Hello darkness, my old friend

There’s a certain line that gets crossed between the normal daily inadequacies I experience and the return of my old friend depression. There’s a certain kind of heart-heaviness that indicates I’ve descended into the darkness again. It’s a physical feeling like a heavy medallion that hangs down inside of my chest like Frodo’s necklace when he carried the ring of doom. I enter into an acute self-awareness that isn’t the same thing as mindfulness and contemplative prayer, but kind of like its perverse cousin, in which every moment I’m noticing how unfunny I am, how little I’ve accomplished that day, and how screwed I’m going to be when people figure out that I’m not good at anything. The darkness is back again. So I thought I would talk back to it and perhaps somehow gain the upper hand.

It’s hard to believe that at the beginning of 2014, my mind was a fertile place. I had a vision for the book I wanted to write. I got started. And it seemed like the first few chapters were really good. Things were flowing. I was having awesome charismatic and mystical spiritual encounters at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception every week. Then in about March or so, my ulcerative colitis ravaged me like a wrecking ball. Every night for the past 8 months, I have had to get up at least five and often up to eight or nine times during the night to sit on the toilet.

At first, I wasn’t taking sleeping pills and I would just stay awake after the third trip to the bathroom. Then I would go and bang out a blog post or make a trance song or something and be exhausted the next day. But then I started taking sleeping pills so I could go back to sleep after each toilet trip. And I don’t know whether it’s the sleeping pills or just the exhaustion of never getting a full night’s sleep, but I spend most of each day in a sluggish haze. The first two months of 2014, I had been trying to write a chapter a week for my book, which admittedly was an insane pace. But I had to give it up altogether when my colitis took over. Now I can barely pull together even a single blog post each week.

It’s pathetic, but so much of my identity has been bound up in my writing. Even more embarrassing to admit is the degree to which my ego came to rely upon the traffic and the likes and the comments on my blog. It’s come to be the case that most of my friends are online. I’ve forgotten how to socialize off-line. I didn’t have very many real life friends when I lived in Burke, but I was able to fool myself into thinking that church events counted as some sort of social life. Now I can’t fool myself as a campus minister because I’m spending my time with 18-22 year olds. And because the ministry is so small, I’m trying to invest every possible moment that I don’t have to be a dad or a husband into creating fellowship events for this ministry.

When I land among the right kind of people, I do reasonably well socially. Catholic Workers, tree-huggers, anarchists, French philosophy snobs, hippies, or really anybody who likes to dream about changing the world and is angry about how messed up things are right now. I love having those kinds of conversations. And I know that those kinds of people are all over the place here in New Orleans. But I don’t have time to meet them because I’m either doing stuff for my ministry or taking my kids to their events. And I suck at conversations with other parents when they’re in parent mode on the soccer field, at Cub Scouts, or at elementary school events. It never gets beyond really painfully awkward small-talk. And those are the only places where I encounter other adults: as a parent among other parents.

The Cub Scout dads at the campout a few weekends ago were all talking all about their man-toys and man-adventures. I don’t have man-toys or man-adventures. So I had nothing to contribute to the conversation. I garden. I fast. I read mystics. I do contemplative prayer. I’m an astonishingly boring person. I was a reasonably up-to-date musical hipster in 2005 before my first son was born. The problem is I stayed in 2005. I guess I bought some new music about two years ago, but that’s been pretty much it. And I don’t really feel like finding new music to listen to. I have a CD of Gregorian Chant that I play on repeat in my car as I go through my prayer beads while I drive. Sometimes I listen to the jazz station.

I really really wish I could live in a monastery or just have a life in which I could do very simple things every day and have very simple conversations with people who didn’t expect me to be clever or funny or hip to the latest slang. I suppose the good aspect of my depression is that it makes me long for a quiet life of prayer. My wife Cheryl has dreamed for a long time about establishing a spiritual retreat center. I’m just not sure how one goes about doing that. I presume it’s the kind of thing where you have to get credentialed in some kind of way or at least have some basis for getting clientele. My irrational dream is that I’ll somehow finish my book and it will take off and as a result I’ll magically gain the credibility of a Henri Nouwen type person who can open a spiritual retreat center where people will travel long distances to pray and garden and take long walks with me. I really wish I could just be Wendell Berry or maybe just take over whatever his official job is when he dies.

So now I’m completely out of energy and I’m not sure how to wrap up this post. It helps to put all this in front of me and realize that I am facing a legitimately difficult set of circumstances between my colitis and moving halfway across the country and being in a job where I have to come up with all of the structure for my time from scratch. I’m hoping that this will end up being one of those stories where “it sure was rough at first but then things started to happen.” I need for God to be my deus ex machina with my destiny in his hands. Pray for me.