To Live is to Err (Maybe)

Recovery is an up and down process. Coming to terms with this deeply unfair fact is an equally volatile process. Learning to live with my depression and recurrent suicidality brings to mind the words of Piet Hein:

The road to wisdom?

-- Well, it's plain

and simple to express:

Err

and err

and err again

but less

and less

and less.”

In twenty years of living with depression and surviving multiple suicide attempts, I’ve gained a great deal of wisdom. I err less in committing the behaviors that detract from my mental health. I add tools to my daily routine that enhance my mind and enrich my life. I’ve learned so much that falling back into the dark caverns of my mind has me feeling like a failure and a fraud.

One of my therapists suggested that returning to writing in my current state may be beneficial both to me and my readers precisely because I’m writing while recovering. Once I decided that writing articles again would be therapeutic and not just self-serving, I felt the familiar desire to put my fingers on keys again. So here I sit. In sweatpants and a hoodie, trying to accept that I’m in a state of recovery for the umpteenth time. Fate, it seems, never tires of spinning her wheel, and while I did everything and then some to keep myself out of the hospital, I still found myself there for almost two weeks in October.

I wrote “Pressing Pause on Writing” on 11/6 because I didn’t want my readers to worry about me while I went radio-silent for a while. Now I’m returning earlier than I expected because I need this. I write and I feel better, and I need all the feeling-good things in my life right now.

I’ve written before that my depression gets a vote. That even with all the mindsets and behaviors I engage in, I can still be dragged to the ground and pummeled with body blows by it. That happened about three weeks ago. I feel like I erred. Like I screwed up somehow. I felt fantastic (perhaps too fantastic and I’ll get to that in a future post), and now that I’m slogging up from a depression I cannot help but see all the negatives. Especially the negatives I see in me.

I’m currently a part of a research study through Yale university that is looking into the long-term effects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Ketamine treatments on patients. I was fortunate to be entered into the CBT group and I now have six months of CBT therapy ahead of me where I’ll be practicing a great deal of cognitive reframing. Of moving from seeing things negatively to seeing them positively.

Here’s the rub: I feel fraudulent to all of you. I’ve written so much about what I’ve gone through and overcome, but I was really, really hoping that I wouldn’t find myself in the hospital once more. That I wouldn’t be struggling so forcefully against the clutches of my diseased mind. I honestly thought I had gotten past the worst, but I am learning that even with a steady recovery, the ground can completely collapse beneath me. While I know this is a distorted thought, the feeling of being a fraud is strong. I know that my chronicling of my mental health journey works because I don’t sugarcoat the difficult stuff, and I won’t start now.

I have a plan with my therapist for the next several weeks. I’ll explain some of that plan here, and my hope is that you, dear reader, will pull something useful out of what I write. Because as much as all the self-therapy does help, I’ve found that putting my struggles out into the world somehow makes things much more bearable.