The Beat Goes On

That is, beating up myself when my mind has nothing to occupy it, which is frequently.

I have seemingly exhausted what western medicine has to offer--45 days at a university hospital with maximum meds, group therapy and 12 treatments of bilateral ECT with the current turned up to the max my brain could tolerate.

Early on in this disease, as a Christian fanatic, I was sure that my overwhelming depressions were due to God' desertion, to a failure of faith.  That model failed miserably.

Next I embraced the medical model.  That seems to have worked for near 25 years but it has failed to work now.

Thus I have entered therapy again, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but after two sessions see no light at the tunnel's end.

Sometimes I think if I could just forget about myself and stick my nose in as many mundane tasks as feasible, from cleaning my desk to weed-whacking, that I might improve.  In the past, however, frantic work did not improve my overall mood.  I'm open to anything now, eastern or western, however irrational it appears on the surface.

The old word for depression was "sloth" or "accidie," a certain torpor of spirit and withdrawal from the world.  Of this I am guilty.  But to treat this behavior as a moral failure seems cruel.  Nevertheless Christian theology holds, for the most part, that despair is a form of pride, as it usurps the hope of God and the faith that our experience will somehow redound to his glory.

I am so far removed from such an attitude it's not funny.  And I haven't written poetry in six months.  Furthermore, I must warn folks about my blog from 8/3/2010 until the end of December, when I became fully manic and entered a fantasy detour where I thought I could save the world.  I leave it as evidence of the flip side of my disease, and as a record of a creative psychosis it may entertain some.

In my depression I cannot even save myself.

Thank God for my wife, Kathleen, who helps keep me on the planet.  I am so grateful for her and for my family and friends.  They believe in me when I cannot.  Oh to believe in myself again!  Oh to have an innate  sense of self again!

I have felt the need to apologize for my mania, recorded here as mentioned above, but such an impulse is ridiculous since I had no control over it to begin with, just as I am now snake bit by a serious depression (again).  Perhaps the psychological model will help me; it never has before but I'm desperate.

I'll close with one of the 28 dark sonnets I wrote during the first half of 2010, when I was also suffering a serious depression--though not as serious as this one, I fear, where I feel global paralysis and abject but unfocused fear.  What do I fear?  Depression.  How shall I overcome it?  I have no clue, but just blogging today is one tiny step forward. 

Dark Sonnet XXVII




I fear disintegration into glass,
Into a million cubes orbiting free,
Reflecting only scenery as they pass,
Without a central hub, without a me.
The ego is a very slippery boss.
Few know the limits of his sour purview.
I know the limits; he is what I’ve lost;
All whirls in a pestilential stew.
A piece of me there, another here.
Who will collect the fragments in a pot?
Another year, another half a year
Where what I thought I was is what I’m not.
Dear brother, if your self escapes your skull,
Pray you do not spiral down to null.


Namaste,

7 kilorats,

Craig

Staying busy. with outside things....

3/19

I recently wrote here that I would try not to write about myself but about things outside myself.

I saw my shrink this morning and he changed my antidepressant. I couldn't help weeping in front of him, something I've tried to spare others in my latest strategy of ignoring depression.


3/20

It's the first day of spring and the raven in the tree outside is honking annoyingly. I love ravens, I love to watch them in flight, but I must admit their vocalizations leave something to be desired. Their calls remind me of those old brass car horns with the black rubber bulb. What does it mean that a bird calls at a lower register? I have no idea, but it is clear that larger birds tend to have lower voices, as the flock of wild turkeys outside demonstrates.

There are mountain lions in this area and we can't figure out why they don't make a quick snack out of this flock of wild turkeys. I'm tempted to wring some necks myself for a feast but can't face the boiling and plucking it takes to get the carcass ready to cook. These turkeys ought to taste good, though. The only food I see them eating are insects in the abundant grass, and they are definitely free-range turkeys. Who began this flock and when and why are questions we have yet to answer. But it is fun to see the turkeys line up at twilight near the eucalyptus grove, waiting for the precise moment to fly up into the branches to roost for the night. They tend to ascend one by one, occasionally two flying up together. And once they are ensconced in their protective grove, they know that they have succeeded in surviving another day.

Although it caused me great anxiety, I looked up six vegetarian dinner recipes and made a list of the required ingredients and went shopping for them. The anxiety might be normal, in that it's something I've never done before. Last night I made a swiss chard fritatta, which Kathleen truly enjoyed. Today I have made a mushroom-barley soup. I had to do it this morning because I won't have time when Kathleen returns from work, so I have it all done and refrigerated already.

Having something to do with my hands is a blessing. I recall prior to my ECT that I generally made Kathleen lunches and tried to make dinner, but just like my former exercise regimen, ECT seemed to amputate my past from my future. The threads of things I was doing before the treatments I have had trouble reconnecting with. There was a chapbook contest I intended to enter, for example, and I had the chapbook done, but I no longer know where to send it. And I found myself published in a journal I didn't know was publishing me. I think the entire experience of ECT resembles a major concussive syndrome, with selective anterograde amnesia and a general disconnect with one's former life. If I were to do it over again, and I never plan to given the recent results, I would take the time to write down in a notebook beforehand all my ongoing activities and goals in a detailed fashion, so that I would have a guide for resuming my life. As it is, things crop up--”I was going to do that?” “I had promised to do that?” “There's a deadline for what?” “I owe whom a letter?”

ECT is a great interruption in the flow of one's life. Naturally anyone considering it would not call their life normal. But even depressed, as I have been, there are connections and recollections that seemed to have been whited out by ECT.

Of course, underneath the inevitable progression of my bipolar disease lies the grief at the loss of my first-born daughter, Rachel, on July 29, 2007. At the time I welcomed the sad feelings because they were legitimate grief, and grief felt better than depression, but in the emotional economy of the human psyche one wonders if that great loss has not been feeding my depression at some level. Experientially I can't say so; theoretically it makes sense.

I've been worrying a lot about old age lately, where we might live, how we will afford to live and all the attendant worries. But I like what Bob Dylan said: “He who isn't busy being born is busy dying.” Also, T. S. Eliot: “Old men should be explorers.”

Fine quotes to live up to. Fear is the mind-killer. Once faith in yourself is undermined, faith in anything else becomes near impossible.

So, outside myself, I've shopped and cooked two meals. Tonight I will be playing a tune I wrote for a Spring Equinox ceremony. The performance, of course, fills me with fear. But the way around my basic fear of non-being, or global incompetence of my person, is to do the things of which I'm afraid. I know this and have done this many times in my approach to life. I even called the Medical Board about the status of my medical license renewal today. (They told me to call back Monday.)

Oh, I fed the cats and brought Kathleen coffee and provided her with a lunch today. Every little useful thing helps. I don't know how it is for others, but in my advanced mental illness I have so much trouble trying to inhabit my body. My body becomes a thing, not part of my person, and to heal my mind must slow down or speed up to the rhythm of my body, so that in washing dishes, for instance, my hands and mind can work in concert. This idea hearkens back to the “moral treatment” enlightened Christians first used on the mentally ill after saving them from asylums. Farming was a big part of that therapy. My capacity for abstraction puts me at risk of losing contact with the material universe and my necessary role in it.

I have tried to keep today's post from undue solipsism. This does not mean that I am necessarily better, only that I am trying to follow my own prescription for improved health.


Unrated,

CE

ECT Failure

The following was written over a number of days. I see little merit in posting it, then I see little merit in anything these days. I am not just a depresso; I am an ECT failure. It doesn't get much worse than that, does it (excluding all the evils one can think of)?

3/12 How am I doing? I was tearful when I spoke with my shrink today; he added another medicine to my collection of wonder drugs that aren't working. He also encouraged me to seize any activity I can, which I'm already doing. In blogging right now, for instance, I'm hanging out at a mini-mall with wireless service, because it's better to be around people than to be alone.

Craig cries when trying to explain how he feels. Even the smallest task or decision can burden Craig with anxiety, which often requires relief through tears. Craig feels that life is a wasteland, a desert devoid of succor or employment, a vast blank canvas on which he leaves no mark. But he's better than when he first finished his ECT treatments. Marginally, at least.

How does one get stuck in an emotional hell for two years? And does the very use of the word “hell” mitigate against healing? Perhaps I should call my feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness and all the rest just a “persistent dysphoria,” instead of tagging the experience with a negative value judgment.

This is always a conundrum in depression; you must accept it as your present condition but not as your permanent condition, because you have known better. Thus you cannot accept your present mood as normal, though you must accept it as your present mood in order to take the sting out of the condition.

I know my mood isn't normal. How? Because I've had a life. And because I've recovered from previous depressions, though I'll admit each one takes a big chunk out of me and leaves a large scar behind.

The great fear is that I will be like this until I die. I couldn't face that. But if it turns out that way, I will have to face it, just not yet—there's always something else to try (like Kromart, an herb from Southeast Asia one reader recommended).

3/13 For four days I have been unable to blog beyond the desultory remarks above. I sat in front of my screen yesterday and had virtually nothing to say, so I posted nothing, having written the last part when I got home. I'm looking forward to getting a new laptop, possibly this week, as this Acer bottom-of-the-line model is always gobbling text, and the screen is so dim I fear I shall go blind if I continue to stare at it. I have to play with the angle of the display screen to read the writing for many programs on my desktop. I got this machine as a hand-me-down, and trust me, it ought to be handed further down. Most irritating is the wandering cursor effect, where I am typing text and suddenly, without warning, the cursor pops up in another part of the text and starts inscribing there. Also, at times, large blocks of text have been lost that were irrecoverable for reasons unknown.

I think I said something important last night to Kathleen, and although not the cause of my depression, it does form a nice backdrop. I have not worked as a doctor since late 1995 other than some brief volunteer work in Mexico which my back could not endure. The reason for my not working was bipolar disease and chronic spinal pain. I took advantage of my enforced sabbatical from medicine as an opportunity to pursue my dream of being a poet and writer. I can't say how hard I've worked at my dream; of course I could always have worked harder. But since 1996, when I recovered enough to begin writing, I have written two book-length manuscripts of short stories, one mystery novel, two books of opinion columns, a book on the major poems of T. S. Eliot and another book on general literary criticism and a book of theology on the Holy Spirit. So much for the prose, not my main feature. As for the poetry, my chief ambition, I had one book published by Mellen Press but have failed to interest any publisher in a second book. Yet I have certainly written enough poetry for three additional collections, in order: Sine Wave, Unexpected Light, and Wear Me Like a River. And in paging through my files, my records indicate that I have published over 600 poems since 1996. That's prolific. To give you a touchstone for comparison, Yeats' collected poems number less than 500. So for twelve years, pretty consistently, I have averaged 50 published poems a year, and this does not include the many columns and essays I published, along with some short fiction. (Fiction is my most difficult genre.) The most I've been paid for an individual poem during this time was $100; the most I was paid for a group of poems was $250. I used to be on the LA reading circuit but despaired of the quality at the open mic venues and quit that scene years ago.

It's been said that if you can pay for your postage as a poet, you are successful indeed. I've done much better than that. Yet I have not done well enough to be a “name,” to be a somebody in the literary universe, somebody an editor will consider closely before rejecting simply on the basis of his name.

It's time to take a good, hard look in the mirror. My thriller, The Abomination, I've been re-reading and I don't think it is of marketable quality. The book on Eliot ought to be published, it's well-done, but I haven't promoted it adequately. My unpublished books of poems I consider better than my only published one; each book gets better, IMHO, and the book of love poems could really achieve some success if someone would publish it. But I'm getting into too much detail here.

Simply said, if I look in the mirror, in pursuing my dream of being a poet, I have not succeeded. I have not succeeded to the extent I wanted to succeed, namely to be fairly well-known and desired at conferences and readings and so forth, and published in the leading journals.

Poetry is not the kind of work you can measure in hours. Inspiration comes when it comes; the mind must be ready to receive it. You cannot compare the work of a poet to the work of a doctor. They differ in kind, not just degree.

Here's the thought I'm trying to work myself up to: Craig, you have not succeeded as a poet despite ample time and a workmanlike effort, of which your publications speak. Maybe it's time to pack in this ambition and take up work “by the sweat of the brow” once more. There was a time writing did occupy you sufficiently to say you were working, but here in this two-year depression you can, perhaps, see the writing on the wall. It would be better for you to be engaged in an outside, worldly endeavor than to continue on your interior journey, which is bankrupt at present in any case. You're only 53. Do you want to go on not earning money until you're 65? Wouldn't involvement in the world benefit you biochemically? You've had a good run as a minor net poet, why not be happy with that? But is this the right thing to do, to shut down the full-time pursuit of my dream in the interest of participating in “reality?” Remember, before I became depressed, I used to take my writing work seriously. Now I've lost faith in my work as a writer. Now I suffer from the summer syndrome, “What's there to do, Mom?”

When I'm healthy there is usually no shortage of things for me to do, gainfully employed or not.

And here, again, we have the question of what's good for Craig and what Craig is good for. There are many fine family doctors equal to or better than I. Practicing medicine would not be a special calling for me. It's not that I want to return to medicine per se as that I want to do whatever I need to do to get out of the clutches of my depression. Perhaps I can scare up enough volunteer work, provided my back can endure it, to keep me involved in the world, without having to desert my artist's world entirely for Mammon's arena. I do not claim the following is a good poem, only reflective of this meditation:


The Poet Bids His Muse Farewell

With the grace of a cat
you have patrolled my shoulders,
clawing me when I failed to see
the nimbus around
the blue-faced turkey
or the pink algae
spread like a holy blanket
on the brown stream.
If only I could see
what you see!
But that would be surfeit,
as in a Van Gogh painting.
There can be too much light;
a man can only take so much.

You also inspire by connections
that make all exceptional!
Hurrah for our interconnectedness!
That last bird that sang, what was it?
A meadowlark! I knew you'd know
I never tire of his song
but you can tire of mine,
yes, you can tire of mine.

To sum up: I am depressed. I don't have enough to do and I don't have a car during the week, which limits my options. I don't believe in my writing anymore as a viable pursuit beyond a hobby, so the main thing that had justified my continued existence and slaked my Protestant thirst for productivity feels as if it has been disqualified. Obviously no one should feel sorry for me, if I have the time to do what I want but fail to believe in the thing I was doing. Most would consider that an extreme luxury. The irony is, it is my bipolar disease that makes such freedom possible (through my disability), while at the same time rendering me incapable of enjoying such freedom. What good is freedom if you are too depressed to take advantage of it?

When they handed out the happiness glow sticks there must have been a hole in my bag. It's getting hard for me to remember ever being happy, but I know I have been, most memorably when Kathleen and I fell in love. And I'm always “happy” to be published. And I'm “happy” to see my close friends, but now I am using “happy” as the cliche' it's become. What would it be like to have an unshakable self-love and self-acceptance? In that case it wouldn't matter if you watched TV all day, you'd still feel good about yourself. You would not be haunted by the specter of self-justification, of Protestant productivity What you did would be acceptable because of who you are, not what you have done. And that includes doing nothing.

All this is making my head hurt.

But are you one of the blessed who accepts yourself regardless of situation or performance, one who embraces and loves the inimitable you through all its incarnations? If you are there, write me, or better, direct me to your blog.

A point about religion: When I get desperate I want to imagine some divine healing from God, so I go to churches in a near psychotically expectant state. This naturally makes my mental illness worse, though even today I'm tempted to go to some healing service. What could it hurt?

When I don't get well, then I can add God to the list of things I have failed or have failed me, and I don't want to do that. I must hold on to something apart from my illness, and my intellectual faith in Christianity, however battered, remains. If you have joy in your type of faith, consider yourself blessed.


5 kilorats,

CE

No Change; Despair in Ascendancy

Today is leap day, and if I calculate my treatment correctly it corresponds to my tenth ECT treatment. I went in in tears and I was in tears before they put me out and put the electrodes to my head. I told my doctor that I wasn't getting better, that I was getting worse. He seemed to hear me because afterwards he loaded me down with some new prescriptions and increased some of the old. You want to see my menu? I won't go into all the dosages, I'll just name the medicines: Prozac, Wellbutrin, Trazodone, lithium, Klonopin, Invega, plus aspirin and my blood pressure pill. Some of the dosages are really high; Wellbutrin, for instance, is now 600 mg. day, which puts me at risk for having seizures from it. (Since I am paying to have seizures induced I expect that's not a bad bargain.) My Prozac is at 80 mg./day, four times the usual dose. Invega is new, an antipsychotic that differs from Abilify, the one to which I briefly responded. The addition of lithium, 1200 mg./day and Trazodone 150 mg. for sleep are both new. The doctor would prefer I take Trazodone if I can't sleep rather than Klonopin, as Klonopin is a mild anticonvulsant and we are trying to elicit seizures. I know, I know, that's a lot of medication and a lot of electricity. It is only evidence of how desperate I am after nearly two years. Come April 1 I'll have my two-year anniversary of the onset of this depression, and during that time I may have had three months remission, total--spread out over different times-each time thinking I might have made it through the eye of the proverbial needle only to have the meds quit working after a brief time. This length of depression sets a new record for my 53 years; I have never been depressed so long. I want to weep as I write this but by force of will I won't allow myself to do so or I wouldn't be able to type.
People tend to wonder what this depth of depression feels like. All I can say is that what makes me saddest is the notion that someone loves me, because I feel so utterly unworthy to be loved, and the certain intellectual knowledge that my dear wife, Kathleen, loves me, consistently brings tears to my eyes. "Why is she wasting her time with me?" I think to myself. "How could she possibly love me if she knew what an awful person I am? Why doesn't she cut her losses and find a life partner not afflicted with manic-depression, someone more emotionally reliable?" But her love and loyalty are beyond question; to me they are absolutely supernatural. Underneath the darkness in which I travel, I know I am in love with her as well. For all time. Forever. And it is true that I have nursed her through some serious depressions for my part, and she came through and found the light. But she's never had a depression this long and this bad in our nearly nine years together, and I don't know how she holds up under the strain of my continued illness.
Little things can break me. "Can you make some coffee?" Yes, but in beginning such a simple task I feel overwhelmed and I suffer severe doubts as to whether I will, indeed, be able to make coffee, and the spectre of failure is always on my shoulder, whispering, telling me I can't do an effin' thing. I am so sad that I think if my sadness were parcelled out to every man, woman and child in this country the entire nation would be clinically depressed. And what am I sad about? I don't know. My daughter's death occurs to me, but that happened July 29 and I felt that my grief for her, though painful, was healthy and healing, I welcomed it as a relief from depression--not that I welcomed losing my daughter, naturally, but that the experience of having an appropriate emotion for a change felt good and right and human. Whether that was just a phase and the grief subsequently piggy-backed on top of the depression, I don't know. Because when I cry now, I cry for crying. I cry for the emptiness, the hopelessness, the devastation I feel inside the hollow of my chest. I feel as if I'm made of wicker or papier mache'--there is just this hollow inside containing nothing but an infinite sponge of grief, just squeeze my arm and it will leak. And fear? Fear attends everything. I'm afraid to rise up and afraid to sit down; I wish with all my heart that I were confronted by a real danger, a man wielding a knife, for instance, so I could lay it on the line and do my damndest, but life doesn't work like that.
I was reading a clinical treatise on ECT last night and although it was twenty years old, it was clear that they didn't know how or why it worked, and nothing I've heard since elucidates the mystery. I conceptualize it as a re-set button on a computer, a wiping of the disk that has become frozen in one repeating affect. But who knows? And there are side effects. My memory for this period is very poor, I have trouble with directions; the internal architecture of my geographic perception is much reduced, I feel as if I have entered Flatland, because normally when I think of directions I see the actual places and turns, for the most part, and I can trace the pattern with my finger in the air. Now directions seem more like words without the maps attached.
Whatever I am, I am not me. I'm a shell of myself with all the filling sucked out. Craig has sprung out of the box of his body and we don't know how to get him back in again. What you meet, what you see, is a construct of Craig, a golem that looks like Craig but really ought not to cast a shadow. My essential Craigness is gone, my way of looking at the universe, my take on literature, humor, my daffy take on so much, it is not there. I cannot laugh except out of politeness. I shudder to give any advice, fearful it may lead to trouble. I crave the simplest tasks, tasks I can do like sweeping or washing the dishes. In short, I don't know who I am. I've lost myself. I don't recognize myself in the mirror; what looks back at me resembles me (with extremely puffy eyes), but it does not feel like me. To touch myself is to touch a golem, a doppelganger, a very weak approximation of who I am as a human being. That I have lost such normal sensations of the self argues that perhaps my sense of self was always very tenuous, but I can assure you that in my manic phases I was more self than anyone wanted to put up with. I was simply too much, knew too much, did too much, slept too little.
For those joining this story late, the onset of symptoms of my depression coincided exactly with when Kathleen and I moved into our quite little house in the redwoods, and all the trouble and sturm and drang and torture of Mexico was behind us. I couldn't believe how quiet everything had become; where was the pressure, where was my next struggle, my next date in a Mexican court or jail, how would I keep up the spirits of my dear wife, there was always purpose and work, both of a nature I didn't want, but I was busy. Busy combatting evil. It was like I held my breath all the way from Mexico until I had us and our dog in a safe dwelling in the beauty of Northern California before I could collapse altogether. And then I did collapse altogether. Sure, I've tended a garden, written much, played music, cooked, hiked, fished, and all the other activities I might have usually done, but the savor is gone from those activities. I walk through them like a ghost. I don't feel present. Like I said to the anesthesiologist this morning, "I hope I don't wake up." I don't. I hope a boulder would fall on me to put me out of my misery. But I won't consider suicide because I know how awful that is for your loved ones, as my father burdened our family with that event when he was 62. I keep telling myself I'll get better someday, but all I have is the terrible now, the feeling of devastation, as if Napoleon and all his armies had marched through my chest and where a heart was is now a vista of burnt and blackened fields. It's a sadness that won't abate, won't relent, can't be forgotten for one iota of a second. The pain my my solar plexus focuses everything inward, like a black hole bending light to its center. If I touch you I'm afraid I'll steal something from you, some life force or animation that inhabits normal people, good or bad. I can't own who I am in this condition because I am not who I am. It's more alien than being another gender or a different animal. If I were a horse and could experience horsness I would count myself blessed. But as a depressed horse, I couldn't experience horseness for that matter; there is just this acre of sadness and tears inside the field of my soul, a graveyard if you will with no redeeming virtues, where no one is mourned because there's nothing to mourn although it feels like an absence of something.
They say 10 to 15 courses of ECT are the usual limit, and already I wonder what's to become of me after I've had 15, which shall be in less than two weeks. Then what therapy is available? Is there a halfway house for the superdepressed, a place where manual labor can be enforced to make our bodies feel as if they were our bodies? I think of some wilderness journey, some extreme physical trial as a possible antidote, something so physically dangerous that I have to pay attention to my body until I begin to inhabit it once again else die trying. You'd think with all the advances in biological psychiatry that someone somewhere would have an answer for me. I'm open to anything. I would try religion but religion just makes me feel more damned, I feel so unworthy of God's love and forgiveness. And it does not escape me that my inability to receive love and laughter could be a form of the Devil's pride, a "You can't help me!" game. But it's not like that. If only God could reach his healing hand inside my empty chest and light a spark, a small flame of Craigness, a hint of self, I think I could make it back. But that isn't happening, and if I start frequenting Pentecostal churches or healing services I'll just end up feeling worse, like my lack of ability to be healed is an insult to God and man and faith.
Too bad we are symbolic creatures, too bad we can think about our inner states in words. If I were a cow and depressed, I'd just stop eating and socializing and eventually die. Because I am a man I can by sheer will make myself get up, get dressed, eat something, try to do something, even though all of it seems like play-acting self-deception of the lowest variety. You see, I don't believe in me. I lack faith in my own existence. If I knew someone else in this condition my fervent wish would be for their death and release from this vale of tears. I don't know how to feel any lower. Feeling low is all I know. Or better, feeling alienated from my former self. After oodles of medications and ten shock treatments I'm just as bad as before if not worse, because I'm having my last hope taken from me. I can't imagine living another 20 years like this; I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I would do anything to get well that doesn't involve hurting another person or creature. The greatest kinship I feel is with plants, if I feel any kinship at all.
So this is my condition. This is what I'm being treated for. This is what I'm indebting myself for financially to have treated, piling up debts for the future should I ever get well enough to pay them. I don't want to be a human anymore; I would be insentient as a stone, I can't stand the pain anymore, I understand why adolescents cut themsleves for relief, but in my case a good cut wouldn't help because it would have to be sewn up. Am I making sense? I'm no better than a sock monkey; no, worse, because sock monkeys don't have feelings. I don't know how not to feel, you'd think this array of drugs would turn me into a walking zombie, but even they are not powerful enough to make me feel any different. I offer myself to you, the reader, and ask for your good will and wishes, even prayers if you can utter them. It would mean a lot to my friends and family if I could get better; I ask you for their sake, not mine. I'm told I was once a good man who did much good in this world, but now I don't even feel a man, more like an oyster for the walrus to weep over.
Please bear with me as I endure this. I'm not going anywhere. I promise not to intentionally hurt myself until I blog again, though I don't promise to continue blogging, for what's the point? For folks to read this? Who wants to read this? I certainly don't and I feel ashamed to broadcast it in a blog like this to the unsuspecting. Yet if you have any loved ones who suffer from biological depression, perhaps reading these remarks will give you more compassion. We don't want to be depressed. We'd do anything to get out of it--take any pill, have any current applied to our brains, you see what lengths I am willing to go to? And I so want to get well for my beloved wife, I know her seeing me like this is a torture that is hard to match, because I know, to a lesser extent, what it is to endure one of her depressions. And with that I leave you.

Down for the Count

It's been over two weeks and seven shock treatments and I am no better. It would be precipitous of me to give up hope, particularly for treatment of a disease most in need of hope, but I can't help but prepare myself, in my imagination, for a life of sadness. It wouldn't be so bad if it were confined to me, but alas, no man is an island and I have the great good fortune to be loved by a number of people, Kathleen chief among them. I know the shibboleths: I must accept myself as depressed, as hopeless, as I am in order some day to have a chance to be well. But I greatly fear I let this depression--(that's not strictly true, I knew I needed ECT long ago, but had no way to afford it)--stew to the point to where even the ultimate treatment no longer works. So what do I have to look forward to? A life of dissimulation, where I strive to appear no more miserable than the next fellow.

I was tearful most of the day. I was tearful before and after ECT. It's a feeling so familiar that it comes as no surprise. I can still laugh, on occasion, so I am not completely lost. But I seem to have hit a default position, pure sadness. I am not angry or fearful. Just inexplicably, irremediably sad, and with that goes a feeling of being apologetic--I want to apologize to everyone for not being better company.

Most of you don't even know me except through my writings. I can be quite the humorist when I'm well. I've been told, even by people who didn't necessarily like me, that I'm "a funny guy." But this is not a time for humor. This is dead serious. This is my life. I'm losing my life to this disease. I cry even as I write this. I have no desire to go on but my personal code of ethics will not allow me to snuff out this brief light. So I must trudge on, lacking any feeling of hope, even after my seventh treatment by ECT today. Dr. Svensson also prescribed a new antispsychotic, Invega, but I have not been able to connect with him in order for him to connect with my insurance to have the medication authorized. If it's anything like Abilify it will run about $14/tablet. After all the hard work Kathleen has done to obtain insurance for us, I'm not going to pay out-of-pocket for an expensive drug my doctor has deemed medically necessary.

If I could get well for anyone, I would get well for Kathleen, the love of my life, the light of my eyes, the heart of my heart. Apparently this illness is even stronger than love, though I hate to admit it. If love could cure me, Kathleen's love would have cured me. I don't want her to suffer because of me, but what can I do? Is it my fault she loves me? I believe I'm doing all I can, all I know how to do, I don't know what else to do. It's not as if a positive thinking book or seminar is going to reverse this longstanding condition. I can't bear the thought of being like this forever, but I can't think about it in those terms. "One day at at time," truly. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." I would say, "more than sufficient." This is my life, damn it, and it is not a life, it is a living horror. I don't know how I go on. I won't commit suicide because I wouldn't do that to those who love me, and besides, my father committed suicide, so that would be a bit of a defeat. I don't want to lose the Oedipal thing. (That was, I think, an attempt at a joke.)

I'm ashamed to write this, I don't even know if I should let people read it, I don't know what purpose it serves. There's enough sorrow in the world without nibbling on mine.

Whoever you are, whatever you are doing, be grateful you are not in my condition. This illness is a soul-destroyer. All I can do is weep. I managed to eat an apple today. I'm sorry if this blog is degenerating into pathos and bathos, but it is what it is. All I can say is that I'm very, very sick, and no amount of thinking or prayer or medications or electricity or exercise appears able to reverse my illness. Of course I'd rather be dead, that goes without saying, but I will not usurp that right from my creator. I'm just stubborn enough to go on living. I'm just stubborn enough to remember that I haven't always been like this, even though that's how it seems. I'm stubborn enough to keep blogging, however much you may be driven away by the boredom of my suffering. Be grateful for whatever light and love you have. More cannot be said.

At Rope's End

It's hard for me to blog and I don't know how often I'll be able to do it in the near future.

Presently I am pursuing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) at hospitals in the Bay Area, as there is no such treatment available where I live.

It saved my life in 1983. I hope it can do so again.

Since Kathleen left on a trip to NY for her mother's birthday, all semblance of emotional maintenance on my part has departed. There's no one I have the strength of will to appear well for. I hope to have the good news of my impending hospital admission when she returns. As she says, “I just want my husband back. I want Craig back.”

The uninitiated cannot know how bleak depression can be, how physical an illness it is. It's as if there is an eternal well of sadness in my chest and it takes very little for me to wet my face with it. I have no confidence in anything. Little tasks are daunting. Everything makes me sad. What makes me saddest is the idea that anyone could love me because I feel so unworthy. I'm such a downer I wish that those who care about me might never have met me. Like Job, I wish I had never been born. It's a terrible thing to admit but it's true. To be born only to suffer like this seems a waste of protoplasm. A weeping willow is much more useful than a crying Craig. One provides shade and aesthetic pleasure, the other only takes up space and continues to eat food and consume other resources for no good purpose.

I don't know what to do with myself. I'm very sick and very stuck. The record keeps skipping, the tape keeps looping back on itself, there is no up or down or forward or backward, just this hole I have fallen into.

I believe the body and mind ultimately know what they need in order to get well and that they lead us to that. Strange that in my case all the wisdom my body has tells me I need ECT. Too bad I live in a state with the most impediments to having the treatment. In California we'd rather let the mentally ill be shot by the police on the street than force them into treatment. Protecting the victim's right to be crazy is much more important than intervening for their welfare.

I have an appointment to see a doctor who does ECT on February 6, for which I am grateful. I can be grateful, strangely; in fact the least kindness shown me makes me want to burst into tears because I feel so undeserving of it. It has been hard work on the phone talking to so many hospitals and doctor's offices and insurance people in trying to get a doctor to see me who does ECT. It's not always easy to obtain. Stanford, for instance, has a two-month waiting list for the procedure.

I don't want to think about what happens if ECT doesn't work. It is the single most effective treatment for depression. Cross your fingers for me. But if you notice I have no reflection in the mirror, hold a cross up to me and please, drive a stake through my heart until it stops spasming.


8 Kilorats,

CE