Category: Mental Illness

Oh, To Be A British Alpine Goat (my anecdotal apology for disappearance)

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

To the stakeholders (followers), curiously cautious pundits of search engines (visitors), and serendipitous Internet bumblebee’s (alighting upon blossoming websites) please accept my apology for my absence from this blog and, consequently, the lack of freshly baked posts.

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I know that my apology may be a bit unusual and absolutely unnecessary; however, I favor civility and honest contrition when one, quite benignly, overlooks a deadline for regrets.  Dignity and grace insist that a personal note (posted that day) asking for benevolence regarding the delinquency of my response; I regretfully decline their gracious invitation to which they respond (for themselves and the blogosphere-at-large) their disappointment and a standing invitation to return to the blogosphere lest I find myself hopelessly self-sequestered from the rest of the world.

As a rule rarely discussed, Writer’s digest life like British Alpine goats level a pasture.  But goats aren’t expected to till and reseed the pasture they’d recently leveled.  Goats have no relation to the past.  It’s “full speed ahead!” As they mow their way about the emerald green pastures of the lowlands!  Goats are enlightened as they don’t drag hundreds of yesterdays when they move from pasture to pasture.  Contented goats just chew and chew and chew.agrazinggoat2

Writers, on the other hand, focus on the recollection of their past, harvest the past of others, or imagine the past of a fictional character whose past is a combination of the amalgamation of the writers past, the “blood draw” of recalled confessing invitees to dinner parties or the stealthy concern of other’s problems.  Writers live in the past because it is a plump menagerie of recollection; an account from which to draw and deposit; a cistern which never falls beneath the water line of suffering.  To hell with future!  The suffered past of unaware donors is where the writer lives.  Suffering attracts readers like moths to a light.

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Percolating Happiness

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 2 Comments

 

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What is Happiness?

Are we aware of its presence or absence?

Is it organic?  Meaning it percolates within us, bubbling to the surface, and expressed through facial expression?  Or is it environmental?  Meaning it is outside of us, an experience we find pleasing and therefore are happy?

Is Happiness found in things?  The greater the thing, the greater the Happiness.  Where can Happiness be found?

Many great thinkers hypothesize that Happiness is an emotional state.

From 1958-2008 I’d always had a fairly good idea of what would/could/should make/keep/prolong my idea of Happiness.ahappy1

And yet its achievement was surely impossible: my Happiness hung inches out of reach like that carrot on a stick, the absence of it’s possession was goading, taunting, irritating; what was at first a quest for joy, soon curdled, and its promise soured.

The greek philosopher Epicurus emphasized that Happiness meant being untroubled and absent of pain.

Aristotle, the father of modern drama said of Happiness, “Happiness depends upon ourselves.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer “The two enemies of human Happiness are pain and boredom.”  He also said that humans have high expectations.  Man should lower his expectations and remember to aim low.”

If Schopenhauer is correct, then depression is percolating cup after cup of Happiness!    ahappy3

 

 

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A Patient Physician Waits For My Question . . .

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 2 Comments

Will this Failure affect my . . .  Durability?

In a broad sense, of course.  I mean, who can possibly predict someone’s . . . permanence, so to speak . . . not that death is, in any way, humorous, but if we did know, one could make plans . . . which is when I trailed off, consciously fleeing The Doctor’s adying1despairing and melancholic answer which, upon delivery, affirmed my inkling and, at first, felt promising, that is until the import of his answer felt as heavy as a saturated woolen coat.

My disquieting understanding was followed by remorse and the physician‘s shifting of weight left right left right; my attention lost to the ticker-tape listing of buoyant memories; then, hailing from afar like a sea boat captain, a nervous cough interrupts my avoidance with sharp and determined finger-snaps by a now brusque and tidy physician whose demeanor is demanding (disguised as cheerful support) takes the tone of an impatient boss, Is There Anything else, then?

adying4That’s when we resumed our assigned roles of patient and doctor.  Long gone was the arm-across-the-back-and-onto-the -other-shoulder fatherly imitation of empathy.  Tucking his humanity neatly in a breast pocket below his blue-stitched name and title like first graders whose names are also stitched but for opposite reasons: The Doctor: To tell you who he is and his department (lest you wonder): And first graders: To remind themselves who they are and what they wore.

Upon empathy’s discharge, a muddy silence quickly appeared swallowing the Doctor and I and filling the tiny room with despair, melancholy, and a dreadful load of confusion.  It reminded me of a time long ago when a generic teen-age girl gave me the sign to try for home, only to be quickly slapped by my host causing my retreat and a kind-of cease-fire and the same shameful silence which the Doctor cast by answering my foolish question:even though I was all-too-aware of the penalty, I asked the question with the same tentative, cautionary, and deliberate way that I behaved with that tart.  And coincidently the responses were eerily similar: the tart with a sharp slap and immediate rejection, and the Doctor with a representational slap and unsettling honesty saying It’s got the moxie, it’s got fervor and doggedness. It’s very rare to be strong and efficient; even rarer still to be too strong and to be too efficient.

His foot steps down the hall seemed to whisper apologies until he turned and they both disappeared.  And there I was, alone, all alone, all-by-myself alone except for the damned answer, of which I’d had some degree of premonition.  But hearing it in your head isn’t official thereby maintaining a small degree of hope.  And then I asked and then he answered and then neither one of us would ever be the same.adying2

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One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

adepressedgal

A few weeks ago I was incapable of simply managing daily routines such as bathing; I couldn’t process dual stimuli so if I was brushing my teeth and a faucet was turned on my attention went to the running water and my brushing slowed to a stop as though someone had killed the power. There was no conscious thought besides a gnawing, chewing darkness as though black velvet curtains had been suddenly drawn, shutting out the noonday sun. If I was present I was only present to the fact that I had, almost immediately fallen down a deep tunnel of which there was no light and no escape and no orientation. Or better, as though I had been swallowed by the immediate mud-slide of my life and in complete darkness and suffocation I simply held on to the one hope that maybe my prescription would act as a breathing tube offering me much needed oxygen as Nick, my psychiatrist and friends and family kept begging for me to hold on as help was on the way.

Two days ago I traveled north to Milwaukee to spend a couple of days with my older brother. We sat for nine hours the first day and six hours the next simply talking. Well, I talked and in a profound gesture of brotherhood generosity he listened interjecting sparingly opinions. It was an exhaasadguyusting experience met with fatigue, resistance and weeping, but I plowed through years of illumination, insights and epiphanies. It was the first time that I was able to track the experiences as they evolved much like tracking a lion or bear by using their footprints in a densely green forest. It was the first time that I was able to collect and sort, catch and dissect, speak and understand a monumental array of thoughts, failed expectations, compromises, distance and pain. My life for the past three years had been laid out before me like a table at Thanksgiving; every piece in its place awaiting their purpose.

Each day my energy has slowly begun to return and I grow stronger. I am still wobbly and use the assistance of a cane to walk; my gait is slow as I amble to the post-box or to the doctor; I often lean upon it when I tire or grab a hold of a fence or the arm of Nick.

But the most important, painful, and fool hardy admission was that I had erected my life cantilevered and precipitously atop a ravine simply adepressedman1for the view.  Then one evening a mud-slide swallowed me, my partner and his family, my career and others at work, my family and friends.   And now, standing at the base of change, the annihilation of my overlooked life, I now stand alone before this devastation, try to catch a glimpse of any familiar object in order to delay the inevitable: to once again try to salvage any pain my uncaged manic self inflicted

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The Brain Breakdown

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

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A psychiatrist offered this analogy:

Your brain is like a computer which has a fixed amount of memory.

When your brain is occupied trying to process depression there’s a fixed amount available to use to process other activities, say memory or long division.  Eventually, as you heal, more memory is made available to concentration or routines or interest in life or, in my case, facing the ashen landscape called life to which a debilitating, manic, and, calamitous event crippled my job, my family, and my spouse.

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