listen to this chapter for free on YouTube: Not Depression
“I know depression. This is not what depression looks like.”
I was telling my therapist how I’d been living under a rock but was now feeling a lift. A hard dark period, I called it.
“You were doing all the things you needed to do. Coming to see me. Making appointments and meetings. Even taking care of some freelance work. You may not have been happy, but I would not call your symptoms depression.”
“Okay,” I said, “But I was severely unhappy.”
“I understand. You don’t like where you were. But you weren’t staying in bed all day. You were trying.”
“Hope. That’s what I was lacking. Hope. Somewhere in my addled and misfiring brain, I was not able to see a way forward. I had no hope.”
Depression was a thing for me. No big deal. Well, okay, in my experience, huge deal, but still.
A number of dark blows had stripped the horse out from under me. First my brother died. He was an asshole And an alcoholic. Recovered, yes. He was mean. Tortured himself, so he tortured others. Pulled arms off dolls, torched my model cars before the custom paint jobs dried. Put firecrackers in frogs’ mouths with his buddies in the back driveway of the big glass house on the lake. He always threw the stone. Even when things got harsh, he was launching into ever more self-destructive actions. Crashing cars filled with empty beer cans and full cigarette trays. Some he should not have walked away from. And now he was dead. How does that feel? Didn’t like him. Watched him die. Harsh multiplied.
There was a moment, as he was doing hospice from my mom’s living room. “I bet you never imagined in a million years that we’d be having this experience,” I said, trying to keep the mood light. I was holding the bottle so he could piss. He was holding on to my shoulder to steady himself. He smiled. Did not laugh. A moment. Five days later his light went out about 15 minutes before I had arrived with Egg McMuffins. I put my hand on his chest, still warm. “Good bye, brother.”
The moment was too much for my girlfriend at the time as well. Let me back up just a second.
A big day was afoot. Sure, my brother was dying at my 85-year-old mom’s house, but I was going to Lockhart to pick up my Boston Terrier puppy, Tempo. My girlfriend at the time and my daughter were both excited and along for the ride. On the way back to my condo my daughter was holding the puppy in the back seat. My girlfriend sitting beside me in the leased BMW wagon appeared to be in crisis. She was leaning away from me as if she were about to jump out of the moving car.
“Listen,” I said. “If you don’t want to go to my mom’s after this, it’s okay.”
She didn’t answer. She started texting on her phone beside me. I reached out a hand toward her leg and she brushed me away. I’m sure I gave my daughter a “huh” look in the rearview mirror. Tempo had fallen asleep on her shoulder. A moment of bliss and hell all in the same three-foot radius. The BMW’s connected dash indicated that a text had arrived for me. It didn’t show the message. A few more texts came in as we were pulling into my neighborhood.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said, trying to lean into my girlfriend a bit.
We got out of the car together and I walked around and hugged her. “I’ll be back in an hour or so. We can all go get something to eat.” She didn’t respond and continued on into my place. My daughter hopped in the passenger seat with Tempo, now ready for adventure and mischief.
I guess I was reaching out for a dog, a moment of happiness, to bring along all of us. A tiny bit of Tempo-joy. We could all use a lift. As the dark cloud receded in the rearview mirror, I touched Tempo on the snout. “Let’s gooooooo!”
Happy for moments. Sad beside my brother’s bed. My mom was looking older and more tired than I could imagine. So I focused on the dog and my brother.
At that moment, I understood I could only manage my own experience of the events unfolding around me. My girlfriend, the dog, my daughter, my mom, all had to play their roles in the tragedy. What I didn’t expect was to return to my condo to the whirlwind of my girlfriend’s emergency departure. Drawers were left open. The closets were ransacked. She had bolted and made a mad dash to take her stuff with her.
“I don’t know what she’s upset about,” I said to my daughter on the ride back from my mom’s. “But I do know I don’t have the bandwidth to take care of her crisis right now. I can only handle one crisis at a time.”
And pop, like that, I was giving the eulogy at my brother’s service. Even my ex-wife and her husband looked on from the audience. The did, however, refrain from attending the reception at the nearby country club. Good move.
It all came full circle at the reception. The country club, remarkably, was the same club where I spent long summers alone learning to play tennis. Learning to be independent. Learning to entertain myself with swimming, club sandwiches, and little yellow fuzzy balls. Happy sad rich kid. Court rats they called us. I was lucky, I know. The same country club where my father parked his Mercedes and drove his boat home after work. The same country club where the annual summer fest, FIESTA, was held, where my dad subsequently met his next wife and drinking partner.
I was there that night , with my dad. It was late. We should’ve gone home hours ago. My dad was in the BEER GARDEN area. I was tuckered out with a few of the other orphaned kids, waiting for our parents to get the message, “the party is over.” Finally, they kicked us all out.
Of course, I didn’t know my dad had met a woman in the beer garden. He was recently separated from my mom, so he kept the details out. All I know is he was exceptionally drunk as he drove us home in the convertible. I sat in the passenger seat, much like my girlfriend, holding tightly to the “oh shit bar” and hoping for the best.
On the last turn leading to his new apartment, he drove right up into the front yard of a neighboring house. It just now occurs to me (present writerly moment) that my dad was *just* separated, not divorced. He didn’t have his high-rise apartment yet. He hadn’t moved back into the glass house on the lake, “for you, son,” trying to keep his marriage together. Nope, my dad was just in escape and party mode. Knowing the feeling now, he was just looking to sew some wild oats. An attractive younger woman, drinker, giving him some attention. I understand. I would’ve shut the place down as well.
He trenched the front yard, bumped us back into the street, and pulled into the covered parking spot in front of his unit. The complex was one of his leveraged investments. It would be another month before his fancy place in the Cambridge Towers was remodeled. Again, this is a man who had everything and nothing. What a powerful moment. As his son, of course, I was hoping he would correct his trajectory out, quit drinking, or drink less, and return to being my dad. That’s not what happened, obviously.
Sorry, I lost track.
Back at the reception for my brother, it was obvious how many people loved him, loved my family, and recalled with fond words for both my recently deceased brother and me and my single dad family. I had two beautiful kids. We all seemed to be holding it together remarkably well.
My mom was not holding it together, but she made it through the event well enough. The kids and I dropped her back at her house. I gained some strength and confidence from that reception. One of the iconic photographs was taken by a man I knew only vaguely. “Okay, let’s get a shot of your beautiful family,” he said. Bless him for the moment.
I rallied around my mom in the wake of my brother’s wake. I dropped by more frequently. I left her voicemails and sent her texts. She was quite tech-savvy for an eighty-year-old. This was a year before Covid brought the curtain down on the world. My mom struggled, but she was propped up by myself, my remaining sister, and the four grandkids. Frequently, she tells us, “I’m ready to go. If Jesus would just take me. I’m done.”
All kinds of hell were about to break loose in my life as well, but let’s rewind again, back to the thread of the opening scene. In a very short period I lost my brother and my girlfriend. I was neglecting the hard work of housebreaking Tempo, and thus cleaning up puddles all the time. My moments came and went.
I did love walking Tempo. And I absolutely loved the attention that came from my daughter, now a senior in high school. The dog became a conduit to see Claire. We both leaned in. My mom would only allow us to bring the dog in the morning when the weather was cool so we could sit outside on her back porch. She had no room for accidents.
Even as all this shit was swirling around me I was, as my therapist pointed out, doing everything I could to take care of myself. I wasn’t depressed, but I wasn’t in one of my high moods either.
From this moment on, I drafted a scale for my happiness from 1 – 10. On the two extremes, 1 meant hospitalization for depression and 10 meant hospitalization for mania. As I began to explore this idea with my therapist a new concept began to formulate in my brain and became the basis for my “plan.”
Prior to this moment, I believed unless I was at a 7 or an 8 life was boring and I was unproductive. I wanted to be ON FIRE. I flirted with 8s and 9s but knew that I needed to dial back before my wings began to melt. A new mantra came online for me, a new understanding of myself.
I wonder if I could be happy in the 4s and 5s?
Initially, my reaction was fuck no. I either needed to be UP or OUT. But, this moment, this not-depression moment, began to transform my thinking from the inside out. Like a virus, or a homeopathic remedy, I began to explore the idea that my joy and productivity could be achieved in the middle ranges of my emotional life.
Talking to a friend of mine upon this discovery, he said, “Dude, your 5 is like my 8. I would kill to be at your 5.”
My therapist had a slightly different frame. “You weren’t depressed. You were just in the middle range and very unhappy about it.”
And, that was it. That was the key. I was not depressed, I was unhappy.
That might sound like a nuance or not a big deal to you. But to me, the word depression had become some sort of sacred shawl that I would wear from time to time. No more. I’m not saying I’m healed, or “recovered.” But, I began to mine the benefits of keeping my highs in the 7s and learning to love the consistency and mundaneness of 4 and 5. My friend’s words continued to intrigue me. I could be happier for longer, healthier for longer, if I could just reset my own scale and my own expectations for MYSELF.
What?
I wasn’t depressed. I was just unhappy about being less than hyper-creative and hyper-productive.
Well, you know what else I’ve learned, that my “hyper” anything came with a heavy cost. Often, in the burn of some creative urge, I would blaze through relationships, through jobs, through friends. I’m not trying to tell you that I’ve got it all figured out, I don’t. I still wonder if a lag or a pause in my creative ideas is the onset of a depression, but… And this is a big but… I’ve been fairly consistent and happy.
I do sometimes long for the comet burn, the jolt, the manic drive of an On the Road or a Fear and Loathing, but… Again, big one:
I prefer steady happiness.
I am productive or not. That’s not the issue. It’s my evaluation of my own state, my own assessment that gives me new flexibility in my quest for well-being. I still cast around for lost hope when I go through a dry spell. Maybe all artists have these same feelings. My unhappiness came from my own self-evaluations and frustrations.
I was in a dark period of my life. I was unhappy with little or no inspiration. Sure, it felt like depression, but that was 100% because of how I was beating myself up. I was causing my unhappiness. I was labeling myself as depressed, with all the weight and shame attached.
I was unhappy.
But, fuck, I was going through an unhappy period.
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