In Search of Glimmers

Notes from inside my depression.

(Photo by Sara.)

I’ve been calling them glimmers. Moments in a dreary, flat day when I suddenly feel an impulse towards the possibility of joy.

It can be a phrase I’ve read. This happened just a little while ago, as I neared the end of a magnificent new book, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, by Zoë Schlanger. I think this was the phrase that got me:

A faithlessness in the public is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remove complexity, and the capacity for complexity degrades farther. I think people can be trusted to handle a complicated truth.

Why did I spark to that passage? In part it was because she had built up to it through the entire book. But also it gave me hope.

Earlier today, I had this thought to myself: I have lost hope. Let me hasten to add that this is definitely not true! I remain infinitely hopeful. Decades ago, suffering from the first deep depression that I’d been aware of, I went to a place where psychiatric nurses could evaluate you. They gave me a written test; I filled it out and handed it in. After a short wait, I went in to talk with one of the nurses, Connie. She was holding my test. She said, “Josh, this is the weirdest set of results we’ve ever gotten back. You got the highest possible score for being depressed, but also the highest score for being optimistic about the future.” This seemed paradoxical to her, but it made intuitive sense to me. I was in a bad place, but it had been wired into me that the world can be — will be — no, is — a good place, a loving place. Yes, not all of it. God, not all of it! But a loving goodness exists, is being practiced by many, perhaps even by most.

And I feel it around me. But not, lately, in me. In myself I perceive a blankness. Until, that is, I feel a glimmer — and then, sometimes (when it doesn’t immediately fade away), there is a quick cool little burst of up-ness somewhere around my heart, and then a wave shudders forward through me, impelling me to lean into life’s doings, towards engagement. And I’ll smile. Or I’ll want to listen to some music. Or maybe I’ll have the urge to sit down and try to write a post to you!

It’s grim to have in mind, even as I’m feeling a bit better right now, that I will soon re-descend. Of course I don’t know that for a fact, but it’s very likely. These glimmers have been lasting for a few hours, generally. A few times they’ve disappeared after I’ve gone to bed for the night: I wake up the next day and — oh no, it’s here again. The dimness. The vagueness. The almost seductive desire to curl up and retreat from the world, to be hidden.

It’s particularly vexing that the person I’m most hidden from is myself. Others seem to see me as me. But the being I feel myself to inhabit is a stranger. No, that’s not right: he’s deeply familiar to me. It is (perhaps) my shadow self, who has always tagged along, but has only rarely been visible. So where is the version of me who virtually always feels a forward impulse (though to be sure, I have, through procrastination, tended to exist in a kind of teasing dance with that impulse)? For this period of time, that person is unavailable to me. I’m waiting for him. Waiting.

And when I can, I try to summon him as well. Sometimes I do this by getting up out of bed, sometimes by reading. Sometimes by looking around me.

From our living-room armchair, where I tend to do my reading, I can turn a bit and look out the window. There are trees there. Forgive me, but I don’t have any idea what kind of trees they are! But they are beautiful. They sway. They shiver. Birds and squirrels alight, scamper, speed away. One thing that reading that book has released me into is the acceptance that those trees can be in dialogue with me. I never before totally understood — or maybe I mean accepted — Martin Buber’s assertion that if I’m sitting by a tree, the tree and I can be in an I-Thou relationship with each other. But I have found myself, at some moments, making the effort to connect with those trees, to try to imagine tree-ness for myself. Perhaps in the past I ruled out such a connection because I assumed that the trees wouldn’t, or couldn’t, reciprocate. Now, in some possibly slightly embarrassing manner, I think that either (a) it doesn’t matter or (b) that reciprocation is actually happening, only in ways that I didn’t sense or was closed off to.

Question: Can depression lead to animism? And if so, might it be possible to preserve at least some vestiges of that animism even after the depression is over?

One of the most hopeful things I can, well, hope for is that, through the experience of this depression, I can discover something about myself — about my relationship to the world. Are there hints towards that in these words?

Sometimes people have asked me: Does it feel lonely up there on stage, doing a solo show? I tell them, truthfully, that I am least lonely when I’m with audiences; indeed, I face them the entire time! Now I am doing this blogging thing, and I can tell you: this, too, is a dialogue. Even as you’re reading it. I and Thou. I feel so much less lonely. Thank you!