Archive for January 2012
Lost Intimacy
I have been known to wonder what it would be like if I lost my wife to some accident or illness. It seems like a morbid thought, but less macabre and not so uncommon, you might hear the phrase, “What would you do without her?”
Well, with Cyndie living in Boston, I am getting a chance to find out.
Our intent was to use FaceTime to keep in contact across the miles of distance. We’ve succeeded a couple of times, leaving the connection open while we each went about our separate business, creating a feeling of being together. It worked pretty well for that. Unfortunately, Cyndie’s schedule isn’t providing very many opportunities for this kind of connecting. More often than not, we have been spending our days out of contact. I am left to fend for myself.
It takes a toll. No doubt about it, when days go by and you don’t talk with the person who would otherwise be your most intimate relationship, there is a loss of intimacy. I find myself inclined to put up a protective barrier in defense. After a while, I don’t want to talk with her. It is so counter-productive to the ultimate goal that it seems ludicrous, but that is the natural reaction that occurs to me.
This is a classic example of depressive thinking. It is dysfunctional, but the unhealthy mind presents it as a logical, helpful defense.
If I was feeling a lack of intimacy in my childhood, and it felt natural to create a protective barrier in defense, it would explain how I now feel so comfortable with this reaction. I’ve had years of practice. It feels right, not talking to the person closest to me. My father taught me well. He was a master at shunning my mom.
It is a goal of mine to invert the pyramid of dysfunction that passes from generation to generation. I want to be healthier than my father, and I am hoping to imprint better health on my children to equip them to become healthier than me.
I need to go call Cyndie.
Frozen Motion
This is a close up image of some old ice on the surface of a lake. It has melted and re-frozen multiple times. There is something both chaotic and serene emanating from it. A lot of motion locked in place. A juxtaposition of realities. Frozen motion.
Why Suicide
I have no idea why, at a very young age, I started fantasizing about taking my own life. I think my family labeled me as moody. All I know is that when I got upset, for whatever reason, I would then feel stuck with the angst, burdened with a lack of skill or knowledge about how to return to normal function.
I have a recollection of becoming upset over something as a 10-year-old, when my family was gathered to witness the first man stepping on the moon in July of 1969. I left in a huff to sulk, and couldn’t get myself to return, even for such a momentous occasion, and despite my family’s admonitions to come back and watch history in the making.
For some reason, I discovered early on that one of the things which offered consolation to my troubled mind was, imagining myself being dead. At the time, it wasn’t a conscious choice to have such thoughts in order to feel better, it was more like an involuntary reflex. It just came natural to me to fantasize my demise, and then eventually, I discovered that such thoughts provided comfort. Of course, it was a dysfunctional comfort, but I had no understanding of that at the time.
It is not uncommon for depressed people to seek solace in alcohol. I assume it provides relief similar to what fantasizing did for me; an escape. I would describe myself as becoming something of a ‘fantasylic.’ I functioned for years with a chronic low-level depression that is labeled, “dysthymia,” relying on fantasizing as my drug of choice. I could project an outward appearance of reasonable health, but inside my head, I was honing a dangerous art. I refined this practice from my childhood into my adult life, and in its dysfunctional way, it served me well.
Then I became a father. With that milestone, my suicidal fantasies began to fail me. They no longer provided comfort. In fact, they increased my despair, as I contemplated the potential impact on my kids. It is silly, in hind sight, that the impact on others never seemed to bother me that way. (Depression is a very self-centered affliction.)
I like to think that my children saved my life. It wasn’t easy, and it got worse before it got better, but that change led to my eventual diagnosis and treatment.
When my fantasizing no longer worked for me, my dysthymia progressed to clinical depression. My fantasies morphed to become exercises of actually plotting my suicide.
But for the grace of god, go I.
After years of neglecting to recognize my difficulties as being depression, I finally sought professional help. I learned very quickly about the dysfunction of my fantasies. Imagining my death is now taboo. As a recovering ‘fantasylic,’ I need to work my program with a purpose. The dysfunctional thoughts can come just as easily now as they did the very first time as a kid. It is a reflex reaction, and it became a very ingrained reaction that feels comfortable in its familiarity.
Through practice, it gets ever easier to instantly recognize and dispatch the depressive mental reflex. Over time, the incidence of needing to do so, declines.
Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Thinking about suicide is a totally wrong solution for any level of despair.
Mesmerizing Media
On Sunday evening, Julian came over and brought a pizza dinner and we watched some football together. Doesn’t hardly get any better than that. Oh, but it did! He applied his craft of tech-savvy wizardry and loaded some software on my computers and devices and suddenly I’ve got music and images all over the place!
The screen saver that pops up on the computer in our library explores and randomly displays any photo uploaded on that CPU. We have our large flat screen television wired to also function as a display for that computer. Now I can control the music from my shared iTunes library via my iPad and watch a slide show of a wild collection of pictures. I’m finding it totally mesmerizing.
I have always loved the combination of music played to a slide show of images. Being able to see the huge number of pictures that have accumulated on my hard drive in this random fashion is fascinating. So many of them surprise me. I don’t recall taking a lot of them.
I find myself struck dumb by the images playing on the big screen with the music filling the house. I just sit and stare. Maybe I’ll call in sick to work today…
There is an interesting advantage/disadvantage to the random aspect of the image selection. Because the screen saver scours the hard drive for any image, it is pulling out images I didn’t even know I had. That’s part of what makes this so much fun for me. However, ‘random’ also means no order, so it can repeat images sooner than I would choose for it to, if I were programming an intentional show. Also, I still have plenty of images on there that probably should have been discarded; partly because they just didn’t turn out, and partly to protect the dignity of some innocent people. I didn’t really mean to capture the ones with the person’s mouth open/eyes drooping/cleavage advertised/hair in their face/butt showing, etc…
That might need some tweaking before I make this a feature I share with visiting guests. Maybe I need to start having people sign a waiver when I am taking photos.
Sensitive Subject
I have recently been impacted by reading the words of an acquaintance who wrote about suicidal visualizations. It serves as a reminder that I have experience which, difficult though it may be, can potentially be put to good use. I found a phone number and made contact to offer support.
Doing so involves a certain amount of revisiting a place and time when my thinking was dysfunctional. It is a place I spend a fair amount of energy staying away from. I believe there is a delicate balance of staying in touch with my experience in order to serve others who may face similar afflictions, and maintaining a healthy distance from the period when my mental state was in a dangerous, self-defeating loop.
If I don’t make an intentional effort to put my experience to use for some good, I will be inclined to leave it behind me. It is not something that feels like it makes for inviting reading, so I don’t gravitate toward the topic for posts here. But when the subject comes up, I recognize in myself, a strong motivation to offer my perspective.
I have done some writing this past week on the subject, in support of this friend, and in so doing, have discovered the depth of passion I feel toward the subject. I have a strong belief in the ability to overcome depression in our own minds. Our thoughts can, and do influence the chemicals in our bodies.
Just like the way my negative thoughts fed a pattern of a self-defeating loop, my positive thinking feeds an increasingly healthy response in my physiology.
The subject of depression can be a sensitive one, but my experience is something that may prove helpful to others, and it is something that I feel some responsibility to be able to communicate in a worthwhile way. I’m not sure what that way is right now, but I hope I am present in that moment when it comes and able to rise to the occasion.
Sky High
The crisp afternoon sky of that recent record-setting warm winter day in January provided a striking backdrop for the vapor trail of a jetliner crossing my view.
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Underdog Triumphs
Something in my mind had me thinking I would have more time to accomplish things like writing, with no one in the house to distract me. I may have more time to myself, but more writing doesn’t seem to be happening.
I did have a rare mid-week opportunity to catch Cyndie on FaceTime last night, which proved to be a very pleasant distraction. Guess what. Work is really hard, she is working late into the evenings, felt like quitting on Monday, and had some good results to report by Thursday. I think that is the same description I got from her last week. At least her reports are ending on a positive note.
But mostly, I think the time for writing, lately, is getting lost in the total freedom I have to watch any and every sports broadcast on television in the evenings. Somehow, the Gopher men’s basketball team survived a strong comeback attempt by the Hoosiers last night to upset Indiana, in Indiana! Going into the game, Minnesota was winless in Big 10 conference competition and the Indiana team was ranked #7 or 8 in the entire country. Sometimes team competitions defy logic. I guess that’s why they play the games, and why people like me enjoy watching.
It’s kind of like the posts in Relative Something. They defy logic. You need to check it out each day in case there is some big upset and the underdog triumphs!
So far, so good. This underdog is winning a lot more often than he is losing, in this game of life. I even have pictures to show for it. Here is one that turned out just the way I hoped it would when I composed and shot it. Dueling points of perspective:
Snow Flake
There hasn’t been much in the way of snow around here yet this winter, but I found this prominent flake holding its own against the record-setting high temperature that showed up two days ago. Gonna need a lot more than this if I’m to accomplish any igloos this year!
Relative Something 