Depression suc

I used to be a religious Xanga-er. I wrote pretty consistently from about July of 2003 to May of 2007. It’s all actually still there on the web, at dayoking.xanga.com (A quick check reveals that my first post was made on July 31 and my last on July 6 of the years noted above.)

It’s still interesting to me mostly because it’s a chronicle of my thoughts and feelings over that span: the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school to the summer after my freshman year of college. My Xanga was much more a “personal journal” than “blog,” if that kind of distinction means anything to anyone but myself. It was basically a diary with an audience.

(The audience part was probably the key to its longevity, since I’ve failed miserably at every attempt to keep a diary or a journal before or since the Xanga. For some reason I feel foolish writing to “myself” in the context of a personal journal, even if I try to pretend I’m writing to someone else).

The most interesting part is the way I wrote when I was feeling depressed. It was a specific Xanga post recording the events of one day in the fall of 2003 that has helped me remember what may have been my first depressive episode. Thanks to Xanga, I know the specific date: October 20, Monday. Here’s the lowlights:

I’ve been so tired the last few days…blah. I just feel so weird. Like…that paranoid stuff I was talking about. Like I do things…just weird things…I think way too much about nearly everything (except, of course, the things I should think too much about) and its really annoying…and I can’t help it…it’s nice to know that God made me the way I am sometimes, because I don’t know what I’d do without knowing that. I’d just be crazy. Like really crazy, not the type of crazy I really am…

I don’t think I can do anything right…because I talk to God and say “help me do better” and I physically or psychologically just can’t do it. Like something happened earlier today (I’m not going to try and explain it, because you’d proabably think I have some sort of pyschological problem…maybe I do…:S) and I said “God, that’s so stupid. Why do I do that? I need help, please.” and then, IMMEADIATLY , like, right after, that it happens again and I do the exact same thing!?

[The irony seems tragic now, reading the parathentical in the second paragrpah]

I wrote a lot about the way I was feeling in my Xanga. From around this time until I quit writing, “downer” posts were quite common, since my Xanga provided a relatively safe outlet for my feelings, and the only inhibitions on what I could express were self-imposed (though there were many of those). During high school they seem to be mostly muted, but they certainly come out again during my silently miserable freshman year at Bryan.

What is so interesting to me now is not just that I can get a better sense of how I felt then, but the simple fact that I did express, in any form, how I was feeling, even if that expression was just copying lyrics to depressing songs and adjusting the fonts for particular emphasis.

Pretty soon after I quit Xanga, the way I was feeling changed. After I left Bryan, I went to Boyce, which became the first place I would start a semester and leave school before midterms. I used to feel private, quiet anguish that was painful but still allowed me to excel at school and cultivate healthy relationships. Yet from Boyce onward, to a semester living with my family in Athens to the second aborted attempt at going off to school to Calvin and my flight here, to Germany, something changed. I ceased to be able to get to class, to do work, to function on any significant level. My life, from the time I left Boyce and in a more intense way since I came to Germany, has been on hold, paused. On hiatus. What I’ve been doing these last few months hasn’t been living. I’ve breathed, ate, spoke, thought, sometimes laughed and smiled. But every moment of it has been empty.

I spent most of high school, and my entire freshman year at Bryan, writing about how miserable I was feeling, but since the fall of 2007, I have found myself unable to do any extended writing at all about my feelings. This is not helpful in two ways: I have no sort of emotional or cathartic release for the way I am feeling, and I have no good way to tracks the changes in my emotional mindset.

I write. It’s what I do. But, on the whole, I’ve done less and less of it since the fall of 2007. Since I left the states last November and came to Germany I’ve  done little writing at all. Aside from an angry recitation of Psalm 22 and a sparse confession [both are Facebook notes],  I’ve been completely unable to say anything significant about my condition.

It’s not for lack of trying. I’ve sat down a hundred times to write something that would express the way I feel, and plenty of times I got a significant amount of words down. Good words, even. But they were all deleted or the document wasn’t saved or it was saved but was forgotten. I’ve started hundreds of posts or essays, and finished none.

I don’t have much significant or insightful to say about my “condition,” whether it be unipolar depression or Bipolar Type II. I don’t know that I ever will. But in my mind, the most powerful commentary on the depth of suffering I’ve endured for the past year and half is the silence.

For me, depression hasn’t simply caused pain. It’s robbed me of the will to express myself and share my feelings. Like a black hole it eats up everything, and even the desire for emotional release gets stillborn by its silent, throbbing vacuum. I cannot write about the experience of depression, because depression is not an experience but an anti-experience, an unexperience. When I am depressed, I am not experiencing the grace and the love of God; I am not experiencing hope for the future; I am not experiencing fellowship and love with my friends and family; I am not experiencing any sort of meaning or purpose or resonance. Depression for me is defined not just by what I have felt but what I have not felt, what I have been unable to feel. Depression, for me, is not simply the presence of unhealthy thought patterns and painful emotions; it is an absence, an inability to experience the world in the way it was meant to be experienced.

So depression robs me even of the will to write about how sucky things are and how horrible the world is and how everyone should pity me, which usually wouldn’t take that much effort to do. When I am depressed I have nothing to offer, nothing unique or worthwhile to say, and no energy to express anything that might be worth saying. As someone who deeply desires visible human connection and thrives on reciprocal communication, my depression is marked quite starkly by my silence. Not a “pregnant” silence, but a barren one. A silence that expresses no meaning, and has no meaning in itself.

So here I am, writing a blog post, breaking the silence. Good sign, right? I certainly hope so. But the way I feel day to day varies so much, and I know I still have far to go. But now, at least, the silence does not have the last word. It has a context. I don’t know if I can give meaning to the silence, to the unexperience of depression/Bipolar. It is intrinsically not just meaning-less but un-meaning-full: something that devours meaning  and dissipates it completely.

But this is a start, a beginning. The silence, the emptiness, the void, is not invincible. It is not insurmountable. A bit of writing is not much. But it is more than I had before, more than I had yesterday or three months ago. It is a witness to something beyond unlife, unexperience, unmeaning. It might even be hope, and hope does not disappoint us.