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I don’t believe there would be much argument if one stated, this arena of experience we call life is flush with irrational contrariness, pain and even agony. For the longest time, as a child growing up, as a teenager, as a young grown-up, as a middle-aged grown-up and as an older grown-up, I was nonplussed by my chronic emotional malaise. Particularly as a child and as a teenager, I was ashamed of my depression. I felt like I had been swallowed by a demon, and for a protestant fundamentalist, this was not good. Somewhere between young grown-up and middle-aged grown-up, with the help of John Bradshaw and others, I had accepted it and felt no compulsion to mask it, but freely talked about it as a part of me. During that time I had seen two or three psychologists and counselors to no avail. About all I remember from those experiences is a psychologist telling me I had gotten myself into a big mess and another one informing me that my depression actually qualified as severe pain. Duh! Not much to show for the time and money spent. However, it was beneficial being able to talk openly about the oppressive milieu which I experienced as everyday life. This openness and my tenacious search for reality allowed me to speak of my own frailties as if speaking of a lab rat. Yes, I had seen psychologists. Yes, I had spent time with counselors. Sure, I'm on prescription meds. Yes, I was mentally sick; emotionally ill. So What! As time went on, I began to recognize the characteristics of mental and emotional illness in everybody around me. The only difference between me and most others was, I knew it and was damned determined to do something about it, and just about everyone else didn’t, and therefore, wasn’t. They were putting all their energies into making the dysfunctional look functional, the status quo look healthy.
Just recently I came to understand what I had been encouraged to accept as sick was actually very wholesome and healthy physiological behavior. When we consider a person to be sick, they exhibit symptoms that are not altogether pleasant to experience; fever, aches and pains, a bountiful production of mucus, vomiting, dizziness, weakness. Though not very pleasurable, these are indications of a healthy body, a body which is reacting to foreign agents in an admirable manner. Even when a person does not have sufficient resources to win the war, the body is responding in a wholesome and healthy manner. If a body was not responding and these disagreeable symptoms were not present, it would indeed be sick. As it is, the body is struggling against the infection and these symptoms are indicators of a wholesome battle. This is a semantic analysis, but all too often we give far too much credence to defeatable foes.
If the body was exhibiting these symptoms, but the person is doing their dead level best to make the symptoms look like a functional model, regardless of the spin, the body is sick. Cancer is a prime example of this unusual concept of sickness. Malignant cells are creating huge destructive armies, traitorous agents are infiltrating essential systems and the body is doing nothing about it. This is sickness in its least defeatable sense.
So, for me, in a wholesome and healthy sense, I was not mentally and emotionally ill all those years! I was affected, certainly, but not over-run by infection. My emotional antibodies were still holding the line. The disease was held at bay. A battle was raging, but I was not raising a white flag. There was a war, certainly, but the smoke and din was proof enough that there was no armistice. Mental illness is not responding with paralyzing fear and dysfunctional behavior. Mental illness is not being disturbed by disturbing realities. Mental illness is creating a make-believe world where dysfunction is promoted as functional.
My problem, or my strength, depending on one’s perspective; the dynamic that prevented my being defeated, the mental and emotional travail I had experienced since I could remember, was caused by an inability to compromise. This did not indicate superior character or sainthood. Because of my chemical and physical constitution, I was unable to compromise. I could not accept the irrational as being rational. Life was like a twelve by eighteen inch sheet of pure white paper with a black dot in the middle of it and all I could see was the black dot. When something didn’t make sense; when what I was told just didn’t add up, I was unable to ignore it much less accept it. It was likely a consequence of my ADHD that when there was an aberrant reality, I couldn't ignore it. I perseverated on it! Being a child and not liking pain, isolation and all kinds of rejection, there is no doubt in my mind; I would have compromised if I could have compromised. I simply couldn’t. In my early years, I desperately wanted to live inside the bun, but all that I was kept me outside the bun! No way would I have chosen this path! But there was no way I could avoid it, either.
I have come to recognize my war as a wholesome and healthy endeavor. It is entirely healthy for a person continually bombasted by corrosive experience to be depressed. A wholesome person will be chronically depressed when chronically exposed to irrational and destructive behavior. In today's society, what is irrational and destructive is spun in such a way that it appears wholesome; what devours society is somehow given a make-over and sold as healthy behavior. Think about it: Severe depression is a natural response to poisonous, lethal and mind consuming experience. Though much of my life was as pleasant as my parents could offer, the world I woke to every morning sucked. The world I slogged my way through every minute of every hour of every day was disgusting. And at night, this world’s demons, the infection, followed me into my bedroom, under my coverlets and pillow until in exhaustion I fell asleep. If unable to disturb my sleep, they waited patiently for me to awaken the next morning. My ability to direct my focus was at best, vestigial. Therefore, the items that got my attention were the really big things, and I'm afraid the fact that from the beginning of time to the present, society has been living in a determined universe as if it was a free-will universe was one of those really big things! Others who could direct their focus, ignored the dysfunction and directed their focus on what appeared to be the closest thing to functionality society had to offer. In the long run, I was the fortunate one.
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