On Jan 17, 1:03 pm, frantheman <[email protected]> wrote:
> Please stick around, Twirlip - in my view your posts have definitely
> enhanced the group since you've been here.
I'm surprised anybody thinks so, but thanks!
(I don't mean that I've been posting rubbish - I don't think I have -
but rather that I am not connecting with others well, which is typical
of me, and always has been.)
> I'm going to get a bit personal. From what you've posted, I assume we
> have common Irish origins, even if from opposite sides of the border
> and I'm seriously delighted to have another paddy here (even if he/she
> might be from the group who migrated to Scotland over a thousand years
> ago and then returned to the aul sod around four hundred years
> ago :-)). Celts wahey!
Yes, and although I'm from the other lot (whose current sex scandal is
giving me an unaccustomed and delicious sense of schadenfreude - talk
about poetic justice, for the Bigot of the Year 2008! - even though
the appalling Iris Robinson, too, is depressed), and although I got
married to someone from a West Indian Pentecostal background, she
converted to Catholicism shortly before we got married, and we got
married in an Opus Dei church. (Just one fragment of a long and weird
story.)
> In fact, of course, we always start from where we are
Yes, it's a nuisance, isn't it? Where I am is /very/ difficult. (I
don't mean that I have a uniquely hard life; in many ways, I've had it
easy, in a hard world. I mean more than there is almost nothing in the
world around me to lead me to think that anyone else can understand
where I am. There are no maps, just a few old footprints to show that
it is not the complete wilderness it appears to be.)
> For me, an important realisation on the way to a better
> life was that the depression/hopelessness I was suffering from was (to
> a large extent) the result of the (inevitable) shadows cast by other
> attributes I have (like sensitivity, or a deep unwillingness to hurt
> others, for example), which I then decided I did NOT want to be rid
> of.
It's important to me not to think of depression as an illness (and
there are, I think, many good arguments for not doing so, one of the
more obvious ones being that depression is no more an illness than
physical pain is), although this is a gamble (not unlike Pascal's
Wager), and it almost feels stupid on a day like this, when raw, mute
emotional pain drives me to wish for sleep or death, and seems opaque
to all thought.
Anyway, I try to have faith that it is not an illness, but a state of
being, which has human meaning.
It is, indeed, a /place/, almost literally. It is a very bad place,
but the fact (if it is a fact) that it is a place at all is a weird
kind of solace. That I can be here means that it is possible for a
human being to be here. The trouble is that it is so easy for me not
to think of myself as being human, but rather to think of myself as
subhuman. But if humanity is present here, then it's bearable.
(There's an obvious Christian perspective on this, but I have trouble
absorbing it, and distinguishing the baby from the bathwater.)
> My experience has ben that it is futile to try to "fight"
> depression, rather - to use a language and way of thinking which Molly
> has used here - one must "embrace one's own shadow side", accept it,
> see it as part of oneself, integrate it and go on growing and
> developing.
Part of what's so awful is that the really bad depression started
around 1971, when I was about 19, and I'm now three times that age,
and still struggling with it. (And it wasn't even fun before I was
19! But at least I never thought of suicide until then.) The sheer
weight of /memory/ is quite unspeakable, and quite unbelievable. So
many shockingly bad things, none of which I could believe at the time,
and which I can still hardly explain to myself, never mind anyone
else!
Some time in the 1990s it went beyond depression, and into an even
darker and stranger and more terrifying state of mind, which has very
gradually metamorphosed into my current, less completely dark,
philosophical, religious, and/or paranormal preoccupation. It's almost
certainly something to do with bringing up my daughter (who is now 18,
and having struggles of her own, not least with her mother). Very hard
to explain. But the depression was always there even before this
latest, nameless darkening of the long dark night. ('Nameless' because
it apparently has no psychiatric diagnosis, and I have never been
found to be psychotic, although it has felt very close to madness
indeed.) Before the slow dawn.
> In the course of all this, I gave up/lost the vestiges of religion/
> faith, which had had such a major influence in an earlier phase of my
> life.
I'm sort of moving in the opposite direction. I suppose it depends on
what one calls "religion". I'm not much more friendly to organised
religion than I ever was; I just have a little more understanding of
some of what motivates it.
> That we
> create our own meaning is something I see as wonderfully liberating,
> and the insights of meaning that we create - individually and
> collectively - are worth working and striving for. They give us a
> ground for judgement; all the better for the fact that we are aware
> that our positions are tentative, subject to growth and correction
> and, occasionally even to complete change in the face of new
> experience and evidence.
Oddly, that sounds very like what I believe. Since some time in 2006,
I have been preoccupied by the mysterious phenomenon of judgement, I
have been more and more willing to trust the "still, small voice"
inside me, and I see it more and more as vital (not just for me, but
for everybody) to do so.
What is this trustworthy source of judgement, which enables us to
transcend our ridiculous individual selves? And does it make sense to
call this source "God"? I think so, but it's certainly arguable!
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