pulling through

It's not even a day-to-day thing. It's a moment-by-moment thing. Or maybe something in between days and moments.

I wake up in a certain mood, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and I settle into the day and write my blog post, and then an hour later my mood has completely changed, gotten worse or gotten better, and the post I constructed earlier has become a stone tablet scratching out a piece of long-gone history. But I cycle back to it eventually, whether it takes moments, days, weeks, months.

Sometimes I hesitate to record my experience of depression in the moments of experiencing it, because I might only write one post per day but it reflects only one of a hundred different moods, and meanwhile I'm not draped over a piece of office furniture like one of Dali's deflated clocks; my personality, my personhood, are more than the slices of one dimension set down in writing here. I joke, I laugh, I tell stories, I listen to stories, I give comfort, I think happy thoughts, I function, and not terribly.

Yesterday was bad, though, legitimately bad, for most of the day, one of those where I lost my sense of humor altogether until I popped in Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn on the way home and fell in love all over again with Conor Oberst's work. Digital Ash is one that's taken me a little longer to enjoy, but as I listened yesterday I drove smiling. Conor gets it. He gets it. Under worse conditions, in bleaker circumstances, and with fewer reasons, he too has made, and continues to make, every day, the same choice: to live.

I've heard him called whiny, self-indulgent and hopeless, but I don't see it. Depression is difficult to express -- by its very nature depression robs a sufferer of expression. And there are many, many ways in which to describe it, but none of them quite touch on the thing itself, on what it is, on what it feels like, on what it means to live in and with and through it. Every day it's a little different. So yes, Conor has written a lot of songs about it, and a lot of them sound similar to one another -- it's looping around a center of nothingness, trying to pin down that nothingness, trying to name the nameless. As Eliot says, "Each attempt is a raid on the inarticulate"; and, as Eliot also observes, words crack and break under the strain of their impossible task. But "for us, there is only the trying," and I resonate deeply with how Conor tries.

He's also something of a writer's songwriter -- his mode of expression, the brilliance of his metaphors, always pierce my soul a little bit. And he's so violently hopeful. His songs contain a great deal of darkness, but in that darkness he's always groping for a way out of it, and his work indicates that there is a way out of it, some bedrock of hope that bears up under the despair and the anguish (which are all the more frustrating because they seem to have no source).

So anyway. Part of the difficulty with this thing is feeling utterly unreachable by humanity and God, and Conor's work is the socket that cradles the plug and allows for the jolt and current of some kind of connection, based in a sort of anonymous and therefore universal understanding. There are no words to describe the relief I feel when I realize that I'm not alone in what I'm undergoing, that someone out there gets it, has gone through it too. We the Depressed don't get together much -- what's there to talk about, when you can't articulate it? So even though you know there are others out there like you, it's hard to wrap your mind around someone understanding.

(And I get that there are consequences when the waves rise up again and I'm reduced to treading water and other responsibilities fall by the wayside. I understand consequences very well. It's grace that takes me by surprise. But that's another post for another day.)

Listening to "Gold Mine Gutted" had me smiling all the more because it reminded me of John and all of our late-night arm-linked walks all over Grove City's campus, sharing cigarettes and talking endlessly about life and literature. I hadn't heard from him in a couple of weeks, since he's been spending most of the summer in Mexico City, and I've missed him; but I didn't realize how much time had passed until last night when I turned on my old phone for no reason and got a call from an unavailable number. Warily ("Unavailable" isn't usually someone I want to talk to) I picked up the call.

"Hello?"

"Sarah. Peters." That familiar and beloved voice yanked a grin out from where it had been hiding all day as John continued, "Where. Have you been. I was getting Very Concerned."

"Oh! I...changed my phone number a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't give it to you yet because I thought we'd just be Skyping till you got back..."

"But you're never on Skype!"

"I'm on Skype all the time! I'm on Skype right now!"

"Well, it says you're offline."

"Um...huh, it says you're offline. I thought you were just busy."

"Well, I've been worried. Didn't you get any of my frantic voicemails?"

"No..."

"Yeah. The last one I left said that if I didn't hear back from you soon, I was going to call your parents to find out how you were. But when I sat down today and looked online, I could only find your mailing address."

As I laughed and apologized, I thought how the years like to throw circumstances back on themselves, because five years ago this conversation (minus Skype) bore the exact same substance, but with the speakers switched. He would change his phone number every other month without telling me, and every other month I would call his parents to get his new number.

Love and friendship are many-splendored things. Odd things, too. So often human relationships seem fragile, subject to change without cause or warning, and I've undergone enough of those to learn to look for and expect them; and then there are the people who come through, like the clear light cutting through Erie's omnipresent cloud cover. I like watching and experiencing the give-and-take that occurs between good friends, the various ways we take turns carrying each other, the strengths complementing the weaknesses, the mutuality.

As I've gone through my twenties, I have found love in ways I never knew to expect. My idealist dreamer soul has yearned for that two-become-one love all my life; but as I raced around looking for it, and it failed me again and again, I ended up gathering other kinds of love, and sustenance from surprising places. Love isn't a post, or a mast; love is a tree. God is the roots, Christ is the trunk, and the Holy Spirit is the leaves. The branches? They're many, and various, but they share a source, and they bear sustaining fruit. Conor's music is one. John is another. I thank God gladly and fervently for both.