For the last few days, the negative voices in my head have been very loud. It's the usual litany: it's too late, what's the point, you aren't good enough. By this time I know those voices don't describe reality; they aren't connected to any "truth." I know that I can detach, put space around the voices, distance myself so I can have a different perspective. I'm aware it's possible for the world to look very different if I turn my vision just a few degrees, lift it up to that place beyond my shame and fear.
But there are days, like the last few, in which I'm powerless over the voices of my despair. They produce feelings in me - oppressive, debilitating - and I can't rouse myself to act in spite of them. They have me in their grip and action, any action feels beyond me.
I no longer think something will happen or I'll come across the magic formula and somehow days like this will never come again. It may be my metabolism or genes or a hard childhood - whatever the reason, I accept that sometimes I stumble into, if not the abyss, then onto the stairway leading down into it.
The question is how to get through. One way is to keep repeating to myself things I know that push back the negativity: reminding myself it isn't "real," it's only a part of me, a part I can bring down to size; other feelings are possible if I turn away from the mesmerizing voices that want to bring me down. I can look for the places despair sinks down into my body, focus on them until I feel it dissolve away. I can close my eyes and look for the place of letting go. I can reach out to the benevolence I believe exists outside myself. I can try to connect.
The answer is always spiritual. I can act as if I'm not bogged down in the muck but it never gets me very far. Just as you can't cook a stew until you light the gas, so I can't get up and do until I feel deep in my body the connection to a power, a force greater than myself. Even to search for it is to begin to find it and although I may have to take minuscule steps I can be headed in the right direction.
My spirit wants to move that way. I want to be free.
Writing these words has made me feel better. They come from deep inside me. They move me toward connection.
I'm fascinated by stories of people who find spiritual freedom in the most unfree of circumstances. For a while, I read everything I could find - books by concentration camp survivors, prison memoirs, stories of people who had survived the imprisonment of poverty and disease. I was looking for examples of survival; I needed to know that it's always possible to emerge out of despair into a sense of freedom My actual circumstances were nowhere near as dire as those of the men and women I was reading about. I had food and shelter and freedom of motion. But I felt myself imprisoned by fear and self-loathing and the particular kind of hopelessness that told me nothing good could ever come.
I needed to know that there is always the possibility of getting. I was desperate to feel that possibility, to believe there was something that would help me leave depression and fear behind. I wanted to believe that my human spirit, like the spirits of the people I read about, could transcend suffering and let go of fear.
I know now from direct experience what that letting go feels like. When suffering cuts deep enough, the body and the spirit must make a choice - either to go under and face annihilation, or to let loose the survival instinct that's in all of us. It's that instinct which finds a way out of suffering and moves us toward the solace we seek, even if we don't understand it and have no faith at all. Spirit wants expansion and freedom. It wants to be set on fire. Strike a match and watch the light grow. Survive.
One day, in the middle of a deep depression, I was lying on my bed staring at the ceiling when seemingly out of nowhere I found myself saying the words of the 23rd Psalm. This was strange; I'm not at all religious but I suppose that psalm is in the zeitgeist and I'd absorbed it without my knowing.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul.
As I thought about the words, I suddenly heard the voice of the poet, of the man, probably King David, who had written those lines. I heard his longing, his need for comfort. I felt the immediacy of his need across the centuries.
I'd been in a very harsh place but those words made me wonder what it would be like if I was starving and came upon green pastures, or was thirsty and found cool waters. Like an actor in a sense memory excercise, I imagined what it would feel like to be restored to some kind of equilibrium, not by something out there beyond my consciousness but by coming in touch with the part of me that could reach for well-being, the part of me that could come out from under and move into action.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of death,
I will fear no evil for Thou art with me...
And surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
I felt the poet's emotion and I heard the words as metaphor. What would it be like to feel I wasn't alone and helpless, that there was at least the possibility of a refuge inside me, a place that was safe, a place I could count on? I had made a deep connection with that human voice across the centuries, those words of longing and the search for solace, and the intensity of that connection released energy, a spark of hope. It would take a long time for that hope to grow and transform into the certainty that comes from direct experience. But just a glimmer of hope was all that was needed to take the first step out of despair and doubt.
