(Author’s note: This story was originally written to assist my Rabbi in counseling people in our Illinois synagogue. I posted it after deciding its contents might possibly have a wider audience.
Since July 4th, 2008, it has become the single most viewed story I’ve ever written for this blog. Realizing this, to my surprise, I rewrote large parts of it on Sunday, 7/27/08 to give it greater clarity and to expand some thoughts I felt were too cryptic. I appreciate that so many people have connected with it, so I felt I owed them, my unseen readers, my giving the story a second look. If this true story has meaning for you, please tell others about it. Thank you.— Robert M. Katzman)
My goal is to turn words into pictures. To make it possible for people with no concept of clinical depression to comprehend what life is really like for people who live with that condition. People like me.
So, I mined my life for some specific moments to try to convey the cold futureless world I lived in for over fifty years, before reluctantly accepting the possibility that new medications would change, literally change, my mind and make my life livable. Not just livable, but worth living.
Some people never get that far, and those are people you sometimes read about whom, in some cases, seem to have so much at their fingertips, so many resources, even a loving and supportive family, but none of whom were able to detect the subtle, deadly and progressive power of a simple chemical imbalance in a person’s brain.
Unlike so many illnesses with physical manifestations like coughing, fever, rashes, flu-like symptoms, loss of vision, hearing, heart problems, ulcers, anemia, osteoporosis and dementia, depression is silent. Invisible to the eye. About as obvious as a single blade of grass not moving, in a sea of meadow grass being raked by the wind.
To experience depression is a solitary experience. No one can catch it from anyone who has it. It may alienate family, friends and co-workers who believe that a person is unpredictably “moody” and someone who can dampen the festive atmosphere of any social event by simply showing up and being their grim, joyless uncommunicative selves. Those kinds of outward symptoms serve only to deepen the pain of the depressed person and cause the subsequent reaction of others to them, to make their existing, self-fulfilling assumptions of their social unpopularity become reality.
(Author’s note: This story was originally written to assist my Rabbi in counseling people in our Illinois synagogue. I posted it after deciding its contents might possibly have a wider audience.
Since July 4th, 2008, it has become the single most viewed story I’ve ever written for this blog. Realizing this, to my surprise, I rewrote large parts of it on Sunday, 7/27/08 to give it greater clarity and to expand some thoughts I felt were too cryptic. I appreciate that so many people have connected with it, so I felt I owed them, my unseen readers, my giving the story a second look. If this true story has meaning for you, please tell others about it. Thank you.— Robert M. Katzman)
My goal is to turn words into pictures. To make it possible for people with no concept of clinical depression to comprehend what life is really like for people who live with that condition. People like me.
So, I mined my life for some specific moments to try to convey the cold futureless world I lived in for over fifty years, before reluctantly accepting the possibility that new medications would change, literally change, my mind and make my life livable. Not just livable, but worth living.
Some people never get that far, and those are people you sometimes read about whom, in some cases, seem to have so much at their fingertips, so many resources, even a loving and supportive family, but none of whom were able to detect the subtle, deadly and progressive power of a simple chemical imbalance in a person’s brain.
Unlike so many illnesses with physical manifestations like coughing, fever, rashes, flu-like symptoms, loss of vision, hearing, heart problems, ulcers, anemia, osteoporosis and dementia, depression is silent. Invisible to the eye. About as obvious as a single blade of grass not moving, in a sea of meadow grass being raked by the wind.
To experience depression is a solitary experience. No one can catch it from anyone who has it. It may alienate family, friends and co-workers who believe that a person is unpredictably “moody” and someone who can dampen the festive atmosphere of any social event by simply showing up and being their grim, joyless uncommunicative selves. Those kinds of outward symptoms serve only to deepen the pain of the depressed person and cause the subsequent reaction of others to them, to make their existing, self-fulfilling assumptions of their social unpopularity become reality.
I speak only as one of the inflicted and not in any other capacity. What I know, I learned by reading as much as I could to make solving my misery possible. A person’s intellect doesn’t cease to function, but motivation can stop cold. Mine did.
But I also learned that having an innate and irrepressible sense of humor, plus a solid central core of self-worth were as essential to my survival as microscopic white blood cells are to fighting equally invisible infections. Those two immeasurable assets in my life-long struggle with depression proved to be mighty weapons, until they too were overwhelmed by the progressive nature of the illness. But it took half a century for that battle to be lost.
It is impossible to will or wish away one’s genes, and in my family, the force was very strong. Both sides of my immediate family and grandparents possessed the capacity for depression. While I believe her witnessing a series of deadly pogroms in Poland in the early part of the previous century powerfully triggered my maternal grandmother’s depression, so many of my aunts and cousins have it that it must be as common to all of us as our dark brown eyes. I wish it were as easy to remove an “infected” gene as an appendix. Maybe someday.
(Read on …)