the weight

It's like living in a pressure chamber.

Everything tries to hold you in one place. Compressed, you exert Herculean efforts just to accomplish what a normal person wouldn't think about. Going to the kitchen for a glass of water eventually seems too hard; you sit in your chair, thirsty, but you don't care enough to slake it. No matter where you are, what you do, what you think about, you feel it. The weight. The pressure drags down at your mind and your body, until the best and only escape is a yielding. The one thing you can do well is to sleep. But you never feel rested.

There's no pride in fighting it. You wake up tired, you fight it tired, you surrender to it tired. Even if you work up a momentary flare of anger, a small scorched free-breathing space in which to get something simple, like dishes, done, it collapses on itself in a little while and you survey the results of your effort dully. It doesn't matter. You might hate it, you might hate yourself for suffering it, you're always acutely aware of the abnormality of what you're going through, that other people aren't like this, but you don't see a way to fix it and you barely care. You mind, horribly, but you don't care. And underneath it all is a deep, strangling, inarticulable fear -- fear of people, fear of yourself, fear of the void, fear that there's no out -- and sometimes it makes you restless, irritable; but there's no getting out from under the weight.

Time works differently for the person suffering from depression. A minute is an hour, an hour is a day, a day is a year. You live in a suspension, and the solvent is nothing, and eats you down in a haze of dull pain. Every single endless moment is exactly the same as the one before it, and will be exactly the same as the one that follows. Hope is something for other people. Emotion is something for other people. In here, in your glass tube, you live with the nothingness. That's all there is. The bad part is that you didn't choose it. The worst part is that your choice to make it better won't make any difference.

It's called a psychological disorder, depression. We're fortunate to live in times when we're no longer quite labeled crazy for suffering it. You don't feel crazy, of course; I guess psychologically disordered people seldom feel crazy. But you do feel abnormal. Subnormal. Something is wrong, and you know it, and you don't know what to do about it, and you don't really care.

I've read what other people, more scientific people, have to say about depression, and it's very informative stuff. These articles tick off all the symptoms -- including a few I didn't know about -- and list causes and treatments and perpendicular problems that often lead to, or are led by, the disorder. Interesting, of course. But they don't capture, in any way, how it feels.

It's a debilitating condition. Even when you know that all the things you're thinking and feeling -- about your hopelessness, helplessness, worthlessness, indifference, insignificance -- are absolutely untrue, it doesn't matter. You don't care because it doesn't matter. You don't want to be alone, you hate being alone, aloneness is frightening, everything you want is symbolized in an embracing pair of arms -- but you don't want to talk to anyone. You seclude yourself because rousing yourself enough even to push the "send" button on the cell phone is too much effort, your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth when people ask you how you are -- how do you tell them? there aren't any words -- and you don't want people seeing you this way: You're proud, and terrified, and deeply ashamed, and they can't help, and nothing matters. And the danger with that is that you start to behave purposefully in ways that are self-harmful, because none of it matters anyway, so why not? It might at least let you feel alive for a little while, put the pain somewhere other than where it lives in your head.

This is why depression coincides so much with alcoholism, drug use, self-mutilation, suicide. All those things are bad, but they could possibly bring a temporary relief. A lightening of the pressure. A lifting of the load. I don't know this from personal experience, really, but I can understand the mentality behind it. Even suicide, the final act of despair, is (don't worry, I'm not suicidal) a kind of victory, because you did something, when one of the hallmarks of depression is the inability to do anything at all. It's the wrong thing, but it's something, and it might seem better than living with nothing.

That's not how I feel. I want to live. I'm sick of living my life this way. I'm sick of the dullness, the emptiness, the unending void, the tired listless pain, the isolation, the seclusion, the yawning eternity of every passing moment. I don't care that it's genetic. I don't care that it's the dark side of giftedness. I don't care that all the odds are stacked impressively against me, I'm sick of being this way, I miss that simple joy of living I used to have.

Yesterday's Gospel reading centered around the first part of John 10. Thank God for the Easter Season, when all the Gospel readings come from John, because I love John, and verse 10 in particular caught at me -- slammed me, really, but I've been numb for awhile and only felt it as a kind of aftershock: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."

Reading that, I saw the page get all blurry. I haven't had a more abundant life in a long time. I've had an empty, flat, stale half-life. And that's not what God has intended me to live.

So I started thinking about it, only half-listening to the homily. I thought about one of the best verses in Scripture to describe the effects of depression: "All your waves and breakers have swept over me" (Psalm 42:7b). I thought about life to the full. I thought about Luke 9:23: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." I wondered, on a sort of wandering thread of thought, if my cross is depression, at least for the moment. It's heavy enough. I thought about "daily." I thought about Christ falling to the ground under the weight of his cross. I thought about heaving my bone-crushing load to my shoulder every day, denying its power over me, denying its intertwination with the core of my self, denying the force of its inertia, and dragging it after Christ.

I thought about a different kind of surrender, a different kind of fighting. I thought about a lighter burden. I thought about living, and hope, and promises made by a God who cannot break them. I thought about a shepherd calling his sheep. I thought about green pastures and still waters and my soul's restoration. I thought about goodness and mercy following me as I follow the shepherd. I thought about being hemmed in, behind and before, and the freedom that comes from that security, that inescapability. I thought about breathing without effort, I thought about seeing in color again, I thought about joy.

The destroyer has had his fingers at my throat for too long. I've often thought that what we term mental illness or psychological disorder back in Christ's day was affliction by personal intelligences of evil. And Christ drove them out. With astonishing authority. I could cry, sometimes, wishing it were possible to catch at the hem of his robe and be freed from all this, wishing it were possible to hang onto his ankles and beg him for mercy, wishing it were possible to feel him stoop and lay a hand on my head. (And surely I am with you always...) And still the promises are true.

I can bear a lot. I've born this for many years, this internal bleeding of the soul, this crippling emptiness. I've fought it off with laughter, with anger, with companionship, with sheer gut force. Now, though, those tactics don't suffice. My own devices have failed, and I've come to the end of my strength. It's good, I think, that I have; it forces me to lift up mine eyes, and see from whence cometh my help -- my stronghold, my rock and my deliverer, mounted on the cherubim, surging on the wings of the storm breaking over the hills, angry on my behalf, coming for me.

It forces me to community, too. I hate needing people. I hate feeling whiny and dependent. But sometimes I am; sometimes we all are. And that's what people are for. Interdependence. The body of Christ, in its various and surprising forms.

I really hope this doesn't sound like the wandering mind of a crazy person. I'm very much afraid it does. But it's the first breath of hope I've felt in well over six months, and fresh air after being cooped indoors for a long period of time does make one a little giddy.

I'm still tired. I'm still in the pressure chamber. But I know someone has the keys, and I know one of these days I'll be let out. In the meantime, there's the heaving, the carrying of the cross. There's the following. There's the glory of the struggle. There's the shepherd.

There's hope.