Yesterday was an off day from start to finish.  It started with being knocked off center by some shocking school reports about my little son’s function (more on that another time) and it ended with a truck door doing significant damage to my car.  The weirdest part was that I had a feeling I should not go near that truck, but I did anyway. I had no clue someone was in it, but I had had the feeling to stop and wait for some reason.

No one was hurt (little guy was in the back) and I knew I was in the right, so I was not sweating any of it but I will have to spend a good part of today dealing with police, insurance companies and the rest.  I’d rather not.  But here’s the rub:  I am nagged by the curse of a New Age thinker/metaphysical believer.  What’s the message?  Is this a sign?  Was I supposed to learn something from this?

Sometimes it is just a pain in the butt to think that way.  Can’t it just be an accident?  They happen, you know!

I reminded of a good friend of mine who did musical theatre in New York City at the same time I did. Just like me, whenever she got sick before a big audition, she was sure it was some kind of self-sabotage. We both shared the habit of torturing ourselves by being convinced that we had brought on our plight by some deeply seated belief about our talent and desires.  (See the Laws of Attraction work had been around a LONG time before The Secret!) One day, a wise teacher of hers blurted out: “Sometimes it’s just a cold!”.

It hasn’t been twenty four hours yet since my fender bender so I am not going to declare anything other than my annoyance at the whole thing.  And I leave you (and myself) with a question. Does everything HAVE to have a meaning?

I am not depressed.  Right now.  I suffered one, huge, three-year clinical depression in my twenties which I wrote about in my new book and I’ve lived with mild, recurring depression ever since.  Except for the occassional need for a nap, it really does not stop me.  I manage it and usually, my  skill set is strong enough to thwart it before it can embed itself for any long haul. And truly, most of the time, I can follow my own best advice and have the purest outlook that does not even allow it to register as a possibility in my psyche or body.

What pains me most, however, is to see other people suffer with depression or to see that someone has the mental habits that set them up for a fall into the pit of the Big ‘D’.  In the medical community, depression does not register as an addiction, but when I see someone headed into ‘the pit’, it’s like watching someone with a drinking problem who doesn’t think they have one and whom you cannot get through to to warn them of their eminent downfall.  The mental rigidity that allows depression is a fortress of its own.  It does not want to hear that it can be threatened.  It does not want its walls to come down.  It is cemented and going to do its job.

I am not a doctor or psychologist, but from my point of view as someone who has disentangled themselves from the sticky web of deep depression and who encounters less than productive mental habits in coaching clients and has for almost twenty years, I can tell you that depression does not hit someone over night.  It’s been building ever so clandestinely in the form of a belief system about yourself or life in general.  That’s one way.  Certainly, there is the kind that comes from sudden trauma or tremendous loss.  After proper mourning and healing, those that bounce back do so because they have not made up their mind like a soldier’s bunk, tight and rigid.  They have refuted mental patterns and beliefs about oneself that keep the brain firing neurons down the same paths that suffered the trauma.  They recover when they can mentally  put their attention somewhere other than the pain, the event, the negative beliefs about what is happening and more.

Depression feels bad.  And when we feel bad, we don’t want to do anything.  But very important to getting out of the dark is moving toward the light.  Literally, moving is key.  Exercising, walking, dancing, stretching—anything that allows the body to start dictating to the mind instead of the other way around.

Depression requires focus.  It wants you to focus on it so it can keep growing like ‘the blob’ in old “B” movies and take you over.  What we focus on, we get, and depression is very good at getting you to focus on it.  Beating it back requires focusing elsewhere, even if it is only for a minute at a time.  Notice something else—something positive, something life-affirming.  Read something positive to start getting the mind to focus on something else.

Depression is often the derailment of your spirit.  It was hijacked by your psyche (or mind).  Your soul and the joy it holds want desperately to come through, but decisions and sometimes circumstances will hold it at bay.  It requires a bit of  surrender—not to lie down and let the blob get you, but to surrender to whatever you are trying to scare away—most likely you are resisting love or self-love.  You’ll need to surrender to your wholeness and surrender to the fact that you are a spark of divinity.  Surrender to the fact that you are loved even if you have or do NOTHING!!!!  If you can allow that truth to permeate your being and your brain cells, you will be on your way to pulling yourself out of the vortex of the dark side.

Forgiveness is a major factor in healing a depression.  Forgiving yourself is probably paramount.  Furthermore, forgiveness is a tremendous opportunity to reprogram your mind to feed you better fuel.  Fuel that will allow you to accept love and be loving towards yourself.  Any fuel that feeds your insecurities or negative self-talk has to be avoided.  Sometimes, the very people you hold most dear are the ones that echo your greatest fears.  Many of those relationships may need to be renegotiated.

It seems that without doing so consciously, I have written a quick prescription for healing depression.  That isn’t my intent.  It is simply to share something I know about. However, I speak only from my personal experience and observation and ask that you use what resonates with you but not consider it a proven remedy.  My ideas are only one way.  There are many more— medical and spiritual.

I care about this topic deeply.  I care about the end of suffering for all.

I have two kids visiting the neurologist now as bigger son had to be checked to rule out seizures. (Oh joy; oh rapture!) The result is he’s in the clear.  But it was the visit to the office itself that made for an interesting set of circumstances.

As the time rolled bye and we were waiting for results and paperwork in the waiting room, the office filled up (more and more) with very disabled children and young adults.  The range was from high level ADHD to cerebral palsy.  Wheel chairs, unprovoked hugs from neurologically challenged kids and a heightened sense that someone could dash into your personal space at any moment prevailed. I wasn’t taken aback by this but it was fascinating to watch my son’s face. He is self-aware enough not to stare or lose his composure in experiencing new ways that people can be.  But as his mother, I could ever so slightly see his brain working to figure out if he was susceptible to whatever made these new people different from him.

When he asked to wait outside with his dad, it was fine with me. I could tell he had questions to ask and needed his personal space back.  What I did not expect was that within a minute of my son leaving, I was swaying side to side shifting my weight from one leg to another as I tried to be patient and wait for my paperwork to be done.  It took me less than another minute to realize I was swaying at the same pace and rhythm as two other challenged patients in the room and a third was walking from another room to come join us.

It felt calming to sway.  It felt natural.  I wondered if we all really don’t just want to rock ourselves or sway but society has taught us to keep ourselves in check.  Babies love to be rocked after all.  People still rock a bereft friend or loved one no matter what their age. It’s one of the ways we soothe ourselves.  Someone invented a rocking chair for that very reason.   There’s something about that natural outer movement that brings order to our inner chaos.

I did stop myself once I caught what I was doing but only after a giggle of recognition and a sigh of gratitude for the respite.  I then left with my paperwork to meet my son at the curb outside.  It was strange though.  It was like walking out of a huge isolated bubble of safety into a different rhythm.  The one most of us are used to—the ‘real’ world.  The one we all conform to to get on with life.

Don’t get me wrong. I would not trade places with any of those kids but for a minute, their presence and the sharing of their rhythm help me appreciate that we all need time to just ‘go there’ every now and then.  To find our own natural rhythm, like tuning an instrument to itself, is an important key to aligning ourselves so we can handle walking into the world.  Do you know your natural rhythm?  Do you allow yourself to go there?

Living with the implications of a miracle is very interesting.  We got freedom from Wyatt’s seizures in early February and got medical confirmation on March 12th and we have seen no signs of any since.  All FANTASTIC news.   But in Wyatt’s world something has changed.  Our usually happy and ever-patient boy is angry and unhappy a lot of the time.  He says he hates school and is showing little interest in friends.  He’d rather watch TV and be on the internet.  He only watches educational,  Pre-school material and he repeats it ad naseum.  I started to worry that autism was replacing our seizure disorder.

Just as I was ready to pick up the phone for another round of neuro-psych testing, Wyatt’s teacher asked me a good question.  Did TV used to bring on seizures?  Yes, was the answer.  She pointed out that he is doing what much younger kids do with  TV when they first get their eyes and minds on it and he lost 4 years of regular cognition.  He was really seeing it for the first time.  That struck me as a very accurate assessment.

He is also suffering over school work.  He cries every morning that he hates school.  He spent half his life experiencing his world in broken pieces of clarity and having clarity all day long now makes for too long a day for him. He is exhausted. He can’t take it.  He just wants to shut down and go into a daze. (hey, I can relate!)

We think we are just dealing with an adjustment stage and it is more difficult than anyone could have guessed.  His brain must be working sooooo hard.  He’s been reading and sounding out small things in the last several weeks and then yesterday he read an entire book with a fluency that knocked my socks off.  I won’t declare victory there yet but it was very, very promising.

Who would have ever guessed that the best thing we could have hoped for could be so hard for Wyatt to integrate?  The journey goes on…….

I’ll try not to be maudlin here, but as I was making lunches for my kids the other morning, it struck me like a laundry list of to-do’s how many ‘things’ I used to be.

 I used to be thin.

I used to sing.

I used to dance well.

I used to be pain-free.

I used to have thicker hair.

I used to be driven.

I used to be an athlete.

I used to have friends I saw on a whim.

I used to be able to stay up late and get up early.

I used to wear wacky clothes.

I used to be free to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.

(Sigh) A focus on loss is a sure way to bring on depression.  I could build up a good head of steam here into an explosion of sadness here but I won’t. I’m used to observing what sucks and then figuring out the cause of what sucks and working on it.  It helps to keep any significant depression at bay.  With that said, it did strike me that much of how I took stock of myself was gone and that not much of it was regainable.  (i.e. a twenty-something’s metabolism)   The last 9 or so years of child-rearing has been so busy and intense that I did not really notice how much was going away.  It just hit me at once the other day.

 I used to think I’d never get old.

The truth is that many of the things on the list I could get back but don’t have the desire to focus on and retrieve.  I’ve moved on from a lot of it.  Others on the list, I am working on and others still are just nostalgic memories.  The list of what is true now, in the presen,t is bigger and very rich.  It’s just weird that every now and then, you’re going to be reminded of what you’ve lost.  That is life. 

 I used to not understand ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’.

 Something’s gotta go to keep going on. (But did it have to be my waistline?!)