Tiller Toward Trouble

Have you ever been driving on a highway or very wide boulevard and suddenly realized that you might miss your exit or turn because you are in the wrong lane? It evokes a complicated feeling of panic and adrenaline tinged with inevitability. If you try to go to fast, you’ll have an accident. If you keep going straight, you’ll be late. It’s a terrible feeling.

I’ve been feeling that way over the past week about something I don’t share too often: depression. Most writing about depression happens after the fact, and good writing about depression is able to elicit the same feelings of dread and despair that the author has felt. The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon is so hauntingly accurate that I found it hard to finish. Darkness Visible by William Styron provides a transformative level of insight into depression - from the other side of it, after.

What you don’t read about too often (as far as I know) is about what it feels like to approach depression. Many times, it’s hard to recognize when the feelings begin. They arrive before you know it, and you can’t express how you got there because you feel depressed. Let me try that again: I can’t express how I got there because I feel depressed.

For the past week, though, I’ve felt depression coming on like a seasonal allergy. The symptoms are slight but noticeable. A vague headache, passing sadness untethered from a thought or idea, an inability to appreciate a small success. But I’ve felt them as fleeting emotions, not the full blown depression I have experienced as a kind of brain flu. I can even pinpoint when the feelings started. Last week, Brook was away and the kids were both gone, and it dawned on me that this will be my new normal: being alone a lot, and not just during the workday or on sporadic occasions that I have appreciated in the past for the breathing room they gave me. My kids are moving on.

Over the next few days, I started noticing that I was having flashes of loneliness and anxiety and sadness in small doses and realized that these were the first signs of depression. It gave me a jolt, like I need to do something started coming into my mind. I was glad that I was getting this signal, and gladder still that I had some idea about what to do. I called a friend to take a walk. Then I called another one, and another one. I added some exercise classes to the calendar, and planned outings with my nieces that would be, at a minimum, time-consuming, and more likely enjoyable. I bought some food I like. I got some sleep. Mostly, I have tried to be very intentional about noticing my feelings and naming them before I spend an entire day lying on my bed playing Solitaire on my phone.

The title of this post, “tiller toward trouble” is a sailing phrase. The tiller is the horizontal bar attached to the rudder of the boat that you use for steering. To get away from a problem, you point the tiller at it, and the rudder will send you away from it. It’s a little paradoxical, and given my extreme challenges with direction, not even that easy for me to execute. But overall it’s good advice. Facing the problem paradoxically helps us steer away from it. I’m feeling better. If anyone else needs to go for a walk, give me a call.