WillSpirit!

Yesterday I sat in my therapist’s office in the midst of an inky cloud of sorrow; I can hardly imagine a greater sadness. There was no talking me out of it. The despair did not attach (too much) to any particular complaint. I just felt a broad and bottomless emptiness, an utter absence of hope. Fortunately, suicide has dropped off my mental menu, but if I could have pressed a button and been sucked into a black hole, crushed to the size of a proton, I’d have pressed it. The nights leading up to this session had been spent hoping to die in my sleep. The physical pain I’ve mentioned played into my despair. So did returning from the Sierra Nevada foothills, where my wife and I live part-time; I always feel grief after leaving that area. (As an aside, I attribute some of that sorrow to flashbacks of experiences growing up. Every summer, the day after school ended in Los Angeles, I was shipped to my loving relatives in the midwest: Michigan, Indiana, Ohio. Then summer ended, and the day before school started I had to board the plane back to Hell. The terror and bereavement I felt every single summer has been seared into my psyche, and gets resurrected each time I come back from the Yosemite area.) Another fount of despair derives from all the memoir-type writing I’ve been doing. I posted the story about my stepmother not long ago (now updated, for anyone who wants to observe a work-in-progress making progress—editorial suggestions will be welcomed.) I’ve also written stories about my mother and father in the past six months. All of this history is dreadfully sad, at least to me. I did take a break to write about a backpacking trip, which long-term readers might remember; plus a story about how I got into ophthalmology. But the positive (or at least zany) memories do not outweigh the burden of discouragement loaded onto my heart by all the awful sagas of childhood. The past ten years of repeated disappointment and failure have not helped.

My therapist’s goal, to the extent I understood it, was to get me to sit with the darkness and not allow it to germinate into analysis about my life. From that bleak landscape, absolutely nothing in my current world looked good. So he kept steering me to just experience the sorrow. I sat drenched in tears, wishing I could vanish into another dimension. An exhausting experience, to say the least. Before this, or while it was happening, I would have said that I often allow the grief and despair to permeate my psychic universe without blaming my present circumstances. I believed I had learned to just live in the depression without either running with it or away from it. Not so. From the safety of today, my posture on the precipice of yesterday looks like a new creature in my taxonomy of mood states. For a few moments, I stood at the cliff’s edge without looking either up or down. Not trying to talk myself out of feeling so rotten (actually, there was little danger of that,) or dwelling on my complaints (a much more tempting activity.)

I realized that whatever the ultimate cause of my despair (residual grief and fear from childhood, disappointment at having no career and facing financial uncertainty, anxiety and discomfort from worsening arthritis,) the proximate cause was some kind of neurotransmitter warfare in my brain. Maybe that goes a step further, with some demon pushing the chemical buttons (I do not think this very likely—but who knows?) Either way, I realized it was a state of mind that I could not control, could not explain in terms of current circumstance, and just had to endure. Like bad weather in the brain. So I sat there without an umbrella, without running for a nonexistent cabin in the wilderness, without starting a fire. Nor did I dive into the rising floodwaters and drown. I just let the rain and tears soak me.

Today the sun is not exactly shining, but I can see it. I think the switch can be attributed to yesterday’s session. A not-too-disrupted night of sleep helped. Settling into this house, and getting past the departure from the other, also helps. And I’ve been taking more NSAIDs and Tylenol to alleviate my pain. But mostly I think the improvement comes from letting the demons assault me until they got bored and drifted back into the dispassionate ether. A bit like a method I’ve heard for combatting recurrent nightmares: rather than running away from your predators, turn and face them. When you look them in the eye they stop charging, and you can welcome them into your psyche like domesticated prairie mustangs. I don’t expect, maybe don’t even want, this to be the end of familiarity with my bottomless psychic cesspool. I know, with every molecule in my brain, that the storms will recur. But perhaps next time I can pull off the trick of letting them pass through my mental atmosphere without wrecking my opinion of myself, my life, and my surroundings. One can always hope. One should always hope.

Obviously, there are times when hope remains hidden. But right now, at least, I can see it its cheerful face behind the dispersing clouds.

One topic I haven’t written about, in my obsessions with child abuse and psychopharmaceutical malfeasance, is physical pain. Back in my days as a surgeon, so very long ago, my neck developed ruptured discs, bone spurs, and all manner of unpleasant pathology. The resulting pain forced me to quit that line of work. But physical discomfort did not stop just because I ended a career. It only lessened. Hence, a few years later I found myself addicted to Oxycontin. The drug, another pharmaceutical evil, helped with pain of all kinds. My neck felt so much better; it was easier to write, for instance. I could sit still longer. It also eliminated my depression, and replaced it with a delightful feeling of well-being—for a few hours. The problem was, when that nice sensation wore off, I wanted it back. And over time that meant taking more and more of the drug. It got to the point where I could hardly think of anything besides the narcotic, and when the hour would come for another dose. My life became handcuffed to those little pills. So I stopped. And it was not as easy as just writing that sentence. It was hell. Without Oxycontin my body and mind became vessels of pain and little more. In the end I fell back on Suboxone, a drug that helps a little with the physical aches, does nothing for the emotional hurting, but eliminates the narcotic craving. Since there is no euphoria, it is compatible with a normal life. But if I’d never been started on Oxycontin, I would not be taking it at all. Oxycodone (the active ingredient of oxycontin) reached deep inside my brain and turned a switch, leaving me with a permanent craving for narcotics. I know, it’s a weakness. If I were really ‘tough’ I could get by with no drugs at all. But that is easy to say and even try until the pain strikes.

I would force myself to taper off the Suboxone except for the mild pain relief it provides. These days, I need all the pain relief I can get. The arthritis now involves many more joints besides my neck.I also take naprosyn, Tylenol, and and another non-narcotic pain reliever.

Lately, with approaching winter, the pain has been ramping up. I lay awake nights unable to sleep because of it. It’s demoralizing. It becomes very hard to maintain a positive attitude with so much physical discomfort. So I sink into a low-grade depression and irritability that might be OK if I weren’t married. But living with someone else requires interacting in a civil way. I hate to admit this, but it becomes very hard to be a good husband when I can’t sleep and feel constant pain. It gets easy to feel sorry for myself. I had such a rotten upbringing, and have experienced such a run of bad luck as an adult, that now living with this pain seems unfair. And that kind of thinking just makes the pain worse, because a psychic value judgment gets added to the physical discomfort. I get to the point of not wanting to do anything, of having to force myself into the most basic activities. I become distant and quiet.

But when has life ever been fair? And what else is there to say besides that?