What It Looks Like

What it looks like for me to be depressed, down in my hole.

Now more than ever friends of mine are seeing as my family already has... what it looks like.
To you perhaps it doesn't look like something so much as it looks like the absence of anything, no presence, no communication, radio silence, a radar scope with no hits.

I will try in this post to add some information to this void, by sharing what it looks like from my perspective.

I would like to have titled this post, "What it Feels Like", however I cannot really say how it feels. When I am down in my hole I am disconnected from feeling anything at all. Mostly I am trying to block/disconnect from feelings of shame/inadequacy/failure.
It is sometimes a conscious choice but more often than not it is a reflexive 'self-protection' process whereby negative emotions are sensed triggering almost immediate blockage.

The mechanism of blockage is not selective, it is a complete shutdown. A mindless dull place. Habits I frequently use to perpetuate this mindless dull state include masturbation, binge eating, reading wikipedia or a book, watching TV shows or documentaries, closed-eye fantasies and sleep.

Movies seems to be a bad choice because the magic of a movie is that it triggers emotions in you.
This past month I did watch Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence, which is a real tear-jerker in its drawn out finale. Emotion definitely came through for me, however it wasn't a torrent like Niagara Falls it was like spurts of water rising through a crack in the ice during the spring thaw.  
Communication requires awareness to process and respond, touching it breaks down the armor and allows feeling to reenter. Thus talking and engaging are the most helpful things. The instrument of blockage knows this, thus it keeps me away from communication as it keeps me away from meditation and anything else that might break it away.

The past few days, slowly coming to (thank you to everyone who I have allowed in to help), I have seen this even more clearly, engaging in moments of awareness of body sensations I cannot help but be aware of everything else I have blocked, mainly feelings of shame and thoughts of real world responsibilities.

So for me it is not endless crying or physical pain, it is endless dullness and lack of sensation, lack of awareness of all the things we are normally aware of.

I am capable to rejoin the world of my own impetus, usually If I have some obligation to which I feel attached. For example, I once spent a good few weeks down in my hole before I got back up because of a Bike Tour I had planned was looming and I had much to do to prepare. Another example from a couple of winters ago, it would not be uncommon for me to shut down for a few days until the 43 minutes I needed to get up and make it to work on time. Sometimes these jolts will move me in a new direction, sometimes I fall right back in my hole.

Other times It seems like it runs its course because it is so boring to be endlessly dull that the craving for feeling overwhelms the protective shutdown.

One thing it isn't is constant mental voices of shame and failure, they may come from time to time but are almost entirely blocked. In the past I was less practiced at shutting down and these negative voices would arise more. It could be that I generate these negativities less than I once did.  Maybe they are still there in equal measure. Sometimes I feel them below the surface (i.e. without thinking them) and it will cause me to thrash for a few seconds.

Another thing that isn't present are thoughts of suicide or self-harm. These used to come up for me in college when I was first learning to deal with depression. I think my experiencing the dharma these past couple years has removed the delusion behind these thoughts.

So I choose each moment, each hour, each day not to deal with anything: my emotions, my friends, my responsibilities. Like an unpaid credit card, the balance grows and seems more overwhelming with each deferment. It never is though.

For me, this is what it looks like.

Mostly I feel badly that I contribute to the worry and suffering for those that care about me, Also for the time I have lost, I can do so much in an hour... and yet I lose months out of the year.

I Love You All, even if you don't know me or I don't know you, even if you're not reading this post, I Love You.

What Its Like

I intended to post tonight about Portland's looming Mega-Quake, as tonight January 26th 2015 marks 315 years since the last Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake which occurred around 9pm that day in 1700. It is particularly apt for me to write about disaster preparedness since I spent most of today preparing for the Blizzard that is hitting the northeast.

Instead I feel like right now, in my first post back, I want to write about how hard it is for me to accept where I am and what its like to be here.
  [Note: Two Months ago I moved from Portland to New York, specifically my Grandfather's house on Long Island]

     I want my time here to have meaning for my grandmother. It may or may not. Because she has Alzheimer's/dementia it doesn't seem possible that I would know what it meant to her... if it had any meaning at all. I should be content to know it has some meaning for me, however I feel a bit lost in my journey at the moment, so that meaning is not clear in this moment. I usually find it's hard to tell what something means until after, like weeks or months or even years after... I should summon some patience.

     I want my time here to be be meaningful for my grandfather in a very narrowly prescribed way. I want for him to learn to see the world the way I see it, not overall, but in at least one way.  I don't gauge that this is likely to occur for him. Is it not enough to bring some company and compassion into his life, to hold space for him, to cook and make life easier in a number of small ways?
     It's often difficult for me to accept him for who he is. In those moments I want desperately for him to see it my way, to make suffering go *poof*. I must remind myself that the whole point to coming here was to sit with suffering, not to alleviate it in any gross way. It's hard to sit with suffering, or perhaps reframed its a part of my mind that hasn't been well exercised. I hope I'm giving it a work out.

     I want my brother to be more like me than he is like my parents. What does that even mean?  I myself am very much like my parents. I am letting this fixation, this attachment to a desire for things to be a certain way get in the way of my being open and real and brotherly with him. I should be grateful to have a loving brother and be able to spend moments together. He's really wonderful.

    And my father... I generally am in the habit of reacting. The reaction is "I can't accept this." Why is your father the hardest one to accept? Is it because I love him the most, care about him the most, therefore want him to exhibit some degree of liberation the most? OR is it because I see in him so much of myself that I feel like I have rejected. Have I rejected it? or grown with it? learned from it? loved it to death? denied indulging those seeds? All of the above please
    Father is the hardest one to accept. I'm grateful that I can see that the reaction I am having is "I cannot accept", I've made it to step one. Now I see the connection to Deb, so hard to accept father.
    Maybe its easier to accept from a distance, it allows you to pretend that things are other than what they are. That doesn't sound like true acceptance though. From far away you can hang onto your fantasies longer because you are presented with less contradictory evidence. Evidence of what? like my father is a criminal? What crime has he committed? He has committed the crime of not exactly matching some wishful idealized avatar of a father-figure I have made up in my mind. Would I be any happier if he had matched this profile, or would I want only for him to be something else entirely?...Tanha
    I am grateful for the work my father did that helped me be here now doing this self-study.

All of this speaks to the difficulty of step 2 in my 1 2 3-step theory (Which is mentioned but not well explained in this post).  The hard way through, the only way through, step 2... acceptance.