yet we are webbed and wedded into relation, even as we deny its truth. Even in despair we bond, even as we believe we cannot, when our eyes are cast only into the unlit distances of cellar-thinking, unable to see beyond the cage we have latched ourselves into.

"Despair is a difficult, a beautiful necessary, a binding understanding between human beings caught in a fierce and difficult world where half of our experience is mediated by loss, but it is a season, a waveform passing through the body, not a prison surrounding us."

Where's the key to the cage? It's in awareness ... and in one breath. Another breath. Every breath admits spring to the soul. Oxygen: the force that drives the pulsing fuse of the brain. One breath at a time allows us to pay "a profound and courageous attention ... independent of our imprisoning thoughts and stories, even strangely, in paying attention to despair itself, and the way we hold it ..."

Can we hold our despair like we might cradle a buttercup?

The best is yet to come? How about "The rest is yet to come?" -- The rest being one of two possibilities: rest as in succor, retreat, quiet. David Whyte writes that "Despair needs a certain tending ... the body left to itself will breathe, the ears will hear the first birdsong of morning or catch the leaves being touched by the wind in the trees ..."

The rest is also simply the next. What will the next moment, the next instant, bring? We cannot know ... but we can guide ourselves into possibiities. What will they be?

Every morning, I tune my ears to birdsong, and one of my favourite sensations is a breeze meeting my skin ... the breath of the world greeting the gift of sensation. At dusk, I tune in again to the birds' nesting songs, their lullabies ...

Despair has a lifespan, as White says: "A season left to itself will always move, however slowly, under its own patience, power and volition."

Volition! Momentum. One breath, one word, one aspirational thought at a time. This is where Gail Caldwell's words arrive as more sustenance:

"I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they're sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you're poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected."

Always. It's a word we often nag at, telling ourselves and others not to generalize, globalize, concoct catastrophe. But here ... always is a word of hope, of possibility.

"... if momentum is a physical version of hope, well, I've got that ... my body heaves in an absolute sense of going forward, with a kind of determination that feels like rushing water; it is the way that one throws off despair ... sometimes force is all you have, and that has to be enough. Because with just that force, according to Newton, eventually you get to someplace else. A calculus of hope and motion."

That green fuse again ...

A person whose brain and being have been mired in depression and trauma's aftermath often experiences what I call volitional paralysis. Frozen by terror, quicksanded by despair, how are we to inch our way back to vitality?

Poetry helps me. C.S. Lewis wrote that "When we read, we know we are not alone." I know that I am not alone when I read this passage from James Wright:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Break into blossom ... like a buttercup.

A buttercup among buttercups. 

You who read these words: dear buttercup, you are not alone. 

In response to fear: A Prayer for the Taking (along the road to Emmaus)

God,
take me
by the scruff
of my tremulous neck,
by the stuff
of this flawless soul
I am blind to,
and lay my withering feet
on the road.
Give me the bread
to break; make of me
the bread. Break me
of fear.
Lay me open
to the sight
of my own astonishment.
Give me my wings.
My power.
Unbind my eyes
to the living,
here in the lens
of all the death
that I see; the death
I believe my life
has become.
Shed me; rid me
of fear. It shatters
my bones; crumples
my spine. Raise me
up to my true height.
Pivot my eyes
to the glory
of May bursting
open with green.
Here, you say,
is Life.
Here, you say,
is Me.
Here, you say
as you settle my stance
on the Emmaus road,
is you. 

How to STAY when you desperately want to leave.

January can be one bloody ugly month in northern climes. Christmas has come and gone; your New Year's resolutions are probably dead in the slush; the skies and everything else in your corner of the world are grey, grey, grey.

So is your soul, and you find yourself waking up one morning, wanting only to go back to sleep ... permanently.

Today's been such a day for me.

I've felt compelled to die since I was a child. In the last eleven days or so, I've felt the chokehold of the old suicidal imperative in a way I've not experienced in over 30 years. The trigger? Being with my family for four days over Christmas -- being in a home full of loved ones, lights, dogs, food, warmth ... then coming back to being alone in an apartment that used to be the home I shared with the husband who left me over four years ago, the man whom I can't stop loving.

Coming back to face, as I have faced for exactly seven years now, a spate of illness, injury, and loss that has not relented. Seven years ago today, I fell ill with a flu that lasted three weeks. I was working full-time then, and I managed to return to work for 1.5 days at the end of January. That was it. I won't detail here what had occurred to throw me out of my life as a competent, healthy, social, viable person; I only know that exactly seven years have passed, and that a quadruple  whammy of major depression, complex PTSD, various autoimmune diseases, and a brain injury have just about totalled me.

Today I awoke to another day alone, another day with no structure, no company, no goals, no work. I made myself some lemon water for breakfast; I ate two bananas, fed my two cats, and did it all through a rageful haze -- a ferocious urge to die on this harrowing anniversary. Seven years. Seven fucking years.

I pulled on every layer of winter clothing that I have, and made myself go out for a walk. The temperature was in the -15C range, with a wind chill in the minus-mid-twenties. I noticed the buds on a magnolia bush down the street. They were intact. So was I, dammit. Upright, walking, moving against the black tide.

(Photo: Leora Wenger)

I started to think about writing this post. Started to think of how I've written other posts that urge people to STAY when all they want to do is check out for once and for all. Thought about the responsibility I carry, now that I've put that order out into the world. Thought about the people who responded to those posts, people who thanked me, people who took the idea and ran with it. One of my friends told me that a support group she's involved with -- and then another support group -- decided to use the STAY imperative as a practice.

I thought about impermanence. Thought of a line I read in a book by Pema Chodron one day while nosing through a bookstore; how I opened a certain book and read: "Impermanence protects us." Three words that blew my mind. Three words that told me, Everything is changing all the time. 

Even the suicidal imperative changes. Even the suicidal imperative is impermanent, if I choose to pull myself through and beyond it. I am typing now to save my life, and possibly yours.

While I was walking, I started to think of a list of STAYS. I'm going to list them here, and invite you to add to the list.

Far too many good souls have checked out -- have given up -- have thrown themselves over the edge between life and death. Robin Williams, one of the sweetest, most generous souls ever to have graced this planet, took his life last August. His death was a catalyst -- a tidal change agent that has galvanized people around the world to dig into why -- why -- we give in to the urge to kill ourselves.

I remember Robin and my previous STAY posts in this blog ... and I pound the keys in order to survive this day. Here's my list. Here's why I, and you, should STAY in the world for one more day, and then for one more day after today.

Give yourself permission to not do that thing you've been resolving to do for weeks, months, years. Allow yourself to have blown your New Year's resolutions, just for today. Let yourself feel as shitty as you need to feel ... without going over the edge. Let yourself feel, period. Emotion is the ventilator that will release the pressure of the thunderheads in your brain.

Run yourself a hot bath and climb into it. Cry your eyes out into the water. Tears heal. Tears release the pain. Tears are an opened valve on a pressure cooker.

MOVE. Even if it's only to take one deep breath, MOVE.

Tell someone how close to the brink you are. If you think that no one in your world wants to listen to you, tell yourself, Bullshit. Someone does want to hear you. Phone a friend. Phone your therapist if you have one. Phone your pastor. Phone a crisis line. Pray. Tell your dog or your cat. Tell someone. Ask that someone to take your hand -- literally or in imagination -- and walk you, step by step, back from the brink.

Play a certain song, and keep playing it. I've created a "Stay Alive" playlist on my computer. It includes (so far) "Have No Fear" (Bird York), "Hold On" (Tom Waits), "Love" and "Love & Hard Times" (Paul Simon), "My Declaration" (Tom Baxter), "Blackbird" (Kenny Rankin), "You Are Not Alone" (Curtis Stigers), "The Gift" (Annie Lennox), and "This Is To Mother You" (Sinead O'Connor). Create your own STAY ALIVE! playlist and play it over and over.

Find one thing to be grateful for. One. You can do it. I am grateful today that I still have a roof over my head, and heat to warm me against the winter cold. I am grateful that I have a computer, and that I can type these words. I am grateful for tea, chocolate, my cats, my friends, my grit. I am grateful that I've made it this far today. I'm grateful in advance for anyone who reads this post and  decides to stay alive.

Notice the surprises, the miracles. Those magnolia buds down the street from my apartment are miracles. They're withstanding a killing cold. After my walk, I logged on to a forum that I participate in for people who live with major depression and other disorders of mood. Somehow, a banner had been inserted above my name. The banner says, "Inside all of us is hope." One tiny leaf extends from the stem of the "p." I have no idea who did that, or how it got there. All I know is that it's there, and that it surprised me. Another surprise: an envelope I pulled from my mailbox from a literary journal I'd love to subscribe to if I had any money to do it with. On the envelope was a quote from poet Sharon Olds: "Between love and language I choose / love and language."

Remember how you've pulled your soul back from the brink before today. Think explicitly about what you did to STAY. Make a list of your STAYS. Use them. Now. 

Acknowledge that you're at rock bottom right now. Better that than at the brink of the existential abyss. At least if you tip yourself over at rock bottom, you won't fall far enough to die.

Eat. Drink water. Your brain will ease if you nourish and hydrate it.

Nestle yourself into bed with lots of blankets and pillows. If you have a teddy bear, grab it and hold on for dear life. If you have a dog or a cat, snuggle in. I have a cat who lets me kiss his belly and sweet-talk into his fur. If you have a little creature who lives with you and depends on you, think about what that creature will be left with if you die today. Then think about what that creature will be left with if you choose to live.

Choose to believe that you're not alone in this. All over the world, other people are teetering on a similar brink. Tell them to STAY. Sit right where you are and make STAY your mantra, your message to the world.

Read something beautiful. Grab a book you love and find your favourite lines in it. Commit them to memory right now. Read and repeat. My lines for this moment, from Rainer Maria Rilke: Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final. 

STAY. STAY. STAY.

I'm pulling for you. I'm pulling for me, determined to be a phoenix who will arise from this seven-year cycle, fire from the ashes. I'm pulling for us. 

Stay steps ... one step at a time.

"Step aside from it," I thought this morning. "Step aside, just a little. One step; just one step."

One step away from whatever ails and hounds you. One step towards LIFE. One step is a stay. One breath is a stay.

One step is a choice. So often, if we have been ill or injured for a long time, we feel stuck ... like an inverted November sky that refuses to move. But above that mass of grey is the sun; beyond the mass is clarity. Beneath the mass, inside your own body, is an open atmosphere: your breath. One breath is a step. One breath is a stay. One...breath. One...breath...and another. One breath at a time. Sometimes I lie down on my bed, laying one hand over my heart and another over my solar plexus. I breathe. Inbreath: "One..." Outbreath: "...breath." My body begins to warm, to pulse. Sometimes I do this to remind myself to stay; sometimes I do it because my body forgets to breathe. My autonomic nervous system has been kiboshed since I was born, and many of the most basic regulatory functions and systems are out of whack -- one being breathing. I have to remind myself to breathe several times a day. Breathe ... Stay ... Breathe ... Stay.

My dear physician, a few years ago, referred to the form my depression takes as "brainstem depression" (also known as anaclitic depression). It's been with me since infancy ... and I have to tend to the absolute basics: body temperature, breath, appetite, movement. "One step at a time" keeps me alive. "One stay at a time" reminds -- re-minds -- me to stay alive ... one step at a time away from shutdown, from paralysis, from the terrible force within my own brain that compels me to leave.

One step is a shift. One step is an act. One step is volition -- will -- moving you in another direction.

A single step. Sometimes a single step for me means that I wash one dish. It can mean that I run a hand along my cat's silken back, or smush my face into his belly, murmuring his name. It can mean grabbing one of my holy books and reading, for dear life, a poem whose beauty latches me to Life. Sometimes it means allowing myself to weep. It can be prayer -- simply a Help ... Are you there? Touch me; move me ... please. Give me a reason to stay. Often, the response from life is so simple: Eat. Nuzzle your cats. Give yourself music. Pick up the phone. Skype someone. Weep. Count your blessings, one at a time, slowly. Count them again. Know you are loved! Know it ... know it. You are still here because you have been loved. You are still here because you have loved. Tuck yourself into bed and turn on the warming blanket that your cousin gave you last Christmas. Grab a pillow; grab the teddy bear you've had forever whose nose and one eye have been repaired and replaced by someone who's loved you. Grab on. 

We are not asked to take big steps or small steps, but we are asked

to make every step a step of faith.

(The Bible, Romans 4:12)

One step ... one song. Here is one of my stay-songs:

One step ... one poem:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

Give Life your hand. 

Stay, dear heart. 

"Do you WANT to be depressed?" -- redux

Therese Borchard, author of Beyond Blue, recently headed a blog post with this question, "Do you WANT to be depressed?"

Do you, dear reader? Does anyone want to be injured or ill?

I wonder if major depression is the only condition that draws forth such an ignorant question. How often do we hear people ask others, "Do you want to have cancer? ... a broken leg? ... heart disease? ... ALS?' It seems to me that even people labelled with other conditions that we call "mental illness" aren't subject to that question ... "Do you want to have schizophrenia? Do you want to live in a state of panic? Do you want to have been traumatized?"

Of depression, if we were to play with "Do you want to be depressed?", we might also ask, "Do you want to be depleted of vitality? Do you want to live in a state of corrosive loneliness? Do you want to despise your existence? Do you want to stand far outside every circle of relation in the world?"

How would you answer these questions?

Only a person deep in the mire of major depression might answer "Yes" ... but this answer is not a natural one. We are beings, creatures, of relation. We are mammals; we are wired to bond.

To consider the question, and to answer "Yes" to it, is a symptom of depression in itself. A more apropos question, though, would be, "Do you want to be dead?"

The first article I ever read on depression -- the one that opened my eyes and began my journey to understand what I'd lived with since I was born -- was written by a psychologist named John Welwood. It was titled, "Depression as a Loss of Heart." I have no doubt that devastating heartbreak, however it comes, is one of the primary formative factors in major depression. There are as many forms of depression as there are people who suffer it. Many, many other formative factors are at play, but there is something common at the core of this condition that the World Health Organization has ranked the #2 cause of disease-related disability worldwide -- superceded only by (hmm...) heart disease.

I wonder if a primary something is heartbreak -- a devastation of bonded, loving, reciprocal relation. Think of the injuries done by humans to other humans in the infinite number of ways that we can harm one another -- from child abuse to torture and war; from bullying in the playground to callous firings at the workplace and "entertainment" that features murder, rape, and other forms of intentional harm. Think of trauma. Think of the deaths of those we love, of all the ways we leave and are left by others, and how the losses pile up over the years. Whether we know it or not, no matter how hardened to it all we might think we are, our hearts are still battered by each blow ... and our brains, master regulators that they are, resound with the damage done, wiring the rest of our bodies to mutate into klaxons of alarm and fear. We cut ourselves off and away from relation with other people; we retract like crabs; we burrow into isolation. We fend off what we most need: engagement and relation with other human beings. We all have a limit of how much loss, how much existential injury, we can endure.

In major depression, a singular element is added to heartbreak, loss, and the damage done to our brain's capacity for energy regulation: self-despising. We turn against our own goodness, our own being. Here is another core something that seems to be unique to major depression.

Therese Borchard tells a story of how she hid the effects of a burst appendix until she needed to be rushed to a hospital. I did the same, at age ten, with an infected laceration on the top of my right foot. I'd cut it on a jagged, rusting spear of metal that was jutting off the edge of my brother's pedal car. A huge triangle of flesh hung from my foot; the injury bled like a bastard and I snuck up to my bathroom, into the bath, and then I doused the wound with rubbing alcohol and layered it with Band-Aids. I got through the next day ... but the day after that, I was sent home from school on crutches because I couldn't walk. My foot had swollen beyond the bounds of my shoe ... and shot agonizing pain up my leg. Many years later -- I was in my mid-20s -- my mother told me that my blood had been poisoned ... and that if another day had gone by, my leg would have had to be amputated below the knee.

Somehow I believed that I was bad for having been injured; that I needed to hide the injury; that I deserved no help for being so stupid to cut my foot. I was terrified of being punished for having been hurt.

I was already living in a state of major depression. I was a child who, at the age of five, sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of food in front of me (having been told that I had to clean my plate before I could go), thinking this thought over ... and over again: "I want to die."

My soul was injured ... and bleeding. I was already gravely wounded.

Dr. Richard Mollica, in his book Healing Invisible Wounds, calls trauma "the existential injury." The word "trauma" derives from the Greek for "wound" ... so a trauma could be anything from a cut foot to a direct threat on one's life -- thus "the existential injury." It could be said that major depression is an existential illness -- and a life threat -- a trauma? -- in itself. One of the mysteries we grapple with in relation to major depression is how we can threaten our own life, our own existence. We can believe that we want to die, that we are being compelled to die.

But Life does not want to die. The force that fuels and sustains us does not want to die. Andrew Solomon, one of our world's leading experiential and scholarly authorities on depression, has said that "depression is the flaw in love" ... and perhaps depression is also a flaw in our relation with our own life force. Somehow, we believe that we should be dead ...

The flaw in love. Major depression cleaves such a flaw in our capacity to love, to bond, to be in relation, that we not only believe we are cut off from our natural inclination to bond with others, but we also cut ourselves away. Somehow, this double-edged severing of relatedness is one of the central symptoms of depression ... and could depression be a symptom of our species' penchant to do battle, make war, sever our bonds with other people, other beings, and with Life itself? To varying degrees, we all do battle. We argue and fight with our families, friends, colleagues ... and with others whom we call strangers ... others we deem to be a threat. We scrabble to acquire, succeed, gain status; we compete and contest; we engage in countless forms of lording-it-over to arrive at the top of a heap; bloodshed and soul-shred be damned.

Most of all, we tend to hack away at our own souls. Therese writes of what she calls "death thoughts" ... She eats a handful of potato chips, and on rushes the vile voice that taunts her. We all have our death-thought triggers ... and it often happens that for those of us with major depression or in the aftermath of existential trauma, we are triggered by merely being. 

Merely being is my primary trigger. There was a predatory person in my early life who had constant access to me, who told me I was filth, that I was bad to the bone, rotten to the core. By the time I was five and was sitting over that bowl of food, unable to eat, I believed these curses. I was infested, infected, in-formed with death thoughts, with a suicidal imperative. The natural self-centeredness of a five-year-old child guarantees that whatever she's told about her being, she'll believe to be true. If I believed that I was filth, that I was rotten to the core ... what else could I think except that I wanted to die, that I should be dead?

The flaw in love. I once had a husband who was the great love of my life ... and he told me again and again that I was his ... until an unrelenting bout of depression -- brought on by over two years of existential trauma and cemented into place by my history -- ruined my ability to be in relation. I was broken of my ability to bond; I could not reach out to my husband, nor to anyone else ... and I could not, for a long time, be reached. For as long as he could, my beloved remained by my side, tending to all aspects of both of our lives. He was so generous of heart ... until he couldn't be any more. He was tormented by the break in my ability, my capacity, to bond; he'd lost his primary relation. He did what any person would do who is shorn of relation and desperate for it -- he sought elsewhere. He left me. He had to save his own life.

The flaw in love. The flaw in me. Talk about death thoughts.

In the years since my husband left, I gradually came to understand that I left the marriage first. I did not choose to leave; trauma and depression took me. Several years later I was able to forgive  the man who had been my mate ... and I still struggle to forgive myself. Still. I have to forgive myself for merely being, every day. I have to forgive myself, daily, for the flaw, the injury, in my capacity to love. Paradoxically, nothing matters more to me than love, and if my character has a primary virtue that I do my best to act on, it's mercy.

It's been said that depression is selfish. It sure as hell is ... and I believe that this is one of the foundations of our stigma against it. How many of us are told to join this or that, to slap a smile on our face, pull up our socks and just get on with it, pick up the phone and call someone, anyone, to essentially pretend that we are happy, happy, happy? To stop being such a downer, such a drag?

I often wonder if major depression is a symptom of something else. The essence of this condition is still largely a mystery; through history, we've attributed its presence to everything from neurochemical mayhem to inflammation to gluten intolerance to laziness to a lack of faith to a weakness of will. God knows. (Just found: an excellent article in the latest Psychotherapy Networker that questions our general assumption that depression is "largely a problem of the individual." Thank you, Jonathan Rottenberg!)

I do know that depression is, in part, mourning writ huge; that it can wreck our inborn, biologic mechanisms of affinity; that it does its damndest to destroy all our relations. We are wired to cling to our mothers, fathers, and other sustainers from the moment we're born ... and we yearn and pine and reach for love our whole lives long. We live in an overriding culture that teaches us not how to love, but how to compete and fight and do more harm than good. And in major depression, the fatal flaw is that we turn against our own goodness, our own beings, our own natural urge to be in relation.

The flaw in love ... The flow in love. How to we mend this flaw, this injury, and restore our natural capacity, this supreme inborn gift?

For we need love -- both to give and receive it -- like we need air, water, food, warmth, shelter. Love keeps us alive and thriving.

I know that one of the essential medicines in my restoration is love. I would be long dead were it not for the love of people who have sustained the soul in me, who have reminded me of my goodness, who have held and tended me through my life. I know that I'm alive because all along, there has been at least one person who has loved me without fail, and whom I have loved without fail (except during that harrowing time a few years ago when the effects of trauma and depression nailed me to my bed and to the terrible interiority of existential despair and illness).

We reach out. We reach in. Like breath ... in, out, in, out ... and we allow ourselves to be reached. To reach beyond ourselves, into ourselves, and to be reached ... this is essential medicine. It is what we live for, no matter what else we tell ourselves. We're born to blend with those we share love with. I have a saying on my bedroom wall, directly across from my bed, which is the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see before I go to sleep at night:

And God said,

love your enemy

so I obeyed Him

and loved myself.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Do we want to be depressed, to live in a state of existential despair and shearing loneliness? My answer is a resounding NO. We may believe at times, as Therese writes, that it's easier to be ill, to contract, to disappear, to hide in the mire of long illness, to give up. Depression and the aftermath of trauma can exhaust our vitality to a point where we feel "that far" from dead -- and it takes a certain amount of base vitality to engage. Sometimes we just don't have it ... the well is dry.

Or is it? Again, I say NO. We're still alive; there's still a drop of fuel in the tank. If we're alive, we're still vital ... even if we can't feel the vitality. It is there. This, we must believe. I apply this belief in the face of all despair; I practice it like a discipline. I am alive, therefore I can love. 

You are alive ... therefore you can love. One drop at a time. Believe it.

Writing to stay alive

"I love my life. I regret my life. The lines eventually blur." ~ Patrick Stewart, in the film Match.

"I never want to get out of bed again." ~ Me, this morning.

Some thoughts are alarms, and that first thought catapulted me to vertical today. Three days ago, my waking thought was, "Best to die in my bed while I still have a bed."

Thoughts like these are what writer Therese Borchard, author of Beyond Blue, calls "death thoughts." Somehow, in major depression, our thoughts compel us to die.

I am considering thoughts, now, as symptoms. Symptoms of something gone desperately awry in the human brain. Thoughts as end results, sometimes as emergencies. Death thoughts are not natural. Every organism is driven to live, to exist. Depression drives us to die. We humans are animals who think, and it may be that this unique capacity -- to think as we do -- is what triggers the despair that compels us to believe we must die.

Other animals, I am sure, despair as well ... Think of a fox with its leg snapped in the jaws of a hunting trap. Think of Harry Harlow's infant rhesus monkeys who were forced to be alone in metal cages with only metal "mothers" to cling to.

Humans are the animals who can articulate despair.

After I threw off the blankets this morning and jumped to my feet -- I did jump in reaction to that first thought -- I began to wonder. I know that curiosity is a saving grace; it leads us to questions, to the larger world beyond our own thoughts, to engagement. I knew I could stay alive by wondering. I also knew that I had to feed my cats. I've vowed to them that I will stay alive. They are the ones I live with, the ones who depend on me for their own survival. They need me to stay.

Today is International Suicide Survivors Day -- we honour the memory of people who have lost their lives to despair. Perhaps we could also call today "Stay Day." For those of us who grapple with the despair that wants to take us ... Perhaps "Stay" could be our prayer, our chant, our mantra, our call to Life.

Speaking of Life ... I noticed, as I threw myself out of bed, an underlying rage to be. This imperative we share with every other creature on Earth. A rage that arises from the force that fires and fuels us. A rage not of anger, but of ... love. Cherishment.

Cherishment ... makes me think of mother-love. Perhaps we need a new mother tongue, a new language, one resurrected from the old. A new mother tongue to lap us (as a beloved dog or cat will lap our face) out of despair. A language of love, of bonding, of beloved relation. Andrew Solomon has said that "Depression is the flaw in love ... a disease of loneliness." I think of it also as a grave injury to our capacity to love, to our capacity to be in relation, to reach out, to attach. Our culture's treatment of major depression errs on the side of cognition -- on how we think. While our habitual thoughts express as a sure "barometric reading" of our emotional state, they are only outward evidence of how the deeper structures and strata of our brain are functioning. As Thomas Lewis and his coauthors write in the magnificent A General Theory of Love, "... the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating the chasm between them in human minds and lives." Neuroscience has begun to map the mysteries of brain function and opened new avenues for understanding and healing brain disease and injury in exciting ways ... but often at the expense of our existence as a whole. In a sense, the mind is what the brain does ... and we need to consider and treat the whole person, not just the neurochemicals.

It may be that we need a more "mothering" approach in how we treat depression and other conditions that shatter our ability to bond -- PTSD being one. Somatic approaches to psychotherapy, like Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing, employ strategies that first address a person's need for relative safety and a sense of presence in the world. In short: a return of embodiment ... and of feeling, of the sense of being alive.

Deeper than all thought runs the current of feeling ... the fuel that drives us to bond and to love. Feeling is what drove me up from and out of my bed this morning ... Feeling is what drives me to write, to communicate, to blend my voice with others.

Feeling extends our desire -- our intrinsic need -- to reach out to others and to receive them; feeling is what saves us. Feeling drove two of my cherished friends to reach out to me today after I reached out to them; they arrived at my home with the fixings for a big pot of chicken-veggie soup. Feeling drove me to ask one of those friends if I could lie on my couch with my head in her lap; feeling brought her hand to my head, which she stroked again and again. Feeling impelled me to sob with the relief of being touched, cradled, tended to. Feeling activated my appetite, and allowed me to eat ... and allows me to write with nascent courage, to extend my own experience to yours, dear reader.

How will you mother yourself today? How will you stay?

Stay, dear heart.

Two days ago, I posted a sudden thought to an online forum that I participate in: "Today, I realize, is what I'm calling a 'stay day.' I just invented this term while cooking some broccoli and garlic. Made myself arise from the 'despair chair' (where I can get, and remain, stuck and sinking...). Looked at my two beloved cats and thought, 'Stay alive for them.' Then more stays arrived: 'Stay nourished ... Stay hydrated ... Stay on your feet ... Stay in the kitchen and cook ... Stay in touch with someone -- anyone ... Stay in tune with your music (James Taylor, Cat Stevens, etc.) ...' So. Today's a 'stay day.' One breath at a time."

Stay here ... stay now. It's a mantra that I recite when desperation urges escape. Stay here ... stay now. Stay. 

Stays are fasteners; stays bind something with something else. 

There are stays ... and there are mainstays. They're the stays that challenge us to remain in the world no matter how urgently we feel driven to leave it. I suspect that our mainstays revolve around our relations; mine certainly do. My mainstays are my cats, my cherished friends and family, the memory of my honoured ancestors and mentors ... and the young ones in my life who light up and run to me whenever we meet. I don't have children of my own, but these little ones may as well be -- It takes a village, after all, and how does my choice to stay influence their souls? How might my presence help them to stay in the world? We are irrevokably bound by every bond we create with other beings ... and eventually death will arrive in one form or another ... but our choice to remain alive helps to ensure that someone else will also choose to stay. Our love is a tangible force; our choice to be is a source of sustenance to someone -- we don't always know whom, but the force of our choice is a link in a chain, a hand reaching out, a voice urging presence, a pull toward the heart. 

There was a huge response to the "stay" post. Amazing how something so simple can galvanize other people to stay, too ... Major depression, for some reason, lures us to leave the world ... I wonder if it's the fundamental exhaustion and loss of vitality of this illness that is so deadly to our remaining present. There's a mystery at the core of major depression that began to reveal itself to me when I was sixteen and found an article written by psychologist John Welwood, called "Depression as a Loss of Heart." I'd not, up to that moment, related my own experience to depression; I just thought I was another lazy, useless teenager who was constantly being berated for being ... lazy, useless, and irresponsible; sleeping in too much and sleeping into the afternoon, sluffing through the days like so many teens do (Now we understand more about how much havoc the hormonal changes of adolescence cause to the entire person -- including that persistent need for sleep, sleep, and more sleep...).

Now I understand the persistent loss of vitality as a chief marker of major depression. Andrew Solomon, who wrote The Noonday Demon, has said that "the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality." YES! -- everything in me cried when I heard him speak those words. He nailed the core symptom of depression! Here's a link to his TED Talk, "Depression: The Secret We Share": 

Now, two days later, one of my forum-friends told me that the members of a support group for bereaved parents have adopted the stay-practice! How beautiful that one little idea, popping up from my own choice to stay for my cats, has been taken up by others. There's another stay for me ... and now, for so many more! Depression, as Andrew Solomon says, is a secret that we share ... and stays are a sacred practice that we can share too. I imagine hands reaching out and grasping one another ... taking hold ... fingers interlacing ... warmth seeping from palm to palm ... the musculature of bondedness squeezing an invitation from pulse to pulse ... 

The stays that my online friends shared range the gamut of goodness and relation. Here are some of them (and a few more of my own) ... 

Housecleaning (!)

One's children and grandchildren

Husbands, wives, beloveds

Colour and art

Creative acts like knitting and sewing

Beloved animals

Kayaking and canoeing

Being needed

Laughter, humour, jokes

Prayer

Playing a musical instrument

Sunshine

God

Cookies (!)

Best friends

Siblings

Cousins

The scents of love

Skills and gifts shared in the world

Helping others

Honouring those whose pain left them so bereft that they couldn't stay

Literature and poetry

The knowledge of death -- being alive is so precious

Reader ... what are your stays?

Stay, dear heart. Fasten to love. Hold on.