Update on the Mother of All Depressions

My blog has been moribund, for any still following it.  My depression has been so severe that I have been essentially non-functional.  I can do a few tasks like take out the trash and wash the dishes, but even facing my e-mail seems often an insurmountable burden.

I have a bright intellectual friend, Norman Ball, whose work I recommend, but right now his writing is too exalted for me to parse, for the most part.

My mind is near constantly darkened by the obsession of suicide, the only release my brain seems to comprehend or imagine.  I resist this daily, but it is extremely hard to live when your own brain has become your enemy.  The voices in my head, like howling dogs, constantly sing an odious hymn of self-loathing and self-destruction.  Nature abhors a vacuum thus the locusts have come in to roost.

I don't know how to break this cycle.  Perhaps it most involves acceptance and doing--doing anything, like writing this.  In focusing on a task, however brief or menial, I do get some temporary relief.  But the overwhelming majority of the time has me, as my friend Ralph described, "cowering in my cubicle."

I feel a coward for not being able to face life.  Life doesn't come to me in specific details but as an overwhelming, all-devouring wall of impossibilities.  I quit blogging mainly for fear that I was only going in circles about depression--after all, there is only so much to be said about it, and I thought the narrative might be reinforcing the disease.  Then objectification of my suffering in words may have some therapeutic benefit. 

Don't know when I'll blog again.

All you out there not afflicted with a serious mental illness, give thanks daily.

Namaste,

Craig