On the Brink

It happens every fall. It took a long time to connect the dots because I actually LOVE fall. I'm not a big fan of being out in the sun and heat of summer, hate to feel sweaty and prickly, rarely visit the beach before October. Give me sunny, blue, autumn days with a bit of chill in the air and leaves that show some color, and I'm a happy camper.

So I've always ignored the dark side of autumn. And it's gotten me in trouble.

Retirement changes things, as I innocently said here when I first left my teaching job three years ago. I came to recognize, gradually, that I had experienced a moderately deep bout with depression. I started calling it my "good, old-fashioned, 1950s-style nervous breakdown" --- a fairly accurate description. 

Considering that I had finally succumbed to what I regarded as the Big Pharma takeover of mental health, and started taking medication a few years earlier, I thought I pretty much had everything under control. HA!

There's a reason that November is the month for Depression Awareness efforts. I always thought that depression had to involve being snake-pit comatose in order to count as the real thing. If I could still walk and talk, that wasn't depression. It was malingering. It was laziness. It was being a weenie.

Of the many things I've been learning during my three years of retirement, this is some of the most important. I still resist it. I still want to believe that it's a character flaw, not an illness, and that all I need is a good ass-kicking to get myself back in gear. But that's not true for me, and it's not true for other people either.

The systemic dismissal of everything short of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, is a huge failure in our society. We lose people every day, every hour. We wring our hands about gun violence and racism and sexism and all the myriad ways that people are bludgeoned with oppression, depression, suppression --- yet we still spank and holler at our tender little people instead of treating them like precious human beings. Where do you think it all begins?

I've had it pointed out to me, over and over, that I treat myself much worse than I would ever think of treating another person. Even the grocery store clerk. Especially the grocery store clerk. I would never in a million years yell at the barista who made me the wrong coffee or the student who didn't understand multiplication. But I sure will berate myself for sleeping 12 hours or not dusting up the dog hair.

It's a long, slow process, recovery. Just like sobriety, it takes constant vigilance ---- without judgment and shame. I have a posse to help me, everyone from a loving wife to healthcare providers to deep soul family and friends. But I know that the best thing I can do to stay ahead of it is to recognize it, talk about it, share with courage. That's a tall order.

Carolina blue skies. Brilliant sunshine across my desk. A calendar dotted with things I want to do and don't want to do. Dogs right behind me. All I have to do is be here now and breathe.