Recent events – in name, the death of Chris Cornell and the news about Autumn Snyder, Zack Snyder’s daughter, has made me decide that it’s time to talk about my depression. I don’t talk about it a lot, except with my closest friends. I’m not embarrassed about it or ashamed of it, it’s just that I’ve never been to a shrink, I’ve never been diagnosed. Only recently, within the last few years, have I learned that it runs in my family. I’ve dealt with it in some form for most of my life, and it’s the reason I write, the reason I used to draw non-stop. It’s my voice. The voice of a guy who can’t use his real voice because a lot of the time it doesn’t work; it skips and scratches like a broken record, and it isn’t a pretty voice, nor an exceptionally manly one. A deviated septum, possibly sustained during childhood when I jumped off one of those Masonite slides at a friend’s house and bashed my face onto a brick hearth, gives it a honking, nasal tone that is flatly unattractive.
Anyway, I’ve never been diagnosed with depression, and I don’t see the point in going to a shrink because I wouldn’t accept meds even if they were deemed necessary, and in any case I certainly don’t have it to the extent that others do. I’ve never been suicidal. I can say that for a certainty, though I can admit that there’ve been times where I hated being alive, and couldn’t imagine a day when I wouldn’t. Those were dark times, and I don’t dwell there. That is not my life. That is not what God wants for me. That is not His plan.
Therein is one of the secrets to my dealing with it: faith. It would be a lie to say that I haven’t had my struggles with faith, though, too. I remember one time, back at my parents’ house, having been broken up with by yet another young lady, I collapsed on the floor between my bed and my dresser, in the corner with the subwoofer, my back against the actual wall, tears streaming down my face, wondering what in the hell was wrong with me that nobody wanted me, my mom came in and knelt down in front of me, trying to cheer me up, and she asked me if I had prayed. I remember this because the words that came out of my mouth were like black sludge, like poison, and I bear the shame of them every day. I ever worked it into one of my books, “The Disciple of Cardonn.” I told my mom, “the son of a bitch doesn’t listen.” I regret those words with all my heart. I may apologize to the Lord for those words every day of my life; I know I was forgiven the first time I did so. But I will always be ashamed that I ever said them. What I have learned in the years since, is that it’s pointless to expect things to go my way, and that most of the heartache and the worry and sense of doom and defeat I have encountered in my life, has come from thinking that I could control how things would play out, and being emotionally and intellectually unable to accept the reality when it didn’t meet my expectations.
I watched a few documentaries about castles in Great Britain and Ireland, recently; and one of them, a fortress called Warwick Castle, there’s a dungeon which is really just a dark, claustrophobic stone pit with a mud floor and a chute from the privy, so that the guy who lived in the castle would literally crap on his prisoners. As a metaphor for certain periods of my life, the dungeon of Warwick Castle is imprecise, but it will do. When you try to force things to go your way, and they don’t, you rather have the feeling of being in a dungeon where it is raining crap. You don’t know how you got there, or why. You would give quite a lot to be shut of it.
But of course this is disappointment, not depression. Depression, however, makes it tough to handle disappointment. Because every disappointment becomes cataclysmic in scale. Way back in my college days, dealing with the disappointment of heartbreak for the first real time, I wrote a poem. I don’t remember it; it is probably long gone, and in any case was most likely garbage. But I had a turn of phrase that I thought was very clever at the time, and looking back on it, it was describing depression: I spoke of having some unknown condition of the mind “that makes mountains of molehills, and molehills of mountains.” The point being that you get focused on the wrong things and find yourself disproportionately upset about them. It can be very hard to recognize that, when you’re in the middle of it. Because your brain is affected. You are malfunctioning.
I talk about heartbreak a lot because my loneliness and whatever sort of mild depression I have, make mountains out of a simple thing like the end of a relationship. It takes me forever to get right again after that happens. The older I get, the longer it seems to take. Like skin getting less pliable with age, so does my heart. But my emotional disturbance doesn’t live solely in the realm of heartbreak. I have a kind of sine wave of general happiness; it goes up and down. I hit a peak for a few days where I am downright gregarious, laughing and joking with complete strangers, surprisingly bold with the ladies; then it passes and I start slowing down, drooping, sleepy all the time, lethargic, sullen. I don’t want you to talk to me, but I didn’t tell you to leave. Get back here and leave me the hell alone. During this low point, I can’t even bear to hear people laughing. I hear people laughing and I want to punch the living hell out of all of them. I see my red door, I must have it painted black.
I’m learning to recognize it for what it is. To understand that I need to be less affected by stuff I can’t control. I need to quit giving things power over my life. Ups and downs are natural, but the sine wave, not so much. And what happens, then, is that love, on those rare occasions when I find it, is like a mug of beer and a shot of bourbon in the hands of an alcoholic. Suddenly the sine wave is disrupted; I am up up up and flying. And I don’t want it to ever end. When it inevitably does, I come down like an atom bomb out of the belly of a B-29. And I mean I crater epically. In the end it doesn’t so much level the sine wave, as exaggerate it.
So, I no longer actively search for love. I fear putting myself through that again, for the wrong woman, will destroy me. If I can find stability, by myself, then I will be a better partner when the time comes. Whatever God has in mind, I will follow the steps He lays out for me and not try to force my own will upon it; that way lies only ruin. I am fortunate that I have this ability to introspect and sort through not only my feelings, but the reasons for them. It keeps things from getting away from me. When I understand that my feelings aren’t rational, I can dissect them and find the root causes. The last time heartbreak came to me, I remember sliding down again, and realizing what I was experiencing was an emotional hangover, and knowing that, I was able to put some perspective on it, and prayerfully face it.
Now, it’s been a couple of years. My feelings for her remain, but I know that they are not requited. I exist, with this emotional reality staring at me like a lone wolf from the forest’s edge. Sometimes I can only see the light reflecting off its eyes. It’s there. I am not very sad. But I am not very happy. I am in the field, and the wolf is in the woods, and we regard each other. I could go into the woods. I could dwell there, and snarl at people and howl at the moon, and hunt some kind of satisfaction, some fleeting victory. I could bare my teeth and spring away into the brush. Because that wolf is just the other part of me. The thing I would become if I let the darkness in.
But I remain in the field, where I can see the light of the sun, and the stars, and the moon. From a distance away, I hear people laugh, and I want to punch them, but I don’t. I exist. It is lonely. I am lonely.
Three times in my life, I can remember hitting bottom, and each time has been lower than before. The first, was when I left home to start school at Longwood College 1994. I did not have a direction in life, and I did not want to go to college, at least until I knew what I wanted to do with my life. However this option was not allowed me. I have never done well with change. Four people were my entire world: my parents, and my friends Steven Lowry and Jeremy Bertz. Those four people were my support system, they kept me sane and kept me laughing and kept me from feeling too alone. Leaving all of that behind, going to a place far way with nothing but strangers, filled me with anxiety and dread. I did not realize that I had a kind of anxiety, but I’m sure now that I do, and like the other things, it has only intensified with age. When I got to Longwood, I was placed in a dorm room with Drew, a tall, quiet guy with a strong observational wit, and Chris Blauert, basically a shitty version of Chris Pine.
The three of us shared a suite with Jay, who looks like the love child of David Hasselhoff and Joel Osteen; Justin, who used to spray a cloud of deodorant in the air and walk through it; and Andy Banyasz, a cynical, ballcap-wearing Mac user. I liked all of them except Shitty Chris Pine, but none of them particularly liked me, and in any case, I was panicking, full of the shock of being away from home, having to live with people who listened to The Pixies, and ruined my sleep by spending all evening socializing across campus and then coming home and turning the light on to do homework at 2am when I had an art class at 7. The truth is, I was unprepared in almost every way for being away from home, and I was depressed, and I didn’t understand it, and thus I didn’t know how to face it, and I desperately needed a support system, but instead I mostly got bullied and it only got worse. I’m sure I was insufferable. I was depressed, what the hell else would I be to a bunch of guys just trying to drink beer and get laid, than an insufferable bastard? Of course I was. I hated every minute of my freshman year. At the beginning of the second semester, Drew and Shitty Chris Pine kicked me out of the room, forcing me to find residence elsewhere. I benefitted from this by getting a room to myself, but I had to share a suite with two frat turds whom it would be possible to compare to apes, if one felt like insulting apes. I remember one night, laying on my bed in my half-furnished, cold, cinder-block dorm room, crying, a voice telling me just jump out the window. I wanted to be anyplace other than college. Anyplace other than Farmville, Virginia. The thing that stopped me, was the realization that the only thing worse than staying in college would be disappointing my parents, or worse, hurting them.
The second time was about six years later. I was working at a print shop in Fredericksburg that made junk mail, primarily with a Catholic conservative bent, when my then-girlfriend, Laura (it was a long-distance internet relationship, because I was very stupid) broke up with me. To be clear… I had just finished four and a half years at Longwood, where I did not want to be, studying drawing and printmaking because they did not teach sequential art, and not minoring in English because my advisor was an idiot. I came home and had to find a job, which was made more complicated by the fact that after all that school I still did not know what I wanted to do with my life. In fact I was less certain at this juncture than I had been when I started college. Still directionless, I took the pre-press job because it was sort of art-adjacent, my degree had “printmaking” in the title, which may have fooled the idiots that ran the company, it paid reasonably well, and had a strong benefits package.
I was depressed every day, going to that awful job in that awful place and making awful crap for money. It was art-adjacent in the exact way that farting is sort of like composing music. Laura was my life-preserver. Idiot that I am, it was her, and not my faith, or my family, that I clung to. I broke her. And then she left and I just broke. There were days, driving to work, that the voice urged me to swerve into oncoming traffic. Actually it was all of the days. I hated my life. I kept going there and collecting the paycheck as long as I could, but finally the awfulness of the job just pushed me over the edge. One can only throw so many chairs – and no, that isn’t a metaphor, I used to throw chairs up in that place. Then one day I walked out. I took five months off, wrote the first draft of “Disciple of Cardonn,” and that was therapy as much as anything. I got right. Mom told me it was like I was myself again, like her son was back after being gone for a long time. I knew what she meant. I felt it, too. I got re-hired at Food Lion, where I had worked during my college years, and I’ve been there ever since. It was only supposed to be five years. Whoops.
Well, I did have a plan, once.
The third time was just a couple of years ago. I had worked my way up to being a Produce Manager, and I was proud of the work I was doing. I was making enough money and had finally lined up a couple of friends to rent a place with, and I got out of my parents’ house at last. I was proud of that, but remember what I said about my support system, and change? I began to feel adrift, again. I also had to adhere to a similar sleep schedule to what I’d had at AKA, and I have learned that this is a factor for me. My circadian rhythms dictate that I was not meant for being early to bed nor early to rise. It takes a toll on my physical, mental, and emotional health. I had the job for some fourteen months. I started strong but as the job took its toll on me, I was increasingly unable to perform. Finally the company swapped store managers between the Dahlgren and King George stores, and I found myself working for a man I still maintain is the actual devil. He ground me down the rest of the way, and then forced me to step down from my position and leave the store I’d been at for over a decade. I’m happier at my current store, but I lost a lot of money, most of my dignity, and all of my pride. For the entire first year at my current store, I was basically just taking up space. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there. I was humiliated, I was wounded, and I felt like I’d just been reduced to a child again.
And then I did a dumb thing. I decided to try to drive to Pennsylvania in a snow storm to pick up a dining room table, and I did not much care if I made it or not. I did not, in fact, make it. God, though? God has a funny way of reaching out, plucking you up and putting you in the palm of his hand. I misjudged my ability to stop in time on approach to the stoplight at Billingsley Road in White Plains, Maryland, and slid through the intersection after the light had turned red, standing on the brake, knowing something bad was about to happen. Somehow, miraculously, what happened was not so very bad. I did total a lady’s car. She happens to be the most beautiful lady I have ever seen in my life. She was not hurt. Nobody was hurt. We hugged each other, she cried, and I thanked the Lord that I had not injured this beautiful, wonderful person. It is absurd that I fell for her in that moment, standing in the snow in southern Maryland, snow in her hair, my insides like jelly. But it is also a kind of miracle. Although we did not end up together – she did seem to consider it, but I lost out to another guy, alas – she and I are friends. And, better still, I came to understand something that day, standing in a pool of warmth by the exhaust of a fire truck. I came to understand that the designs we have for our lives are basically inconsequential, because God’s plan overrides all, and his plans are to benefit us and not ruin us. I was feeling ugly, when I got in the truck that afternoon. I felt like dying. Instead I was reminded of beauty, of the preciousness of life and the wonder of chance. Of snow in a pretty girl’s hair. I was reminded that the world is a pretty good place, when you stay in the field under the light of the universe, rather than hiding in the thorns with the wolf.
That was the day, more than two years ago now, when I finally surrendered my will to God. Now I know that some of you reading this, are not religious. Some of you will think I’m crazy. I’m completely okay with that. But I look at a guy like Chris Cornell, who had more talent than I do, who was good-looking and successful and had three children, and I feel like hell that he’s gone, because I know the wolf got him. I hate that wolf.
I think about Autumn Snyder, and then I think about Zack and Deborah, talented filmmakers, Zack is a great artist, again, more talent than I can imagine. I think about what stopped me from seriously considering the window that night at Longwood so many years ago, and then I think about Autumn, and I know why Zack had to quit the movie. He feels like he failed her. It isn’t your fault, Zack. You, and Deborah, it isn’t your fault. It’s the damn wolf.
That will not be me. The wolf will not eat me. I will eat the wolf. I will eat the wolf raw, with the fur still attached, and I will swallow it whole. I am a warrior. I will live. I will live for the will of God, I will live for the joy of discovery. For snow in a pretty girl’s hair. My God, but it’s a beautiful world.