Let's Talk About the Dark, Part 2: Eric Maisel, R.D. Laing, Ben Goldacre and Adam Curtis

Warning!  This post is ridiculously long!  Be prepared to sit for a bit…

Last post I wrote you a mini history of why I think I get sad, and what it feels like for me.  This is so you know that I’m not speaking of these things with no damn idea what I’m talking about.  On the other hand, what I told you of is simply and only, my personal experience.  No two people’s experiences of anything will ever be exactly the same.  Before I begin to tell you about the first part (actually, it’s only the first 3 chapters and the introduction) of Eric Maisel’s useful new book, Rethinking Depression[1], I want to make one thing crystal clear to anyone reading.  It’s this:

Everybody’s feelings are different, though similar.  One person may struggle with a feeling s/he calls depression their whole lives and say little about it to anyone; another may seek help by talking or medicine, and often.  Some people feel chronic sadness or depression is a deeply private thing; others feel the stigma of it should be fought and we should talk about it openly, a lot.  Some people are greatly benefited by drugs prescribed them for their feelings and their management; some people have had awful reactions to these medicines; some people will not touch them out of principle.  Same goes for talking therapies, or any kind of help.

Never think, for one second, reading this (or anything I write, I’ve told you this before), that anyone’s own experiences of this life are invalid.  Personally, I have been sad on and off my whole life, and several times very badly.  Personally, I have tried 6 different types of anti-depressants and had awful side effects from each one, and zero help from them.  So I won’t be trying anymore, I shouldn’t think, and I will worry for you if you do or are, in case you have the same problems I did with the meds.  Personally, I have tried several therapists and 2 psychiatrists.  All the therapists I tried had hobby horses of their own disciplines, and all were a disaster for me.  One psychiatrist was worse than useless, and one was a lovely man, who tried me on cognitive behavioural therapy – which didn’t do much for me; I don’t think it’s the saviour of our minds other people think it is.  I don’t like or trust most doctors, due to my own mental health experiences with them, and to watching them ill-treat Troubadour when we were married, and he had been seriously ill.  But these are My Experiences Alone.  I will be talking out of them, of course.  I will reference them.  But I do not mean to invalidate anyone else’s.  If you take meds and it works for you – good.  If you have a great counsellor or therapist etc, and it works for you: good.  Good for you.  We are not all the same; we are similar.  Got it? 

Evangelism is never going to work for me.  Sharing information and experiences and trying different tactics at different times for different things, IS.  What works for me may not for you.  And vice versa.

For this reason, I have a slight problem with the tone and assumption of the first bit of Eric Maisel’s book.  He writes very conversationally, as he always does, very persuasively – he is a great writer, a great polemicist, and I have admired some 20 so far of his 35 or so book output on creativity, living creative lives, and staving off sadness and meaning loss in our lives by organising our thoughts and philosophic leanings more cleanly and clearly. 

Eric Maisel sets out a thesis in the first part of the book that really, there is no such thing as ‘depression’ as we know it now.  What there is – and he goes to great lengths to not underplay it[2] – is a deep and persistent, chronic human sadness, that we can all feel.  It can come at any time, for a reason we can see, or for no apparent reason at all.  Furthermore, it has been hijacked by the pharmacological industry, for their profit.  He says that we have ‘unwanted’ emotions sometimes, that we have been taught to label as ‘abnormal’.  He says: ‘Unwanted does not equal abnormal’ (p.9). 

He argues the chicken and egg scenario of biological brain differences in those feeling chronically sad: are their brains showing differences in chemical actions and areas working more or less BECAUSE they became sad and it changed the working of their brains?  Or because their brains were like that anyway, because they have a proper biological disorder and this MADE them sad?[3] 

He argues the medical industry would like us to believe the latter, when he thinks the former is more likely.  The same goes for the effects of various anti-depressants.  Do they work because chemicals have an effect (you drink; you’ll get drunk), which means you may think you must have had depression because this pill FIXED it?[4]  Or is it simply that your feelings were altered by chemicals, your symptoms masked – while the causes of your malady were left completely unaddressed, and therefore, likely to make a quick return once the pills are stopped?  He is angry at the way the medical industry as a whole seems relatively uninterested in finding the causes for this modern epidemic of depression (an idea we’ll return to), and trying instead to validate their own authority arbiting status by merely inventing labels for maladies, syndromes, disorders, and then offering us drugs for them (all of Chapter 1).  Drugs that he says may or may not do anything for you (pp.31-35). 

He worries that we are as a culture laying down for all this, adopting the language given to us by the medical and pharmacological industry (I regularly refer to my late father as both ‘OCD’ and ‘obviously clinically depressed, just never diagnosed’, for example).  The fact that it can be mightily comforting to have a name for the thing that ails us, is not lost on him. 

The fundamental linguistic game played by the mental health industry, is to characterize anything that remotely needs remediating or changing a disorder.  That hundreds of millions of people agree to play this game only proves the power of naming. (p.39)

But he suggests that by buying into the labels of medicine, wholesale, and taking all their drugs and their expensive talking therapies, we are giving up what personal responsibility and control we could have for trying to feel better ourselves.  He argues that by remembering that this modern thing we call ‘depression’ is in fact a 20^th century label and construction; by remembering that throughout history, people were seen as ‘melancholic’ of temperament (a philosophical word rather than a purely medical label)[5], some more so than others, and that we can find ways of living our lives differently and training our minds and thought processes better, so that life is less easily able to lose its meaning and sink into a pit of greyness – we would be better off.

He isn’t by any means, a lone voice in the wilderness saying that our Western society is too quick to yell mental illness, and ‘pathologize the experiences of everyday life’ (p.9).  He backs up his points with several scientific studies (all supporting his points, of course), and quite a few good books, some of which I have read[6].  I need to make clear that a lot of this story takes place in America, and is about the American pharmacological industry for a large part, which functions a bit differently to ours.  Though the idea of comforting labels is all over both our societies.

I had greatly furrowed brow while reading all this.  I agree that our society is very quick to jump on bandwagons; and that we all seem to love a Label, for ourselves or others – as Bill Maher recently said, I need to label you, as if I don’t, I don’t know whether to ignore all your opinions immediately or not (I paraphrase, as we have annoyingly deleted that download of his Real Time – if anyone can give me the correct quote, please do, its within the last month).  Its scary to consistently be feeling things that go against society’s grain of needing us to be team oriented, happy happy happy all the time, and mostly extrovert in behaviour.  It’s scary to feel unable to talk about this for fear of being criticised as wimpy/ malingering/ unable to look after your children/ unable to hold down your job, or the nicest one of all: ‘mental’, ‘crazy’.  So its no surprise that some of us have chugged down our diagnoses of depression with a relief or gusto that may seem odd to others.  If it’s got a Proper Medical Name, then its REAL…and because more people are speaking out about it, its starting to lose its stigma – because so many of us seem to have it, or have had it, or will have it at some point.  There then lays out before us an array of ‘help’: support groups, drugs, psychiatrists.  This can be very comforting.  And it can work, for some people. (I'll come back to this in the 3rd and last post of this series.)

But I do agree that it goes too far.  It’s very tempting to say things like, if you grieve too long after a death, you have gone from mourning to depression.  How long is too long?  It’s obviously different for us all.  You can’t bring it all down to numbers, and lists of symptoms.  That’s over-generalizing, and creates its own problems. 

This was dealt with in depth by the UK documentary film maker, Adam Curtis, in the first episode of his short series The Trap: What Happened to our Dreams of Freedom? broadcast here in 2007.  (If you want to go see that bit, it’s on YouTube here, and it starts about 36 minutes in, with R.D.Laing looking very thoughtful and pinched, listen from there – I warn you, its dense, lots to take in.)  The section I am mentioning is part of a wider critique of political control in Western and specifically UK society, so I am quote mining, in a way; it’s a small part of what he was saying, but an important part. 

Eric Maisel’s book focuses the early sections on how depression is not a real thing at all, but a construct, made by doctors, and an incredible find for the psycho-pharmaceutical industry.  He doesn’t give any background as to why this may have happened, or how.  This is where Adam Curtis comes in, and the section of his documentary I just mentioned.  So before you jump up and down and yell: ‘But I AM sick!’ do have a think about how the label of depression arose, and what it does in our society.  The background information is, in fact, vital to thinking about it all.

What Adam Curtis proposed was this (for those of you who have no time to watch a 10 min clip, or don’t want to) - any phrases in speech-marks indicate direct quotes from Curtis's narration; indented paragraphs are longer quotes:  

Celebrity Scots psychiatrist RD Laing goes to America, mid 1960s.  He is against the medical elite, as always propounding mental illness as a purely biological thing, taking no account of intellectual and social factors.  He viewed psychiatry as a ‘fake science’ used for political control of people. Labels of madness or sanity have no actual reality, they are just convenient labels to lock up people ‘who want to break free’ politically – who differ from the norms.  One of the many young US psychiatrists who came to Laing to learn was called Rosenhan, and he devised a truly breathtaking experiment to see if psychiatrists could tell the difference between madness and sanity.  You need to watch the documentary clip for this bit alone, or read this link that describes the experiment: it’s truly shocking.  Basically, they really couldn’t.  Healthy people were judged sick, sick people judged healthy.  It emphasised the immense dangers of psychiatric labelling.  It was an important experiment and sent shockwaves through the American psychiatric establishment at the time (1973).  (Maisel sites some similar though less dramatic experiments, pp.27-30.)

The psychiatric establishment fought back though, with a new system of diagnosis that relied on the scientific, clear and clean beacon of numbers.  ‘All human judgement removed’.  The new system was based on ‘measurable surface behaviour of human beings’.  Curtis has Paul McHugh, then psychiatrist in chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital explain quite clearly that psychiatry has no clue what causes any of the conditions – ADD, ADHD, OCD, BPD, PPSD, GAD etc, but could just tell you ‘what they look like’ based on surface behaviour that could be observed and recorded.  Characteristics of all these Disorders, including depression, were listed very specifically, and questionnaires devised asking people if they thought they had these characteristics (NB: human judgement straight back in there, doh!).  The choices were ‘yes’ or ‘no’, so that anyone could conduct an interview with a symptom checklist, and the results could be fed into a computer, that would then diagnose a person as having this or that disorder, or none.  If they were normal or abnormal. Curtis has Dr Robert Spitzer, creator of the new diagnostic system in 1979, confirm this was how it was supposed to work: ‘no clinical judgement required’.

This is the bit we will start to be familiar with, over here in the UK.  In the late 70’s, to test the checklists, interviewers were sent all over the USA to question randomly selected people with them.  The point is made that till then, psychiatrists had only seen people who felt they needed help, who felt ill.  'No one had asked regular people how they felt'.  Do you need me to tell you that the results were apparently terrifying?  That more than 50% of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder, 17% of them had a depressive incident at some point.  This is where the idea of a ‘hidden epidemic’ of depression comes from, in our society.  More surveys were done, more random people: very similar results were returned.

Many many people found ‘the checklists were a liberation: their private suffering was finally being recognised’.  But here come the unforeseen consequences:

Millions of people began to use the checklists to monitor and diagnose themselves; to identify what was aberrant or abnormal in their behaviour and feelings.  By definition this also set up a powerful model for them, of what were the normal behaviour and feelings to which they should aspire.  Psychiatrists began to find more and more people coming to them, demanding to made normal.

Paul McHugh makes the point that previously people did not wish to seem ‘psychiatrically injured’ but that now they had a new ideal of NORMAL they wanted to be made to fit the model.  Curtis concludes this section with saying:

The disorders and checklists were becoming a powerful and objective guide to what were the correct and appropriate feelings in an age of individualism and emotion.  This was a very different system of order: no longer were people told how to behave by an elite.  Instead, they now used the checklists to monitor their feelings and police their own behaviour.  They were reassured that these new categories were scientific and could be checked by the power of numbers.

Now, you may think it weird I have devoted so much time to Adam Curtis in a review of a book by someone else, but I ask you – if an author declares depression doesn’t actually exist, is a construct, and serves other ends for those who created that label, not really much for us…would you have liked a bit of background to such an immense claim?  I had already seen this documentary, read a fair bit of Laing and knew about the anti-psychiatry movement (of which Laing did not like to think he was associated, by the way), so I could see where Eric Maisel was coming from.  The other point of course is that RD Laing is very important for modern existentialists – he saw mental illness as part of lived experience, cultural and societal, not just a biological phenomenon and that it must be treated as an intellectual, societal, cultural phenomenon; and Eric Maisel is an existentialist, so tends to take the same view.

I think the problem I had with the first part of this book was that whilst this modern thing, ‘depression’ is almost certainly a creation of the mental health industry and its adjuncts, and that restating how we feel when we feel awful as simply part of lived experience, and then trying to live differently and more mindfully, with a set of good existential tools on how to do so…will not work for everyone.  Maisel makes it clear that existentialism is a tough philosophy, hard and rigorous (bit like I find Zen Buddhism – too hard for me by far)…BUT.

Let me put it like this.  I read Sally Brampton’s Shoot the Damn Dog (2009) a while back.  (As a result of it I became quite vocal for a while about ‘my depression’ in an attempt to remove stigma, at least from around myself.)  Its one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read.  That woman had a hell going on inside her for a long time.  I did think, reading it, that all the meds she had given to her did not seem to be helping at all, and she freely says they gave her awful awful side effects.  Eventually she came out of it all, years later (also unimpressed with cognitive behavioural therapy, as I am).  I also note that Marion Keyes, beloved chick lit Irish author is only just now feeling better from a depression that she described on her website in absolutely heartrending flat clear terms.  Both these women, and these are but 2 examples, were on the floor with whatever ailed them.  And their lives were fine before sudden felling by depression, or whatever we want to call it.  Marian Keyes had had some depressions like mine before, but nothing like what befell her the last 2 or so years.

I don’t think either of these women could have been helped, at their worst states of mind, by existentialism, or by being told that depression doesn’t exist and they felt ‘chronic human sadness’…Semantics would not have helped them, at this point, I think.  Do you see?

Many of us feel quite shitty, quite a lot of the time.  And there are degrees of it, different for each person.  Whilst I think many of us are far too quick to embrace the idea of being mentally ill (for whatever reason), I think there are states people get into where you genuinely cannot, for sometimes a feck of a long while, think your way out of it, or do things that will make you feel more in control and thus feel better about life and yourself.  Some people really do disappear into an abyss for a while.  Whatever we want to call that, depression, a melancholic episode…it’s REAL.  People die there sometimes.

The dangers of the first part of Eric Maisel’s otherwise very useful book is to blithely state that depression is just a word.  A bad word in service of the psycho-pharmacological industry.  It may well be, as I have tried to show you with a bit of background. 

But it is very dangerous indeed to lump all the ways people feel when they feel sad together and if someone in the absolute pits of sadness came across this book, and tried to read from the start, when they are at that point where you aren’t capable of proper action or thought, I don’t think it would help – it would make you feel worse, because you would feel guilty and powerless to feel any better, despite seeing the logic in some of what he says. I don’t personally think meds are the answer either.  But that’s just me, ok?  I don’t know what the answer is.  I think the fact may be that its different for each person.

I too think the pharmacological industry is not an altruistic one by any damn means, and I would totally concur with (UK medical doctor) Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science, in this assessment of ‘medicalisation[7]’:

[which is] the expansion of the biomedical remit into domains where it may not be helpful or necessary…In its most aggressive form, this process has been characterised as “disease-mongering”.  It can be seen throughout the world of quack cures – and being alive to it can be like having the scales removed from your eyes – but in big pharma the story goes like this: the low-hanging fruit of medical research has all been harvested, and the industry is rapidly running out of novel molecular entities.  They registered fifty a year in the 1990s, but now its down to twenty a year, and a lot of those are just copies.  They are in trouble.

Because they cannot find new treatments for the diseases we already have, the pill companies instead invent new diseases for the treatments they already have.  Recent favourites include Social Anxiety Disorder (a new use for SSRI drugs[8]), Female Sexual Dysfunction (a new use for Viagra in women)…and so on: problems, in a real sense, but perhaps not necessarily the stuff of pills, and perhaps not best conceived of in reductionist biomedical terms.  In fact, reframing intelligence, loss of libido, shyness and tiredness as medical pill problems could be considered crass, exploitative and frankly disempowering. (p.153, my italics)

Which brings us back to Eric Maisel, who would also utterly agree with that, I’m sure.

 Despite the fact I am in two minds about dismissing the word ‘depression’ for everyone, I have actually found dismissing it for myself quite useful.  In my last major fit of being in the pit, I frantically googled about the web looking for things to help me think.  I’m a pagan by inclination, so I googled pagans and depression (wondering why my own notions were helping me so little), and found this blog article.  It’s noteworthy because of one line, for me.  It said that pagans are often quite left-leaning, politically, and lefties have a lot to be depressed about in the way our society is going.  Or this one, about free-thinking people being more often classified as mentally ill (harking back to RD Laing’s point of psychiatry as something to label and lock up those who disagree with societal norms).  That really made me think.   

Why was I so quick to embrace the idea of being depressed as thing that was happening to me, against which I was powerless (in a way)…making it seem like an alien, or chemical invader.  In fact: there’s loads going on all around me, that explain perfectly well why I am worried, anxious, and downright upset, a lot of the time.  Watch the news!  Live with someone like Stanley who watches the news a lot!  Have an upbringing like the one I described last post. You’ll then be a bit vulnerable to paranoid feelings, insecurity and phases of feeling worthless.  Trust issues.  It’s understandable, not a mystery.   Be someone who seems to think a lot, to over think, analyse a lot.  To have been alone often, so sees things from the outsider perspective, often.  To get into bad mental habits as a result of all ones experiences, is not a surprise.  And it would affect and take each of us differently, depending on what our personal experiences were.  Obviously. 

So whilst I’m not going to be one to take the label or idea of depression away from anyone who is finding it helpful in learning how to feel better, and live differently; unless I am in the real pits, I do take it away from myself.  I’m me and I get damn sad, damn often.  But I like to try and deal with it with my own brain, which is why I do like the rest of Eric Maisel’s book, the meaty bit, the solutions.  Which we’ll get to next post, the last one of the series. 

It won’t work for everyone, it won’t always work for me, and its only part of an answer.  But it is part.  I think it can help.  Some of us could do worse than try some of his ideas.

---

[1] Maisel, Eric, Rethinking Depression, California: New World Library, 2012.

[2] Rethinking Depression, all of pages 49-52, give a long list of reasons why we get unhappy.

[3] RD – p.16, p.20

[4] RD – p.34, p.41.

[5] RD, p.10.

[6] The ones I have read and can recommend as interesting to the topic are: Charles Barber’s Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation (2008), Richard Bentall’s Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Any Good? (2009), Daniel Carlat’s Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry – A Doctors Revelatins about a Profession in Crisis (2010), Peter Conrad’s The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders (2007), Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield’s (also featured in Adam Curtis’s documentary The Trap) The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depression Disorder (2007) and lastly, Joanna Moncrieff’s The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (2009).  There are many more he lists that look very interesting, but these are the ones I can vouch for as MOST interesting.

[7] Goldacre, Ben, Bad Science, London: Fourth Estate, 2008

[8] An antidepressant, Prozac is of the SSRI family.

Let's talk about The Dark, Part 1: secrets of my personality, 1, 2, 3...

Ok.  There hasn’t been a serious thought piece in this blog for a bit.  So there are going to be 3 now.  One after the other.  This is a bit of an exploration, an expedition to stuff I usually allude to but don’t come right out with.  I’m going to be frank in these pieces.  We’re getting ready for Eric Maisel to visit next Thursday, and I’m not going to write a small fluff review of his new book, I’m going to really think about this topic.  Depression, sadness.  My home turf, yes?

So.  Let’s talk about the dark.  Ready?

I had a dream the other day.  A nightmare.  It went exactly like this:

I was in a dark shadowy basement boiler room, as me, now.  A real one, that I used to go to with my dad when he was alive and I was a girl, in the bottom of the office block at Grosvenor Hill.  We had a storeroom down there where we kept our excess books.  I was alone, just there, looking at the red massive old boilers, reading the old dials, to check the temperatures were right, just as I used to when helping him.  A man appeared in front of me, dressed in a faded security guard’s uniform.  He was middle aged, nondescript.  I was holding a hammer.  I beat him in the head, slowly to death, while he weakly pleaded with me, almost conversationally, to stop.  I don’t know why I did it.  Afterward, covered in blood and bits, heaving huge sobs of terror and revulsion at myself, I stumbled further into the boiler room, to our store room door.  Behind one of the boilers there, I saw a body.  Shaking and dripping, I squeezed through the small section between the wall and the boiler’s edge.  My father lay there, dead and decaying.  Wearing a security guard’s uniform.  I realized what I had done.  I hated myself.  I couldn’t bear the feelings rushing through me, blotting out everything.  I knelt down by his body.  The head was crushed in.  I leant forward, and took up part of the skull.  It came loose with a viscous noise.  It was wet in my hands.  I had the forehead, the eyes, part of the mouth: large browned teeth glistened as I moved it closer to me.  I put the skull part over my face, like cleaning myself with a cloth doused in cool clean water.  As I put my fathers face over my face, I felt so comforted.  By the complete darkness, the crushing out, winking out, of everything else there ever was.  Just the darkness was left.  I was so relieved.

Now.  The thing about that massively melodramatic dream, and the fact I woke up hugely disturbed and freaked out at my own obvious nuttiness, is that it’s one of those easily interpretable dreams.  There I am at a subterranean level, where things are boiling away, unseen.  Things I might not think about consciously, so much.  My father was a housekeeper, a sort of security guard for a lot of his life.  Live in, with us, his family, mum and me.  We lived at the top of office blocks around London, through my middle to late childhood.  We didn’t really mix with other family much, and I didn’t have friends over much.  I did go and help on the locking up rounds often, because an empty office block has an amazing spooky charm unlike any other emptiness.  I learned to not be afraid of literal actual dark on those rounds.  Dark is just dark. 

My father, on the hand, was a man for whom life had not gone as he hoped and wished it had.  He was embittered.  He had not become a lecturer at a university, as he would have wished, one of his dreams; he had had to look after his younger brother instead, as happened in those days, in poorer families.  My mother and I were often something of a disappointment to him.  He told us this, sometimes quite plainly, sometimes by his behaviour (contempt, dismissiveness, cruel gestures or statements).  Other times, he was sweetness itself, and was incredibly kind and empathic.  We loved him.  My mother loves him unswervingly and with many kind explanations for his personality, to this day.  I found I was treasured as a small child and looked upon with increasing suspicion as I came of an age to think for myself – even though some of the time, he loved my brain and praised it.

I don’t want this to be a dad bashing post. I merely attempt to be very frank.  I loved him wildly, he was a little god to me, as most fathers are to daughters when they are young.  It was difficult to stay in his good books; it was great when you were there.  When you weren’t, you were simply eclipsed.  He wouldn’t talk to or acknowledge you.  If he did, it would be to slice with words.  Waiting out the displeasure period quietly and unnoticeably was usually the best option.  I learned to sneak about, to tell half truths, then outright lies; I played rooms with him in by ear.  I learned to value dissembling quite a bit.  I became an amazingly earnest liar at one of my first schools, until one day I was caught out spectacularly in my invention of a life different to my own (I spun a tale to my mother about an incident at school, completely untrue, that was unfortunately checkable, and I had made it sound like it needed checking, stupidly – so I humiliated my mother when she phoned the parent of the other child it involved…never my intention, I remain eternally sorry for that).  I learned the value of keeping lies as close to the truth as possible after that; though to this day will occasionally embark on an outright untruth with huge embellishments, just for the joy of it.  (Or I write a short story.)

My dad was tough to love and live with.  He hurt me and my mother many times, never physically (lucky), just with his anger and disappointment at just about everything.  I would like to say I used to defend her, he used to put her down infront of people and such, treat her like a doormat in front of me.  When I was quite young and he was god, I observed her just taking this behaviour and saw her through his eyes: as weak, and deserving of contempt. Act like a servant, get treated like one.  I joined in.  I treated her like dirt too.  Thankfully (for my sense of self), this only lasted a couple of years. Once I hit the earliest possible puberty, life kilted itself right over.  I remembered my mother had been caring for me all my life: taking me to museums and ‘places of interest’, taking me out and away, encouraging my love of stories and writing, reading my little ‘books’ I made.  She was always so concerned if I was sick, or unhappy.  Apart from believing my dad was always in the right (a religious belief; that is, taught to her by her religion, that men were better, and women subservient, especially wives to husbands), she was damn near as lovely as a quiet person gets. 

Also, at this point, dad seemed to become suspicious of me.  I was suddenly, sometimes, for no reason *I* could see, the enemy.  I got the benefit of the treatment my mother had been receiving all this time.  Nothing makes you have sympathy with someone like suddenly BEING them!  I remained in this boat with my mother till he died, decades later.  Never getting back that early relationship of him being loving (teaching me all about classical music and films and having endless mini philosophical discussions), just sometimes brittle and difficult (always ending up making me cry when helping me with my homework, because he had no patience if I was slow in any way), and never being the Horrible Daughter for him again, never the co-conspirator again.

To get back to the dream, it was quite clear to me that I am terrified of becoming him.  I have very little patience with people when they are slow about something I understand well (I NEVER understand when people say I should be a teacher because I know lots about this or that bookish topic and can express myself reasonably well; being a teacher is about loving to help people think for themselves, and I fear I would get too frustrated and be rubbish and unkind).  I have had a lifelong experience of something we could call low mood.  I see things as full of great joy, and great sadness.  Everything feels A LOT, far too much.  I often lose my own side of a discussion or argument, because I have entered into the other person’s so much and can really feel it.  I don’t know where my bit has gone.  I feel permeable, skinless, almost all the time.  I have to be careful in crowds, or I vanish and feel only the cacophony of the hive, the mob, the cult.

Things are either ok to wondrously quietly euphorically peaceful (no massive unrealistic highs here, ever); or they are dark dark dark.  On good days, I go about my business and my head is quiet.  I can think thoughts and do stuffs, and smile and I feel the sun, I feel my connection to everything.  It hums quietly: and all is well.  On the bad days, usually from very early, I just feel that the raincloud is over my head and I am soaked and foggy.  On these days I am just in fear, despair and…darkness.  My head says unkind things to me all day, and when I contradict them, I hear only myself telling me lies.  (Don’t get me wrong, these aren’t separate voices, this is me ganging up on me.)  It has been this way since I was very small.  One of my first memories is of being sad.  One of my others is of Victoria Park’s orange garden and the wonder of those colours, the green, the orange, the blue sky: I reached up from my baby stroller and grasped an orange.  I stroked the sun.  I smiled at my mother. 

My point there, is that clearly I grew up with loads of baggage, and I worry that I will end up like my dad – a contradictory person who is at once terrified (he was practically a hermit, yet liked to paint my mother as the scared one – it took someone pointing that out to me after his death before I saw it), very mean and yet full of warmth sometimes, and creativity he never let out.  (He wanted to compose, to write; he wanted to be a missionary preacher: he wanted to be a change in the world.  He was quite the autodidact all his life.)   

In the last couple of years before he died, he and I were almost estranged.  I had divorced Troubadour which really really upset dad.  I had ‘broken Biblical Law’, he said.  The one and only time Stanley ever went to meet him, he got the silent treatment.  Dad would not acknowledge him beyond a muttered hello; would not look at him.  Would not even get dressed, or look away from the TV.  I was mortified; mum tried to explain it away, and I didn’t bother with dad for some months after that incident, deciding silence – finally – can go two ways.   

Of course, what mum and I didn’t know, was that by this time the COPD that had been eating him up for years (what a smokers cough, was what we thought – we thought he was the only one spitting up all that phlegm all the time) had been joined by prostate cancer.  He didn’t tell anyone.  We think he knew he was dying, but didn’t want to know what of.  He never went to the doctors unless my mother somehow made him.  He quickly became much smaller and wizened than he had been (I missed most of this, busy making my point as I was), and oddly nondescript.  He lost all his colour, all his fire.  In a photo of him shortly before he died, he smiles benignly out at me, with genuine gentle sparkle, genuine good humour – none of his anger remains.  He has a semi shaved head, as he got bored with doing anything to his hair, which remained thick into his late 60’s.  By the time I was speaking to him by phone again, I was stunned by his compliant behaviour – he was kindly, nice, welcoming, happy to hear from me.  Not sarcastic or unkind at all.  Not thinking I was just ringing to borrow money (as I had borrowed a lot of money one way and another over time, and his always giving it to me, and the way he behaved about the loans, were one of the most dysfunctional things about us).  I thought I had shown him that you can’t treat people this way without getting your own medicine back at you sometimes.  I thought we were finally relating as – sort of – regular people: two grown ups. 

Then I visited one last time, saw how thin he was and realized he was very sick.  My mother was trying to not notice (she had become – and remains – very good at not noticing things she does not know how to deal with in a way that squares with how she wants to be, which I do not fault her for; the woman has not had an easy life, we all have our mechanisms).  While I was there, he became suddenly very ill, breathing troubles, pains, terrible pallor.  We called the ambulance.  Two nights later he was dead.  Pneumonia has a way of intervening.  We only found out about the prostate cancer at the hospital the night before he died – they thought we knew. 

So I hadn’t ‘shown him’ at all.  What I had done was have an unequal battle with a dying man, who died quietly without forgiving me for being such a bloody disappointment.  (There’s the nondescript security guard who I beat to death.  And yes: he was a Housekeeper, a sort of security guard; and what is a dad, but a security guard of his children??)  They had asked my mother and I, at the hospital, about resuscitation when his lungs gave out, as they unquestionably would; a machine was already helping him breathe...They made it clear he would just be on life support after that, no more waking, no more dad, his body had given up.  My mother was unable to have this decision alone, and turned to me.  I said no, let him go.  I was thinking of all my cats, who get the dignity of going when its clear their bodies are given up on them; when we humans don't always get that choice.  And yet, it came to pass, and I somewhere within feel like I killed  my father.  Mercy it was, but nonetheless.  Before you say – oh for fecks sake, enough with the guilt and the melodramatic way of interpreting events, all I will reiterate is that I am telling the truth as I see it, for me, and for no one else, with reference to no one else.  I judge no one but me.  What happens in our lives, and how we tell the story to ourselves is part – how can it not be? – of who we are.  At any given time.

There’s the other fact that as I am sure you will have noticed from all the previous writing exercise posts and such, that I had all this going on at home and school was rather a disaster too.  The pack scented a bit of a freak and I wasn’t able to be less freaky, at that time; I just couldn’t understand why people kept judging me as lesser, not good enough, a bit of a joke.  I withdrew, and stayed withdrawn.  My whole not good in groups thing.  Work has been an improvement on all that, especially my last job, where I was, for the first time ever, accepted as myself in a group type situation, after hours.  (I always do jobs where I work alone; but I can socialise after.)

Anyway.  So I have always been an odd, delicate flower of a person; and my childhood more or less explains it.  Dad was unhappy and didn’t deal with it very well, mum was doing her best, and I had a bit of an approval deficit problem looming.

The Dark is always with me.  Even on good days, I feel it in the background.  I am just well capable of ignoring it, those days.  On the bad days, I see the light, but I think it’s a lie other people indulge in – the truth is that it is, and always will be: Dark.  I wish I could be in on the lie too, of course, but on those days, I can’t.  I can only just about do what’s needful on those days.  Yes, I think of suicide, I always have thought of it. Once I tried it and failed, despite my best efforts.  Raven Digitalis has memorably called this feeling the Goddess Suicidia – “she challenges our fears of Being”.  I’m afraid I can’t reference that properly, as he said it on Facebook on a status ages ago – it just caught my thoughts: challenges our fears of being.  That is exactly what I am afraid of: being here, dealing with everything.  When I think of suicide, I am aware what I actually want is to Go To Sleep, and Wake Up When I Feel Better; or next week sometime.  I DO want to stay here, I just want a bloody good rest.  And a brain clean…

Eric Maisel’s new book that I am going to talk around for the next 2 posts, is a book of 2 halves.  The first half posits that there is a difference between regular human unhappiness (however profound and longlasting or persistent) and this modern beast we have come to know as ‘depression’.  The second half talks of ways to take care of yourself and your mind, your body, to minimise the effects of human unhappiness.  It’s a lot about existentialism, a lot about not surrendering all of yourself to a label, no matter how comforting it can be to finally have one.  To take some control and personal agency back, from where you can actually lose it, in the medical system, and do some helping for yourself, quietly, gradually and at your own pace.  To learn to stand bravely in your life, knowing it won’t always be good feeling, but knowing you always have some kinds of tools to help you try to Be.  Gently.

Now I’ve explained where I see my own Dark as coming from, and the fact I am still, on and off, in thrall to it, I will state that some days I can’t existentialize my own way out of a paper bag.  And I will ask him about those days.  I don’t agree with everything he says – but he has some very useful things to say, and they are well-reasoned.  We’ll start on them in the next post, with a little background to his ideas too – he isn’t the only one worried by the way we are laying down as a culture and wishing to be Made More Normal (by the same people who told us we are Not)…

Come back soon…