Hi Cody,
Thanks for sharing your experience with all of us. I wasn’t able to watch live, but I watched your webinar this morning. I have had my own journey with depression and anxiety, most of which I learned to manage by my 30s. Now 61 and recently widowed, having lost my mother and brother (just 63) in the last year as well, I find it is a lifetime project to learn to live with life and death.
One of the quotes you shared struck me especially. I can’t remember it exactly, but the gist was this, which is something akin to the sublime, I think: to be a living person with all the good and bad and feelings and anxieties and yet to die. There is something about any moment that is also about not being in that moment, and something about living that is also about the inevitable end of it at an unknown future time. This is both the curse and the blessing of consciousness. It’s " I think; therefore, I am" translated as “I live; therefore, I will eventually not.” Which leads to another of your quotations: “While I am alive, I will live.”
For me, translating my anxieties into curiosity is an extraordinarily helpful practice. It’s not denial of the anxiety, but it is about recognizing that most anxiety is about not knowing what’s next and simply continuing to live in order to find out. It’s also, to some extent, the feeling that lies behind the “what if I drove straight at that curve” thought process. It’s not a desire to do so, but rather a realization that we have the power to choose life every day. Having lived 43 years beyond my first thoughts of that nature, I know life has always been worth choosing, even when it just gets us closer to the inevitable.
I say that recognizing that when life cannot in any way be worth choosing, it will be more obvious to us than what we experience when we wonder about how to take that curve ahead. Any day or month or year when suffering from depression, anxiety, or a spiritual crisis about meaning and whether any of it is worth living through, the answer is always yes.
When it isn’t, it won’t come as a question. It will come as an incontrovertible fact of science and certainty. My wife had a blood cancer that was in remission, then came back, then seemed likely to be brought under control by a cutting edge treatment, which she wasn’t able to undergo because the cancer consumed her spine, paralyzed her, and became untreatable. She used Oregon’s DWD law to end it, knowing the day and time she would go. That’s certainty, time to second guess, and time to say “I’m going to the flip side now.”
In contrast, mental health challenges are not that. That is not to diminish the pain, desperation, and hopelessness they create. Things can feel unbearable. But they are always treatable. The only constant is change, they say, and that means the misery of a moment will not last forever. There’s always something to look forward to even when you cannot yet see it. Often, we only see it in the rear view mirror, saying, damn, I’m glad I stuck around for Japan. Can’t wait to go back. And there are more Japans ahead of us too, even when we can’t yet see them.
I hope it’s okay that I posted this response here. Moderators: feel free to delete if not. I am certainly not a mental health professional (an English teacher, actually), and I know that what I said here might not even speak to your experience or anyone else’s any better than what your webinar shared, but we all are living beings struggling with what that means, and it is absolutely true that the only way through life is with creativity as part of the process.
Your webinar has helped me think about the next year of my life as I continue to grieve my losses and look forward to retirement. I too know that I cannot continue to do what I have been doing for a living and live a full and fulfilling remainder of my life.
Thanks again for sharing,
ML
