I’m Depressed

I’m depressed. You heard me. I’m depressed and I want to share it. I’m lucky I have the ability to write.

What? You say you would never have guessed? I seem like such an optimistic upbeat person? I am. The two are not mutually exclusive, and they don’t occur in my brain/body/mind at the same time. Rather, they seem to alternate. Everything seems fine for a while, and then something happens.

I’ve been this way all my life. When I was younger, my depression often masqueraded as anger (I was a bitch as a CEO) or anxiety (I had my first panic attack at age 18 in a college classroom.   When I felt like I couldn’t breathe and my heart started to pound, I raced out of the room thinking I was going to die and went to the school clinic.

In graduate school, after my father died, I knew I couldn’t get through my grief without therapy. You see, I realized the recurring nightmare of my youth, that my father would die, had actually come to pass. You can imagine how weirded out I was by that! While I never had that nightmare again, his passing didn’t resolve my anxiety.

In business, anxiety drove me to succeed.People found me intimidating because I was so harsh. Well into my fifties, I still thought there was a chance I’d starve. At that time, I had already been in business for almost two decades, and had almost singlehandedly sent two kids to expensive colleges without loans or savings: I did it out of sheer cash flow.

You can see my anxiety wasn’t very realistic.

By the time  Intel acquired us and I became a corporate shill for a year, my doctor husband had put me on anti-depressants. It’s a good thing, because he died during the year I was at Intel.

This time, I realized my depression was grief. It was situational. It was permissible. That didn’t make it feel any better than the anxiety did.

Shortly after his death, I began studying yoga, where I discovered that the source of most of my issues was attachment to outcomes: the idea that things should be permanent in a changing world. I also learned that my anger was really depression, and my anxiety was also part of my depression. For the past fifteen years, I’ve been trying to deal with the fact that all things die, including me.

In 2008, some of my financial security died. In 2009 I took a trip to India, where an Ayurvedic doctor reminded me that I had lost nothing but expectations. I was still far from starving.

In 2010, my golden retriever, age 8, suddenly dropped dead after barking at the mailman. I got another dog, the redoubtable Sammy. In 2012, my long-time best friend died unexpectedly and perhaps unnecessarily. I’ve made new friends.

I’m learning the lesson of impermanence over and over again.

Over the summer, a wonderful, cheerful friend of mine was admitted to the hospital. He’s still not out. I couldn’t even visit him until this weekend. I had already started mourning.When I finally was allowed to go to his room, I was stunned by how weak he looked.  I left thinking there was little chance he would ever leave the hospital.

But yesterday, I went back and there he was, sitting up in bed, cracking jokes, wearing his glasses and asking me about my trip to Vietnam. Once again, the world has tried to teach me not to attach myself to expectations and outcomes.

Here’s the deal. Like everyone else, I’m going to die. All the stuff I wrote about above? At bottom, it’s really about me. And, as Ram Dass reminds all of us, “Be Here Now.” I’m still here.