Depression and Self-Discovery |
Thursday Jan 03 2008
By Stu Whitley | Bio
So what is to be done about depression? Much the same, I think, as rediscovering the rational self in a time when emotions hold sway. Not an easy task, but it’s done all the time. One disciplines oneself to think. The brain is exercised through reading, or better yet, writing. Journaling is a powerful tool to self-discovery, and one doesn’t need to be a Joseph Conrad to diarize one’s thoughts. What better way to explore the inner self—the ossuary of our life’s experiences, events, images, biases and tribal assumptions—than to set them down on paper as influences for our present course?
It truly is surprising what actually lies within the sediment of our motivations (provided we don’t set out to fool ourselves): a fear of a past mistake repeating itself, the contour of a face we once loved and lost, the quiet authority of a parent, the indifference of a friend. Reading (almost anything) can trigger the imagination, but writing impels restraint and makes blame look ridiculous. A wise intellectual, Albert Camus wrote, is someone whose mind watches itself.Our lives have a completely public character. This is so, as Josef Pieper so aptly stated in The Four Cardinal Virtues (1965), “…because the individual is adequately defined only through his membership in the social whole, which is the only reality”. One must belong, love and be loved, participate in a social environment, to be realized as a human being.
The way out of depression will often mean putting one’s hand in the hand of another. It may be that a sexual relationship will be the blaze that will quench the lesser burn. It is no accident that depression is high among those who are alone. Sometimes it’s necessary to rediscover (or discover) loyalties, those attachments we have for certain individuals that in some instances have never been properly pursued. We know that there are people in even the most misanthropic lives who assist us in carrying out our purpose. The highest level of loyalty is, of course, love. But love cannot thrive unilaterally. It’s been said that love is the crocodile that lurks in the river of passion. I wonder at the metaphor: it’s demonstrably true that unrequited love, or love that has withered from its full bloom (often for reasons we cannot quite comprehend) can contribute to depression. There cannot be anything more unfair than to love, yet to be unloved in return, for at minimum it is upon congenial loyalties that our survival depends. Abandonment of love is the crocodile.
So we must share our story. “We are a narrative species. We exist by storytelling—by relating our situations—and the test of our evolution may lie in getting the story right.” The author of these words (R. Rosenblatt in the article ‘I Am Writing Blindly’ in the November 6th 2000 issue of Time magazine) was contemplating the dying message of Lieutenant Captain Dimitri Kolesnikov, written to his wife from the ruined hulk of the Russian submarine Kursk. The best way to regain some semblance of perspective is to relate events that can then be placed in a broader context that assists us to live with it, to make sense of it, to make its place in our lives a cohesive part of our life’s as yet unfinished narrative. It becomes part of our ‘truth’, and not simply some inexplicable contradiction that triggers no other response than despair.
Written by eldering at Learning
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Posted by congenial on January 05, 2008 at 10:40 PM EST #