Category Archives: Mental Health

Starting A New Blog

I finally took the plunge yesterday and started a new blog dedicated entirely to perspectives on depression and other mental disorders from a Christian perspective. Hopefully, this will allow me to use this space for other subjects, such as parenting or editorializing or just messing around. Check out the new blog at http://depressionlighthouse.wordpress.com/. Thanks!

Perfection

About two weeks ago, one of my daughters and my two sons began mentioning this idea of theirs to open a restaurant. Now, given the fact that this particular daughter is 9 years old and her brothers only 7 and 4, I was naturally curious as to how this plan would proceed. Apparently, this was to be a roadside restaurant, sort of in a lemonade-stand design: People would drive by, see the sign, and then, hopefully, stop and order something.

Just to give you a mental picture of the “town” we live in, it’s called Coldwater. Doesn’t exactly imply a thriving metropolis, does it? Also, considering we actually live approximately a mile off the nearest main highway, the likelihood of much traffic in our neck of the woods is fairly slim. The enthusiasm was so high between the three of them, though, I decided my best course of response to whatever they told me they were going to do would be to smile and nod affirmatively, as long as it didn’t have anything to do with power tools, the killing of animals, or a start-up cash loan.

Of course, the 4-year-old lost attention fairly quickly once the other two actually began to actually hammer bits of wood together for signs, but the other two stuck with it. Soon, I came home to discover, sitting in the yard, a couple of kids’ lawn chairs, a wooden pallet, some assorted cinder blocks, and painted wooden signs advertising the new establishment. Granted, they still hadn’t solved the dilemma of not having any actual food for their restaurant, but problems of this nature are relatively minor to aspiring elementary school-aged entrepreneurs.

No one actually stopped at the new roadside attraction the first day, but I was told there were some curious looks and plenty of smiles from those who drove by. They were proud of their work, and I was proud of them for putting the time in, even if I knew there wasn’t much way they could succeed. That night, as the sun was setting and my daughter and I were heading inside, I noticed one of the signs had a strange word written on it – skare – so I asked her what it meant.

“Oh, that says ‘Come On In To The Old-Time Square.'”DSCN1201

“Oh, okay. Um…”

“Did I get a word wrong?”

“Um, yeah. That’s not how you spell square.”

“How do you spell it?”

“S-q-u-a-r-e.”

“Well, what did I spell?”

“I guess you would pronounce that scare.”

And then, my daughter laughed, said, “Oh, well,” and went on inside our house.

I just stood there, dumbfounded. Even at 9 years old, I would have been absolutely mortified if someone had pointed out one of my mistakes like that. I would have been completely distraught at the fact that people had driven by all day looking at it. And I would have worked until the daylight was gone trying to fix what I had done wrong.

And my daughter just said, “Oh, well…“, and didn’t give it another thought.

Now, this particular incident has caused me to reach two very distinct and different possible conclusions: Either I have taught my daughter that it is okay to make a mistake and that she needn’t beat herself up if she gets something wrong or I have not taught my daughter to strive for perfection and she does not care enough about doing a good job. The former of these, I can live with; the latter … eh, not so much. In fact, that would be something I would want to rectify immediately.

Therein lies the rub, though, so to speak. I have struggled with perfectionism for as long as I can remember, and I certainly don’t want my children to grow up afraid to try different things because they might get something wrong. On the other hand, by virtue of them being my children, I have a burning compulsion for them to be the best possible human beings they can be. So I don’t want them to settle for “Oh, well…“, but I also don’t want them belittling themselves constantly and killing their self esteem.

I suppose there is the possibility here that God is trying to teach me through my daughter to learn how to move on from mistakes and not worry so much. I also suppose the possibility exists that this is a wake-up call to me to teach and preach a better work ethic to my children. The actual answer probably lies somewhere in between, and, unfortunately, finding it will be a largely imperfect process.

Oh, well…

The Fine Art Of Not Caring

I have had three rather significant occurrences shape my life over the past couple of years. The first was my decision to enter counseling for my depression, accompanied by the decision to give antidepressants another try. The second was learning my baby daughter was going to have to undergo open heart surgery before her first birthday and then walking through that process. And the third was turning 40 earlier this month.

don-t-care--sourceI’ve never been a person who could just shrug things off. I might have said, “Eh, it’s not bothering me,” but I can tell you that nine times out of ten whatever it was definitely was bothering me. A lot. Relationships. Striking out in a baseball game. Having to get my car worked on. Workplace disagreements. Being too shy to talk to people. Seeing a C on my report card. Hitting a ball long playing tennis. Prayers that I didn’t think were answered…

Actually, it might just be easier to say everything bothered me.

These days, I am certainly not immune to caring too much about trivial matters. For example, a horrible night on the lanes at the local bowling alley this past October nearly ruined my wife and I’s night out for a friend’s 40th birthday party. I do seem to be mellowing out considerably, though, almost to the point of wondering if I’m getting a little too relaxed about things. I’m moving on from regrets, conflicts, and hesitations quicker than I did before, and I keep asking myself, “Is this a good thing?”.

Here’s what those three circumstances I described in the first paragraph did for me. Depression counseling helped me learn to prioritize situations and stop worrying so much, and the medication (presumably, at least) seems to leveling out my highs and lows. Turning 40 made me face up to the fact that time is not something to be wasted, and dwelling on things for too long slows you down and stunts your growth. And, well, once you’ve seen a drainage tube stuck up in your infant daughter’s chest, life’s annoyances don’t seem all that terrible anymore.

This is where the slippery slope lies, however. How does one stop caring enough to relax and live a balanced life without going over the edge of total ambivalence about everything? I went the medication route years ago without counseling to accompany it, and I nearly lost my focus altogether. Right now, I’m enjoying the peace of being able to just let things go, but I catch myself wondering if maybe I should care just a little bit more about some things. I think that’s a positive thought, though, because if I didn’t care at all, I wouldn’t be caring that maybe I didn’t care enough … right?

Sometimes I want to go all Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, where I’m staring down the loaded gun of a situation but I’m so The-Fugitive_7878_19focused on what I’m doing I can throw up my hands and say, “I don’t care.”. As awesome as that would be, though, everyone knows Deputy Samuel Gerard really did care about what Dr. Richard Kimble might or might not have done. It’s a fine line to walk between caring and not caring. I just wish I could look that cool doing it.

Raison D’être

I was a tumor … or so I’ve been told.

A chance meeting with one of my neighbors today revealed this to me. He knew my dad when I was born, and that’s what my dad had told him when my mom was taken to the hospital the night of my birth. See, my parents didn’t know I was coming, and not in the sense that I was born ahead of my due date.

They didn’t even know my mom was pregnant.

There were circumstances that made this not so difficult to believe at the time, but the fact remains I went through the entire Reason for Existencepregnancy without anyone checking on how I was actually doing in there. In my lighter-hearted moments, I joke that this explains why I’m so screwed up in the head now, but the truth is I’m amazed by the whole story. Granted, probably not as amazed as my parents 40 years ago, as my neighbor told me he received a call from my dad that night that began with the words, “You’re not going to believe this…”.

I called the meeting today a chance one, but the more I think about it I’m not so sure. I’ve known that story for a long time (Well, not the tumor part. That was new.), and I’ve learned to embrace it in times of struggle. I’ve had so many days of feeling lost or inadequate or just plain embarrassed to be here that I’ve thought on more than one occasion that I had to be some sort of mistake. If that were true, though, how do I account for the miraculous way I wound up here in the first place?

So in my frustration today, I decided to go for a walk. A little ways up the road, I ran into a neighbor, and he told me I was a tumor. And I was glad he did.

Happy To Be Here

For a while there, I wasn’t sure I was going to be around for this.

There wasn’t anything wrong with me … at least, not physically, anyway. No chronic diseases, no recurring health scares, no rotating list of prescriptions. I wasn’t courting some kind of death wish, either. No repelling off mountain sides, no canoeing down turbulent waters, no bungee jumping from bridges. And even though I had battled depression for the better part of my life, I wasn’t plotting my untimely demise. Things never reached that level, thank God.

I just had this feeling, though, that maybe I wasn’t going to make it to 40. I have no rational explanation for this. I know in the past few years I have put tremendous pressure on myself to achieve certain things before I reached that dreaded age. I basically kept a running checklist in my mind, and not many items were being crossed off as time went on. I felt more and more like a failure. So, instead of saying I wasn’t sure I would make it to 40, maybe it would be more accurate to say I didn’t want to make it there.

Today, however, I am 40 years old, and an amazing thing has happened: Life has continued to go on. Not only am I still here, I’mlife begins pretty happy to be so. My list is still in shambles, and there are days when I feel totally aimless and desperate for direction. That cutoff date I had established in my mind, though, doesn’t mean a thing today. Much to my surprise, I’m feeling fairly optimistic, even though this past week has left my scratching my head as to what the future may hold.

So what changed? Well, lots of things. I took a look around and realized there are many people who don’t “make it” in their younger years, and a large majority of them don’t care if they’re the old codgers on the block. I noticed I’m still in (relatively) good shape and good health. I got some help for the depression that had dogged me for so long, and I began to think about things differently. I finally began to see the truth in the Bible telling me that “all things work together for good,” even the things I don’t understand.

At the risk of sounding schmaltzy, I want to share one more very important thing I’ve realized: I have been blessed with some really great friends over the course of these last 40 years. Some of you I see a lot, some of you not so often. Some of you I haven’t seen anywhere other than social media for over 20 years. Whatever the case may be, every one of you who have been a part of my life are still very special to me. I love you all, and even in written form, it takes a lot for me to express that in words.

Here’s to 40, then. I’m glad I’m here for this, and I’m glad you’re here, too. Hopefully, we’ll all be around for 40 more.

Too Much

too-much-mailI remember several years ago having a talk with my supervisor at the time about mail. Specifically, we were talking about the sheer volume of mail he received every day, and he said something I don’t think I’ll ever forget: “We get so much stuff, I just get overwhelmed with it. I’m sure there have been good things that I’ve thrown away, but it’s just too much to keep up with.”

I’ve thought about those words often as the world keeps changing to bring us better and better access to nearly everything imaginable. There’s just simply too much stuff out there to take in. It flies at us from every direction every minute of every day. From our televisions, from our computers, from our cell phones, from our radios. We can’t even blame the professionals anymore. Suddenly, it seems everyone is capable of producing anything they put their minds to – albums, books, apps, podcasts, websites, movies, videos. You name it, we got it.

overloadIt’s just too much. Links to links to links to links to links. Independent music websites. Independent book publishers. YouTube. Hulu. Web series. Daily podcasts of programs that have already aired somewhere else. Spotify. Pandora. Online sites for newspapers and magazines you might have missed. Reviews of reviews of reviews. And the blogs. Blogs and blogs and blogs and blogs…

A lot of you reading this have been kind enough to follow this blog. I can’t thank you enough for that. Every follow notification I get is a tremendous encouragement to me, and lets me know I actually have something worthwhile to say. In all honesty, though, I’m not reading your blogs. I’ve looked at some of them, and they’re very nice, but there’s only so much information I can stuff into my tiny brain in one day.

So I’ve begun to cut some things out. For instance, if you post a video to your Facebook or Twitter feed that is “amazing,” “unbelievable,” “touching,” or “astounding,” I will more than likely not watch that video, since 99 percent of those videos I have watched are neither “amazing,” “unbelievable,” “touching,” or “astounding.” If an article is billed as “mind-blowing,” I’m skipping over it. If a video is “must-see,” it ain’t gettin’ watched by me. If an album doesn’t have at least one fast song on it, it will not be getting added to my collection. And so on and so forth…

I fully realize I could be missing some truly great stuff this way. Then again, I could be missing some truly great stuff by focusing on all these other things, too. Either way, I just can’t take it all in. And, in an odd way, having this many options has actually caused me to limit my horizons in some areas. Take music, for instance. With options like my iPod, Pandora, and Spotify, I can tailor the music I listen to into whatever categories I choose, which means I can basically not try anything new or out of the ordinary if I don’t want to.

I didn’t think this was a problem until I thought back one day to all the music I listened to in high school. Now, I’m more of a hard bobby brownrock/borderline metal kind of guy with bits of Americana mixed in, but back then I also thought Bobby Brown, LL Cool J, Young MC, and Enigma were pretty cool, too. And as poorly as some of that music has held up, it broadened my sense of rhythm and wordplay and electronic music. But I heard it all in the natural flow of life – radio, friends’ cars, sporting events. It was just there; it just happened.

It’s hard to believe I actually feel this way. I mean, a world of infinite possibilities should be awesome, right? I should be more knowledgeable than ever, able to snap off information in the blink of an eye. Instead, I read a really wonderful and insightful article the other day on the relationship between teenagers and social media, and now I can’t remember the name of the book it featured, the author of the book, or the website I saw the article on. Whatever I got from it is crammed into all the other bits of data I’m consuming nearly constantly.

So consider this my apology for missing out on all the wonderful work some of you may be doing. Maybe one day I’ll give you the attention you so richly deserve. In the meantime, I’ll just be over here sorting through the day’s mail and trying to decide what I should keep and what I should get rid of. The trash can is looking pretty full already…

 

The Toolbox

Want to see me really lose my cool? Tell me to do something and then give me neither the materials necessary to complete the task nor the instructions for how to do it correctly. Whenever this happens, not just anger, but an entire wave of emotions sweep over me – embarrassment, confusion, shame, fear, inadequacy, resentment, anxiety. You know, basically all the emotions of a 6-year-old who’s just been asked to take out the garbage for the first time.

Put me in a situation where I know what to do and am able to execute and succeed, though, and I’m one of the happiest people you’ll ever see. It’s like finding yourself in need of performing some type of repair and suddenly realizing you have a toolbox with exactly the right tool for the job at your disposal.

I am a “how-to” kind of person. No, I don’t mean I enjoy watching countless hours of This Old House (That would be my wife.) or house2tooling around in a shop behind my house. I need to know the process of how things work. For example, let’s say someone told me to paint my living room (I’ve painted before, but I couldn’t think of another example.). I wouldn’t just go out and buy some paint and go to town. I’d want someone to either show or tell me the right way to do it and then emulate their example as closely as I could. I’d want to access what I know and apply it.

For years and years, I had no idea what to do with the feelings of depression and anxiousness that seemed to hover over me. I wanted to fix them, but I didn’t know how. I had a lot of well-meaning folks along the way offer me sound (and not-so-sound) advice, but I could never figure out the process, you know? “Think more positively.” Okay, but how do I do that? What steps do I go through? What tools do I need to complete the job?

I’ve mentioned counseling and cognitive therapy here before, and I’m entering into a season where I’m not going to be relying on that so much anymore. Being kicked out of the nest, so to speak. I’ve spent a great amount of time discussing and dissecting how exactly to get my brain to jump from one track to the other, and a funny thing happened along the way: I found out some of the things we talked about actually worked. There actually was a process I could follow … and that’s what I have to do now.

And so begins another chapter in this blog and in this life, where I try to sort all this out. I’m a little nervous and afraid, and I may even wind up in another therapy session or two one of these days. For now, though, I’ve got some tools in the toolbox … and I’m ready to go to work.

Sick Of Ourselves

Well, it finally happened last week: I became a narcissist.

I’m not sure if it happened all at once or just gradually crept in over time. I’ve never thought of myself as a self-occupied kind of narcissismperson. As I sat at my keyboard last Monday night, though, I realized I was three-quarters of the way into a blog post that had no real reason to exist other than to get people to visit the site you’re on right now (Isn’t it ironic? Don’t ya think?).

I wanted to think I was just following up a post I thought was pretty good from the day before (which can be found here, wink, wink). You know, generating traffic, building readership, providing enlightenment for the masses, etc., etc. After struggling through a few paragraphs, though, it became clear to me I was uncovering another uncomfortable truth about myself…

I really, really want you to like me.

When I first hopped on the Facebook bandwagon a few years ago, I was racking up “friends” like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, if you and I had even exchanged glances at the local Walmart, you were getting a request to add me. Even before the days of social media, though, I craved the praise of others. The internet has just sped up my journey toward being completely self-absorbed.

I’m making some of these statements tongue-in-cheek, but there is an element of truth to them as well. I’ve noticed lately I’ve been keeping a closer eye on my “likes” and checking in on the WordPress dashboard every morning to see how tall those little blue bars are. I still don’t get Twitter, but I always get a good feeling when someone acknowledges one of my tweets somehow. Sometimes it’s as if I’m building my own little cult of personality … and that is not a good thing.

I’ve noticed something else lately, too: Many of my social media friends seem to be posting less and less these days. They’re not talking so much about how they went to the grocery store or taking so many pictures of the food they’re eating or shouting as much about political matters. This kind of made me sad for a while, but then it hit me that maybe they all were starting to feel the same way I did Monday night. Maybe we were all getting tired of talking about ourselves.

So my lesson learned here is there is a fine line between self-promotion and just blatantly grabbing for attention. I dislike the idea of this space becoming my barometer for how popular I am or how well I write. I want to contribute something or help someone or make people think about things in a different way. That might sound too lofty for a little ol’ blog on the internet, but it’s the truth. Positive affirmation is great, but it doesn’t need to be the sole goal.

If you’d like to comment on any of this, though, I’m sure I’ll be checking WordPress every few minutes or so today to see how many views this post has gotten. At least I’ll be able to respond to you fairly quickly…

Miserable States

Before I get too far into this, let me just say I believe the eventual abolition of slavery in the United States was the greatest of all the outcomes spiraling out of the Civil War. As someone born and raised in the South, I will be the first to admit my part of the country held onto something that was clearly wrong for far too long (Although there were slave owners in the North, too. I think people forget that sometimes…). The efforts of the Union are to be commended for what they accomplished.

All that being said, the older I get, the more I tend to think that was only one factor that splintered the nation for a time. Without attempting to go into a full historical breakdown (which I’d probably get wrong anyway), I believe the Civil War had as much to do with the southern states feeling disrespected by those in the north as it did with slavery and abolition. The issue of states’ rights was a huge deal in the South leading up to the war, and still today many of the battles between what the federal government wants and what the states feel they should control are centered in the southern portion of the U.S.

I guess maybe I feel this way because I notice my feathers getting ruffled whenever I perceive someone not from the South (and I’m including the western part of the country in that statement, too) portraying the people where I live as somehow beneath the people where they live. Consider this gem I discovered from a discussion posted in Yahoo Answers back in 2008 about why the South is so conservative: “So many southerners are extremely conservative, which doesn’t have much do with Christianity as much as deep-rooted racism and a wish for things to return how to how it was in the ‘good old days’ (who they were good for, I have yet to learn).”

Far too often, the South is portrayed as racist, uneducated, bigoted, unwilling to change, stuck in “the good old days” that actuallykentucky weren’t very good for anyone. In my opinion, that line of thinking is extremely evident whenever I see a list of the supposedly “most depressed states” in the U.S. Almost without fail, a majority of the states on the list will be located in the South. I live in Kentucky, and my state is always in the top ten on every list. One I saw recently had us at number 2, to which I jokingly commented, “Crap, can’t we finish first in anything? Life sucks.”

Inevitably, the reasons for states winding up on these lists come down to the same things. High unemployment, lack of quality jobs, poor education systems, inadequate health insurance, etc., etc. One list mentioned Oklahoma because it was (and I am not making this up) “highly prone to severe weather.” Not saying the threat of a tornado wouldn’t dampen my spirits, but really?

Of course, the other conspicuous thing about these lists is the virtual absence of any northern states. New York? Vermont? Massachusetts? Apparently, these are the places to be, since I don’t ever see them mentioned. Could it be because the jobs are so much better or because the education is superior or because healthcare is not as much of a problem? Maybe. But is it really because there are fewer depressed people in the North than in the South?

Unfortunately, I am almost certain there are no numbers out there that will give me an answer to that question. I’m just going to hazard a guess, though, and say no. As anyone who has ever dealt with any kind of depression can attest, there are any number of factors which can set it off. It’s not just finances or station in life. There’s divorce. There’s loss of purpose. There’s alcohol and/or drug addiction. There’s seemingly reaching your goals and then finding they don’t fulfill you as much as you thought they would. Are these factors exclusive to the South?

All these years later, and the North and the South still don’t seem to understand each other. Depression isn’t about your quality of life or how much money you make or how bright the lights in your city are. It’s about your inability to find hope or happiness in the everyday things in life, and how that inability gradually sucks you into the abyss. Can an Appalachian coal miner in a one-room shack be happy scratching out a living for his family? Maybe if his children bring him joy. If he loves his wife. If he feels blessed to have a roof over his head and food on his table. Maybe…

Don’t worry, southerners. This is not something we need to go to war over. The real enemy here isn’t the North. Hopefully, though, they can wake up and realize the same.