Staying Alive

This is my second or third attempt to write this. Every day at school, I think of some anecdotal evidence of how much nicer it is the second time around. I should write something flowery about how good it is to feel known at my school, not to have my guard up all the time because I know what to expect, the various former students who greet me and make me feel like something got through, the greater warmth and camaraderie I feel toward my colleagues and my greater openness toward and acceptance of the experience as whole, as I have gotten past the initial culture shock, etc. It is good to be back, and perhaps someday I will find it in me to bore you with the details. But that day is not today.

Despite my good intentions, every time I try to write this blog, nothing really seems honest but the deep, dark, and unspeakable. The truth is, I feel like a man with two faces. I wear a mask at school, and if you knew me there you would hear me say that things are “awright” what seems like a 1000 times a day. But underneath the mask, there is a bleak portrait nobody sees. Only I know how tenuously I have it held on right now. The truth is, I am a man with no complaints but a ton of despair. There are moments when I go to bed thinking of ways to die and can barely find a reason to get up the next morning. And it feels like no one but me can possibly understand this.

A week ago, I wrote this about my depression: I feel half-paralyzed. Nothing really seems worth it, and I float back and forth between my just-enough workaday reality, and a zombie-like solitary existence in which the days pass, dressed down to my underwear and sweating in my ill-conditioned apartment without meaning or consequence. The lighter stages of depression can feel like a drug, a creative tidal zone of the moods filled with delicious introspection, but the deeper, prolonged stages such as this are simply ashen.

You know, people say that exercise mitigates depression, and I suppose it is true up to a point. But they do not know it as I do. Even a month ago, as I bicycled 60 to 100 miles a day surrounded by beautiful, unfamiliar landscapes and new experiences, approaching the climax of a noteworthy adventure and one of my greatest tangible triumphs, I recall several distinct moments of absolute despair. Just a day and a half before I reached the final destination of my 1000-mile journey, I remember sitting as a spectator in a dark corner of a cramped backpackers hostel in Inverness, Scotland, watching with detachment the younger twenty-something travelers. Even the girl in dreadlocks and the dainty little feet sleeping on the sofa in front of me seemed to have someone to be there with, everyone but me. That night, I remember entertaining a brief suicidal fantasy of leaping to my death off a rugged North Sea cliff the moment I reached my goal, as a sort of ultimate stab of existential despair in the face of triumph, as if to say, “See!”

There are moments when the restless soul in me longs to run off and join the military. What’s the worst that could happen? Exactly. It’s a kind of death wish, but it makes a certain rational sense, almost. After all, nothing informs a person like real experiences, and there is no experience, for good or for ill, like war. Who am I or anyone to sit on the sidelines and criticize the war if they have never been there, experienced the life and death stresses of a soldier in place where the enemy looks just like the innocents? I hear these hard conundrums of the military reality, and it speaks to me. I want to know, to see, to experience, and I have my whole unhappy life to throw away.

Instead, I just carry around inside my mind a gun-to-the-head cartoon, a sort of imaginary tattoo of private retreat. The image comforts me, like a prayer to no one that my unhappiness is not without limit, a secret reminder that my angst is so ultimately meaningless, it is actually optional.

As I stop to ponder the matter, it is surprising to me how little thought I have given as to the cause of this depression. Then it occurs to me it is probably not at all unusual for someone suffering from depression to lack the insight, in the midst of it, to cure himself. I guess I think of this as my early-onset midlife crisis. At some point, a person gets old enough to realize his youthful dreams and ambitions will almost certainly go largely unfulfilled, and this causes no small amount of discomfort as one reconciles expectations with reality. At some point it hit me a few months ago: Loneliness is actually normal. There is probably no one out there who can change this for me. Whether by choice or by nature, my path in life is an exceedingly lonely one, and this is not exactly as I had imagined it. I also went on to realize that half the things I tell myself are lies; I never do them. I may never write that first novel, learn a foreign language, or play the piano better than when I was 17. All of these realizations sicken and disgust me.

And what am I even here for? I have set myself to the task of becoming a teacher, but I’m not even that great at it. I pass for adequate, certainly, and many times better than the alternative in some cases, but that is just because I give half a damn and know my subject inside and out—not because of anything about teaching itself that I do outstandingly well. Sometimes I feel more uninspiring than should be physically possible. And I never keep half the promises I make to myself, even as a teacher.

I originally set about to write in response to: Compare your first week(s) of school this year to last year. Well it has been more comfortable. Better in so many ways. Yet I barely care at all. I barely want to exist. I find myself conducting business in the most perfunctory way I know how. So many good intentions are already sidelined. So I do what I call damage control. Who was it who said that 90% of life is just showing up? Well that’s all I’m really doing at the moment.

I know enough to recognize I am suffering from a diagnosable condition, a kind of disease if you will. But I've experienced this before. And I feel a good deal less than enthusiastic over the prospect of medications or therapy sessions for it. What do I do? I force myself to get up and go to work each morning, that’s what I do. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I tell myself that nothing lasts forever.