Isn't It Time You Got Over How Fragile You Are

It's been weeks now.

I've been feeling like I'm missing a piece of myself; like I misplaced it somewhere.

The concept is nothing new. In deep depression one loses all sense of self.

And it's a struggle, trying to grasp for things that you think might bring you closer to the person you're supposed to be instead of the ghost that wanders about haunting your life.

This is different. [Somehow, every time it's different so that just when I think I have the hang of it, I really don't.]

I'm not sure if I'm losing myself in stages or pieces are falling off or if this time I'll just lose parts and not the whole. And frankly I'm not sure what's more frightening.

So, I'm sorting through all these old photographs trying to see what part of me is missing. Maybe if I can identify what is missing I can remember when I last saw it? I'm not sure when that statement stopped sounding rational, but you have to understand that sense of missing something ~ it's like I left it in the pocket of a pair of pants that I haven't worn in a while or it's packed in some box I haven't unpacked in the two years since I moved.

The obvious answer to the part of me that I have lost is the part of me that can feel happiness and hope and love, that can look to the future and see more than darkness. I can't remember ever being happy. I'm not sure I've ever been loved. The one great relationship of my life ended with him saying, "I don't love you anymore. I'm not sure I ever loved you."

Can you even imagine HOW much I want to get him on the phone and make him take those words back? I can't even look at the photos of the two of us because I'm convinced they'll reinforce his statement. There will be something in his expression or body language in the photo that will SCREAM, I don't love this woman and I never did.

I asked my mother if she ever remembered me happy. She mentioned a number of different things but one of them clicked and now I cling to it.

It was a late weekend afternoon and I had gone for a walk in Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens. It was nearly the end of a special butterfly exhibit they were have in one section of the new glass conservatory. I had been in no rush since I had gone to a similar exhibit at the Museum of National History in NYC not too long before, in fact I had planned to skip it. But after wandering through the orchid room in the conservatory, I decided to check out the butterflies. The Gardens were set to close in 5 minutes and I expected to be kicked out, but instead the garden personnel just left me alone with the plants and the millions of exotic moths and butterflies, letting me know to make sure the door was fully sealed with I left.

I can't remember the last time I had seen such beauty or was filled with such wonder. It was like being a child again and rediscovering the magic that surrounds you. Everything else, every crazy stress, left my mind and I was completely alone with the flutter of tiny colorful wings. I remember just stopping everything and sitting down on a bench and taking in all that surrounded me until tears of joy ran down my face. It was exactly the transfusion that I needed for my crazy life and my crazy job and everything else I just couldn't stop juggling.

So now as I risk losing myself to disease I hold on to what I believe is a vital part. I remember the beauty and the joy and the wonder and the happiness of that afternoon and I remind myself that I am more than capable of that.

And I sing along with my theme song....

You have got to be kidding me....

Since the Boston Globe doesn't have have a permalink function, I can't link to this article. Instead, I've reprinted it with the Boston Globe copyright intact.

I miss my depression
By Tim Bugansky

November 20, 2007

TEL AVIV

AUTUMN visited Israel recently. The temperature sank, chilly rain spattered the streets, the wind tossed the trees to and fro. As I sat outside on the porch one night, I found my mind yanked back to Ohio, and I was struck by a familiar pang of sadness - and I missed, achingly, the decade when I was clinically depressed.

The irony of depression - for me, at least - was that it made me feel a pervasive sadness that pierced my heart like frigid, jagged glass, but it also made me feel supremely alive. Depression isolated me within myself, yet through its ever-present melancholy, it also made me feel completely connected to the world.

Anything had the potential to envelop me in tentacles of despondency: a parking lot at dusk; illuminated living rooms on dark city streets with families moving about inside; an elderly man hobbling through a store all by himself; train tracks disappearing into the distance.

These were amplified by the gracefully turbulent decay that accompanies autumn in Ohio, where I have spent most of my life. Brisk breezes bore reminders that life is fleeting. The moon hung morosely above cornfields. Brittle leaves crunched resoundingly like fragile hearts underfoot.

Amidst the crushing poignancy, I was also more creative, more perceptive, more in tune with the world. I can remember entire weeks when I was depressed more clearly than I can remember the particulars of any one day last week. Although days were interminable back then, they were also alive and palpable, bursting with beautiful futility.

It's been four years now since I began a course of treatment, swallowing daily a white pill that changes not only my brain chemistry, but also the very ways I perceive the world, the ways the world affects me. Besides all the questions antidepressants raise about reality and perception, "mental illness" and normalcy, my personal reality is that I am different now. Antidepressants altered my existence.

I eat and sleep more regularly. I can now get sad without venturing into the borderlands of despair. I can get happy without that happiness seeming like the gleaming tip of an iceberg - full of splendor at the surface, but dwarfed by the hulking dark mass of potential disappointment beneath.

I don't mean to glorify depression. Had I not taken those little white pills, I would probably have become seriously ill, more and more troubled, increasingly incapable of living in a world constructed by and for the "normal." There is no question that depression can and does hurt people, both the depressed and those around them.

But while depression is often portrayed or understood in simple terms, it is more than just an affliction. Its complexity is all the more apparent to me now that it is absent from my life; yet the memory of it can still transport me from the edge of the Middle Eastern desert to the American heartland.

And I wonder - as I sit outside on quiet nights and sense the seasons shifting and wish that I could "feel" the phenomenon like I used to - I wonder how many others like me are out there in the world, wandering through their own private autumns, fortunate to be alive today yet missing the brilliant sadness of the past.

Tim Bugansky, a writer and teacher in Israel, is author of "Anywhere But Here." He wrote this column for the International Herald Tribune.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

Personally, I find this Op-Ed insulting, naive, ignorant and repulsive. It is completely lacking in respect for anyone who struggles and survives a life with real depression.

Those people know the numbing effect of a disease that, to paraphrase a talk* given by William Styron, causes the brain so much pain that it is incapable of doing anything but enumerate its own suffering.

It's odd, at best, that the Globe would choose to print such an article just one day after it printed a science piece on new research showing that depression may cause degeneration of the hippocampus, the part of the brain believed to have an essential role in memory. Further, the use of SSRIs (a class of anti depressants) may actually regenerate neurons in the hippocampus.

Take a moment to soak that in. Depression is connected to the part of the brain that controls memory. Memory, say, of the things that usually bring a person happiness and pleasure.

So, while the rest of us are in some fog ~ all joy, beauty, and interest forgotten. Some even feeling so numb with lack of emotion that they harm themselves just to feel. Mr. Bugansky is experiencing life on a new ultrasensory level.

Mr. Bugansky, I'd like you to meet Mr. Frey. The two of you will be spending a long, long time together in a place we call a Special Hell. This one is reserved for lying liars who lie.



*This talk was given at a symposium at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in the mid to late 1980s and later became the basis for Styron's memoir Darkness Visible. The particular quote I refer to did not make it from the speech to the manuscript, but remains one of my favorite pieces of prose from his talk.