Where Stories Come From

[This post has been renamed from "90 Days and 90 Nights"]


When you're sinking like the Titanic, you can:

(1) hold your breath and wait to drown,
(2) keep rearranging the deck chairs, or
(3) jump.

I'm sure there are more options, but you get the idea. The problem with depression is untangling what is external, and therefore largely out of your control, as opposed to internal, and therefore completely out of your control.

We live in an age and society where we medicate depression, although, as a recent New York Times Magazine article reported, some doctors and researchers now see an "upside" to leaving depression untreated.

Among the examples cited were writers (one small sample found that 80 percent are depressed), with the implication that many might not produce their best writing if they were medicated.

The idea is that there's a trade-off here -- treating the pain with drugs vs. sublimating the pain into stories.

***

Let me be especially candid tonight. From the beginning, this blog has been a chronicle of one man's pain. There have been, at various times, many other emotions captured and evoked, I hope, but there is no denying that my main personal motivation to write about my life is to work through pain.

In this, I'm acutely aware that I am not alone. Not only from what I hear from readers here (casual and regular), but from other friends, colleagues and strangers who know exactly what I am writing about.

When it comes to the question of whether to medicate or not medicate, I'd never presume to tell another which choice to make. But there does come a point when the preponderance of evidence suggests treatment.

On the other hand, even at that point, another option might be consider the thinking of the experts in that Times article.

Let me try to explain.

We all know some of the triggers of depression -- losing a job, breaking up, getting sick -- and unfortunately, over time, we all experience one or more of these triggers. Some of us experience all of them. Others among us experience all of them multiple times.

Maybe this creates an accumulated pain.

After all, these are all external events, although any reasonably sensitive person takes such things personally, blaming himself even for misfortunes for which (a more objective) observer might apportion responsibility elsewhere.

To the depressed man, it matters not. Over a lifetime, as the slow, awful realization sinks in that these cycles of loss are your fate, you have to develop, by brute force, a personal survival strategy.

You cannot allow these things to defeat you in the end.

Giving up always appears as an option, but it's actually only a cop-out.

Going on is the only choice; it's the morally and ethically correct choice. No one is perfect, no life is perfect, no path can be revisited once you've traveled too far away from the place and the time when things might have turned out differently.

I heard an artist from another culture describe what she called "pathways" recently, and -- if I understood her meaning -- she was using the term to describe those pivotal moments in life when we make fateful decisions, from which there is no return.

Looking back, these moments stand out with all of the crystalline clarity of one tiny tree branch coated in ice, lighted by the sun, outside my childhood window many decades ago in a white Michigan winter.

As I pressed my face to the window, I felt only awe. I was clueless as to what I was actually seeing -- how the branch was me, the ice confined me in that place, that time, and that position, but that even the ice itself would soon be melting, or indeed the role of the sunlight, and how that would come to define my own life as a writer.

None of this could I have known then; only the years have brought it back and brought it into a sharper focus.

***

Today, as on certain other days, I struggled for hours to find the strength -- physical, mental, emotional -- to get out of bed and enter the day. I had more reasons than most men to rise and become active.

Three of the most important were my young children, already long up in my apartment and going about their daily routines, which on Saturday includes watching TV, playing video games, and making themselves yummy cinnamon bread toast.

They left me to resume my life at my own pace; they are empathic children, so, without words ever being spoken, they knew some things were wrong for me in my world. I can try to hide sadness but I always fail, at least with them.

All in a moment I was able to get up and join the world again. Without recounting what in every way was an ordinary day, allow me the indulgence to specify a handful of moments that brought me out of my darkness and into the light once again.

My daughter asked me to build a Lego toy with her in the morning. This is a type of play that is mainly in our collective past now, she is very busy becoming a young woman and only occasionally reverts to being a little girl.

But I really needed a little girl again today, although I never would have put it that way, nor would I have known that a simple game from yesteryear would brighten my dismal spirit state.

My soccer-playing son and I drove to his practice. On the way across town to out near the ocean I was angry, upset, frustrated, not able to find the route and hating myself for that, and a million other personal failings.

Why can't I perform the simplest tasks? I knew my outburst, plus the underlying emotional stress of feeling his father's sadness was weighing heavily on him. He slumped back and tried to nap the rest of the way to the field.

As he practiced. I spoke with other dads about little things in ways that comforted me. Parenting is so complex sometimes, and then, also frighteningly simple. I also had a long conversation with a friend about the subject of this post -- depression -- which helped mine lift, centimeter by centimeter.

The sun emerged, warmed our day, heated my skin, raised everyone's spirits. From yesterday's gloom came today's spring-like air, the air of life and love and hope and a freshness of purpose.

In this air I can be anything, and anything can yet happen, including all kinds of good and marvelous things.

This air is the purest of music, and what I needed, desperately, was a new song to enter my brain.

On the way back my son told me how much he loves soccer, how it is his "passion," and then he told me something I never knew before today.

Last summer, as he was about to begin high school, he had visited the soccer coach to tell him he would like to try out for the team.

"I'm sure I looked like what I was, a scared, skinny little freshman," he told me. "But do you know what Coach did. He smiled that big smile of his and said, 'Welcome! And I'm sure you're going to be a great addition to our team!'"

He was. He made the team, became a starter, a star, and a key part of a winning team that made the playoffs.

It was a magical fall for him and -- as his father -- for me. I can't even think about it without tears filling my eyes. I'm so proud of him, and I know how much work he puts in to excel at competitive team athletics -- a world I never really knew as a boy.

As he told me this story, I loved his coach all over again -- a big, somewhat tough-looking but essentially gentle man, African American, a man who loves his wife so much he spends hours at school openly making her a poster for her birthday, or planning what to do on their anniversary.

This man does this proudly in front of his athletes -- young males whose minds might otherwise rarely focus on the kind of love a man can have for a woman, not in the movies or in a bar or in a song explicit with sexual lyrics, but the simple, lovely feeling of a man for his wife.

Whatever happens to my son's soccer "career," which he explained to me today he fully intends to pursue throughout high school, and barring injury, throughout college, I know he will always remember that first encounter with his high school coach. And now I will too.

Later still his little brother and I played "21" and "Horse" in our backyard court in the sun; then we sat and talked about a variety of topics. This is possibly the gentlest child in the universe, a boy with a brilliant mind that reaches into places far beyond the grasp of the typical 13-year-old.

His favorites these days include Orwell and Hemingway, and as he describes their fiction, he always illuminates new meanings of their work while he critiques them frankly and effortlessly -- dissecting their stories and characters and voice as if he somehow inhabits these writers' brains. There is no move they make that he cannot understand as to its purpose and effect.

But it wasn't his soliloquy on literature that touched me so much today as his pragmatic skill in solving another nettlesome problem. Just as I seem incapable of finding my way in my car I utterly lack the logical genes necessary to make any device work for long.

My camera's Memory Card claimed it was full, but I wanted to take a picture. My daughter loved the look of a certain soda bottle we had gotten from the corner store when she was thirsty.

Back home, I had clipped a bit of jasmine for her to place in that bottle.

My son calmly reprogrammed the Memory Card, handed me the camera, and I shot the photo at the top of this long-winded post.

So I offer that photo to you now and I also say, thank you for stopping by. Sometimes, I hope, working the muscle trumps taking the medicine.

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