Tag Archives: depression

What Democracy Is

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It’s almost 2pm on a Thursday afternoon and I’m still in my pajamas (flannel with Peanuts characters, if you’re wondering).  There are dishes in the sink, laundry to be folded, unopened bills to be sorted and paid, all along with the hundreds of miscellaneous things in my too-big house that need to be put away or at least put somewhere else.  I have not exercised today, which you could probably infer from the PJ fact above and also tells you all you need to know about my 2018 resolution to exercise JUST A LITTLE BIT, EVEN every day.  I have errands to run — if I don’t refill my trazadone prescription today, I will definitely be able to add”crappy night” to tomorrow’s list of things undone. And I think the pilot light on our heater is out, a not inconsequential thing in the deep freeze of the northeastern United States where it is currently 29 degrees but, per The Weather Channel, “feels like 19.”

On the plus side, I have fed the cats and cleaned the litter boxes, breakfasted, had my coffee, and read the paper.

Let’s face it:  it could be worse.  All in all, I think 2018 is going OK so far.

It’s not 2017, for one thing.  As you probably noticed from my radio silence, when you see the black dogs of your depression loosed upon the entire country . . . it’s daunting.  I’m pretty well medicated, but the drugs just adjust your brain chemicals so that they don’t screw up your ability to constructively figure out what you’re doing here on this earth.  They don’t actually figure it out for you.  Unfortunately.

I spent a lot of time last year not doing the work — sleeping late, reading formulaic spy novels (kind of like peanut M&Ms for your brain), playing Spider Solitaire on my phone (I’m still holding that against you, Isabel W.!), leafing through catalogs, and watching HGTV and QVC.  I’m sad about the state of American democracy, my last child going off to college, and the incivility of our national discourse.  I’m worried about my health, the repairs the we should be doing on our 100+-year-old house, global warming and the loss of bats and bees.

Several years ago, back when we thought that the worst thing that could happen to us was the re-election of George W. Bush, my friend Liz gave me a book called,  “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear.”  It’s a collection of essays edited by Paul Rogat Loeb.  (Just as relevant today as it was in 2004. Check it out for yourself.) I’ve been re-reading one by Jim Hightower, a former Texas state official and currently “America’s #1 Populist” (Self proclaimed, I believe) called “Rebellion is What Built America.”

Hightower writes:  “Of course it’s hard to battle the bastards! So what’s new?  History — and certainly the history of our country — is the story of people struggling, always going uphill against the powerful to seek a little more democracy, a tad more justice, a slightly wider sliver of the economic pie. . . . The Man, The Machine — by whatever name, the establishment is not in the giveaway business.  Striving for democracy is bone-wearying, agonizing, frustrating, cruel, bloody, and often deadly work.”  He quotes Ibsen ” ‘You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth’,” pointing out that he didn’t mean “we should stay home and press our trousers, rather that we should gird up accordingly and go forth into the fray.”

Hightower reminds us, “Those who came before us risked all of their property, their reputations, their freedom, and their lives to push the boundaries of democracy for us,” citing Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays of Shays’s Rebellion in 1780, suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, the Grimke sisters and others, American labor leaders like Big Bill Haywood, A. Philip Randolph, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and the struggle for civil rights which “started when the first slave was put on a boat to America.”  Few, if any, of these movement leaders, Hightower emphasizes, lived to see the successes they hoped for and envisioned.

But, he says, “Inhale a bit of our country’s pungent, brawling, inspiring history of grassroots rebels, then tell me that battling the bastards today is too hard, too uphill, or takes too long. What else are you doing that is more worthy of your efforts than trying to establish the moral principles of fairness, justice, and equality for all in our America?”

The essay ends with this: “The important thing to know is that you are wanted.  You are needed.  You are important.  You are not only what democracy counts on, you are what democracy is.”  [Emphasis mine.]

I think I should go get dressed.

 

 

Don’t . . . Give That Girl a Gun

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I grew up in a house with guns, and in a neighborhood where families went hunting in the fall in order to have meat in their freezers for the winter.  I’ve handled guns, and shot them and I’ll tell you something that liberals like me don’t often say:   I like shooting.  It’s satisfying to hold a pistol in your two hands, plant yourself, and fire at a target.  (It’s even more satisfying if you actually hit the target, of course.)  It’s a powerful feeling to shoot a gun, and the power is thrilling.

Having said that, I also have to say that my father was an absolute gun safety freak.  He never kept a loaded gun in our home.  We were not a hunting family, but the rifles he and my brothers used for target shooting were kept in locked cases in the bedroom he shared with my mom  — which, unlike my children, we never, ever entered without permission — and the ammunition was in another locked case in the second floor crawl space.  Guns and ammo went into the car in their separate locked cases; after shooting, the guns were cleaned and locked away again for the trip home.

My father’s rule was that you never raised a weapon at someone or something unless you intended to fire at it, and he took it very seriously:  No one could point so much as a water gun at a non-combatant in our house.  When we played cops and robbers, you did not point your toy pistol at people who weren’t participating, like my little sister (or heaven forfend, my dad).

We laughed at my father’s gun rules back then, albeit behind his back.  But today, in the midst of the outrage and sadness of yet another senseless shooting, it occurs to me that my father, a veteran of WWII, understood something profound about guns.  He appreciated their power and their allure, and he had, and insisted that we have, appropriate respect for that power.

My father’s been dead for over 20 years, so I don’t have the chance to argue with him about gun safety.  But while my family will disagree with me, I think he would have supported some of the current gun regulation proposals.  A guy  who insisted that nine-year-olds carry plastic toy cowboy shotguns broken over their arms inside his house would surely  oppose selling military-grade weapons to people on the terrorist watch list or people with mental illness.

Even if those one of those people was his daughter.  I understand the civil liberties issues with these kinds of restrictions.  But I’ve suffered from depression for most of my life.  I am older and wiser now, properly medicated and living a healthy life with people I love and who love me.  But I knew the sadness and hopelessness and the energy it took to keep the ruthless rage I felt — about my helplessness, my inadequacies, my shortcomings and stupidity –in check.  That rage drove me to screaming arguments, to dish throwing, and to a serious suicide attempt.

And here’s the plain and simple and shocking fact:  Had I a gun — God forbid, a gun with a trigger I could hold to fire an endless stream of bullets — on one of the bad days where the rage overtook me and all I wanted was destruction, I would certainly have killed myself with it.  And I would certainly have killed any other innocent within range.

I have worked hard, learned a lot, and have the great good fortune of loving family, good friends, and decent health insurance.  I have tamed my black dog of depression and he lies docile at my feet.  But like my father and his guns, I understand the dog’s power.  And I respect it.

“Don’t Give That Girl A Gun” is the title of an Indigo Girls song.  But really, don’t.  For heaven’s sake, Congress, do your damn job and pass some real gun control.

 

 

 

Black Dogs

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Winston Churchill was afflicted with bouts of serious depression throughout his life; he famously referred to these periods as his “black dog.”  (I always thought that Churchill coined the term himself, but apparently it originated much earlier, maybe with Samuel Johnson in the late 1700s.     See http://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/docs/Foley.pdf, if you’re interested.)

I’ve struggled with depression for decades, and while the term doesn’t resonate with me, black dogs have been on my mind these days. It’s because of Andreas Lubitz, of course, the murderous Germanwings copilot, who crashed his plane and the 149 people on board into the Alps.  The front page of my local New Jersey newspaper recently carried a headline about a murder-suicide in a nearby town, and I also understand that the Mad Men actor Jon Hamm spent 30 days in rehab due in part to depression, not that it’s really any of my business.

Celebrity depression always reminds me of Robin Williams, whose relentless, manic hilarity displayed pyrotechnic intelligence and covered, apparently, more than one serious illness.  I remember hearing Carol Burnett talk about comedy on The Actor’s Studio, and about how close it is to tragedy, how often what sounds funny with a laugh track is gut-punching without one.  I remember thinking that if someone as insanely bright and unbelievably talented as Robin Williams could not keep the black dogs at bay, then there wasn’t much hope for the rest of us.

My depression, however, is not alive and breathing, and it’s not black.  It’s stone cold grey and heavy and silent as a grave.  It hangs over my head; it hovers by a hair; and sometimes it pins me down.  And when it does, it immobilizes me.  I can’t get out of bed, off the chair, out of the house.  Finding clothes to wear is too hard, food is too complicated, and I can’t talk because I can’t think because I can’t move the weight of depression off me.  I can’t imagine murdering even one person, much less slamming 150 of them into a mountain, when depression overcomes me.  I can’t imagine defeating Hitler, although I can easily imagine snapping my own neck in a noose.

But I do understand Churchill’s dog idea.  Depression follows you.  It lies at your feet in the dark, and it trips you when you try to get up.  It breathes malodorous dog breath in your face even when it’s not even actively barking or snapping or padding after you, claws tick-ticking on the hard floor.

I don’t actually know but I’m pretty sure Churchill struggled hard with his depression, just as I do and just as, I’m sure, Andreas Lubitz did.  I use all the tools I have:  I take prescription drugs to adjust my brain chemistry (although I’ve certainly tried the other kind).  I exercise because the endorphins help, in much the same way, I suspect, that running marathons helped Andreas Lubitz.  I work very hard at whatever I do — lawyering and parenting and volunteering and cooking and and and — so that I have something else to focus on besides my illness.  Most of all, I have people who love me very much, people for whom I would jump in front of a speeding train and for whom I will shove back against depression or anything else that prevents me from loving them as much as they love me.

We don’t know why people do what they do — whether they’re depressed or not, whether they’re Mozart making music or whether they’re murderers.  I cannot for the life of me conjure up any empathy for Andreas Lubitz, although I also cannot for the life of me entirely brush off the errant strands of sympathy I occasionally feel for him. Nothing excuses one murder, much less 149 of them; my sympathy does not go very far.

But depression isn’t a disease you see, like a tumor or a broken leg or a heart attack.  People who are depressed are more than just sad or discouraged.  When I’m depressed, my reality is distorted and the only uncertainly I have is how long I can hang on to whatever’s left. But most people won’t see that struggle.  We don’t see it until it comes screaming out of the clouds and smashes into a mountain.  And then it’s too late for all of us.

So yeah, I’m thinking about Churchill’s black dogs these days, and how they roam.