Embattled No More: The Invisible Exhaustion of Depression

And now quotes like this no longer feel like these unattainable wishes but instead feel like a call that I can answer.

Since starting on this new anti-depressant, I feel… capable.

For the first time, I think maybe ever, I feel what people have told me about myself for my whole life: that I am someone who creates stuff out of thin air, that I get an idea and then I act on it, that I walk into visions.

I never believed those words, or more accurately, I felt like a fraud who was pulling wool over the eyes of the speakers. Like, if they only knew all the things I was NOT doing, all the hours wasted in self-doubt and self-hatred, all the time spent thinking but not doing, all the days paralyzed in my bed or on the couch or staring off into space.

Even at my most productive, I never ever felt productive.

I felt embattled.

How could people not see that I was suffocating and drowning and that I was barely surviving, much less thriving? I would think this not in judgment of them but in judgment of myself. How could I pull off FOOLING so many?

Because you see, no matter how much I might have managed to do, there was one thing that I was doing 24/7, and because my brain has been like this for so long, I no longer saw this thing as unusual or “extra.”

I was fighting for my life. Fighting for every square inch of it. Fighting every second of every day.

I was fighting, as I’ve mentioned before, the Asshole in My Brain, and that Asshole was a NINJA.

I was convinced simultaneously that I was ill AND that my brain was normal, therefore this internal fight was normal and why couldn’t I get my shit together!? (Try untying THAT knot. It has everything to do with shaming my own spirit rather than acknowledging my biology.)

I was so used to living like this that I didn’t notice the energy it took. I would judge myself for not getting enough done from day to day, not noticing this huge thing I was accomplishing every single day — not defeating the Asshole outright, but winning each day’s battles so that I could live to fight again.

Back to this idea then that I wasn’t ever accomplishing what I knew I COULD deep down: perhaps, um, it was because I was using most of my fuel, most of my energy, for this war.

I was exhausted before I got out of bed.

I was done before I started on the lists of things that mattered to me.

This is the part of depression that those who don’t suffer can’t understand or see. It’s the part that is invisible to everyone around us because we might appear somewhat functional, but it’s also dangerously invisible to the person suffering, so no matter what we do or don’t do, we’re damned… by ourselves as ineffective, weak, soft-willed, disappointing.

This is the underbelly of an extreme cultural belief in self-sufficiency added to a multi-billion dollar industry called self-help.

Why can’t I fix myself? becomes part of the Asshole’s arsenal, really a nuclear-level weapon, which leads to a cycle of shame that leaves us attempting to hide our illness even more vigorously. Asshole wins.

And each day looks like this: I’m exhausted and so very close to the edge but somehow I function at a bare minimum level. It’s enough for people to remind me of “all the good work I do” when I say I am suffering from a crisis of meaning and purpose. Their cheering only adds to Assholes bullets of “see? they believe in you…but you’re nothing… you can’t even finish your basic to-do list… you can’t even ((insert the thing you want the most here))…” Shame. More shame. More hiding. Not getting the help you need because this is obviously not a “real illness” but something wrong with your character so I dive deeper into spiritual practices and exercise and wonder why the things I do help others but not me…

Rinse and repeat ad nauseam for the next couple of decades.

Somehow… SOMEHOW… I listened to my husband and got the help I’ve needed all along.

It’s taken until today for me to notice my increased energy.

Huh… isn’t that funny? No longer fighting an Asshole 24/7 means I have energy for other stuff.

It’s taken until today for me to notice that those spiritual practices weren’t a waste except for the fact that my brain was TOO TIRED to take it all in and that’s why I couldn’t seem to remember, couldn’t seem to keep doing it all, couldn’t seem to “ever freaking learn.”

Because now? My brain chemistry is being altered for the better and I can feel the power of that.

I can feel what “normal” really is and it’s NOT a daily battle for one’s life. It’s a sort of battling for a better life, for more art, for more love and friendship… but that’s not a battling of an asshole… that’s a battling for all that’s good and right and wonderful and beautiful in this world and that sort of battle feeds energy right back into us, invigorates us with meaning and purpose, and has us ready to get out of bed each day, grateful to be doing just that.

My Anti-Depressant Story, with Happy Ending (Middle...)

By the time I was in my early 30s, depression took pretty much everything from me.

It took my sense of self, a taking that started when the depression was really amping up to full-tilt in my mid/late 20s. It took my sense of self to the point where I started to walk a wrong path, be a wrong way, live a lie, and because of my stubborn nature, it would take well over a decade for me to admit this to myself. (My self was whispering the wrong of this immediately, and because depression taught me how to lie to myself, I shut it down.)

All of that self-denial eventually took me from my family, and every day now, I breathe a sigh of relief that that was not permanent, that I was able, somehow, to rectify that.

Depression took my passion, my fire, my loves, my likes, my curiosities, my will, my knowing, my moral center, my talents.

This is hard to write about and it’s even harder to look at — depression took the years of my life when I could have been building a family, when I could have been creating the kind of future I had dreamed of in my teens.

But regret is poison so let’s move on.

When depression first started to get bad, I went to a doctor and got some pills. They turned me into a zombie.

In my early 30s, I tried again. After 3 doses, I got very sick.

What I took from this: there is no help; you can only do this yourself. Pills are bad. I will never take another. (Please note: I always have believed in “experiment of one” and would never ever tell someone NOT to get help if they felt something could help them. I have even guided friends to physicians to get prescriptions and been there as they adjust. “NO PILLS” was a rule for ME ONLY.)

Needing to do this ourselves… What a LIE that is… it’s a core lie of our culture, whether you suffer from mental illness or not. It’s a core lie that keeps us all so much more separate than we are built to be, so lonely, so angry, so fearful.

Fast forward… SOMEHOW I get to a point where the lies are no longer sufferable. I get to a point of inner strength.

I get there thanks to dance and to a million other things I put together in my life. Thanks to the whole “design my life to elevate my mind” approach.

But then more things happen and depression lately has been something more acute for me. This was hard to admit after everything, after how far I had come.

It took me many months, but I found a PCP and then lo’ and behold, I liked and respected her so I opened up about all of this.

She prescribed another SSRI (which seems to be their favorite class), and as I have written about, I landed in the ER with a really bad reaction.

It felt like the same rollercoaster ride. I said NO MORE. NEVER AGAIN.

Then I was back in her office and we decided (due to some research I did) to try another class: SNDRI. (I won’t get into details but this drug works on a cluster of brain chemicals as opposed to one.)

No side effects. None. I breathed and waited.

Not only no side effects but within 10 days there were noticeable positive effects, and yes, this CAN happen. It makes me think that this is the exact right pill that my brain needed all along.

Here’s one of the positive effects: I’m not spending any time regretting not trying this sooner. I don’t have time for that. Depressed brain would have had time for that…

But here’s a little list of what’s going on:

The first thing I noticed (because my husband asked me how it was going and then I was like oh…): I have had a part of my brain for as long as I remember that I call ASSHOLE BRAIN. This asshole does exactly what an asshole does — talks down to me, loves to contemplate death, nihilism, and meaninglessness, and is generally cruel. I spend A TON OF ENERGY fighting this asshole Every. Single. Day. You can imagine that it’s tiring. But…suddenly… ASSHOLE WAS SITTING IN THE CORNER. Quiet. Not saying anything. I realized I could lie in bed at night and THINK POSITIVE THOUGHTS and NO ONE WAS INTERRUPTING ME. I cannot overemphasize the MIRACLE of this.

Then the other night, Craig and I were watching TV and I was LAUGHING AT EVERYTHING. ANYTHING that was remotely SILLY made me laugh.

I heard myself and was yet again amazed. My mother would tell you that when I was little, I laughed so easily. She would tell you that I would sit in front of the TV and just laugh and laugh at the littlest things.

This was that laugh.

Another: any time there is ANY music — in a commercial, on the radio, in my head — I do little dances. That had completely stopped.

And another: I talk. I talk A LOT. I talk in vomitous rivers of excitement. This is ME.

Ten days. On a half dose.

IMPORTANT: Since I’m not exhausted fighting the Asshole Brain, I have energy to do MORE of the other things that I know help. More exercise. Better eating. More play. We can’t let a pill replace those things; a pill, if it’s working right, will help us DO those things.

MOST IMPORTANT: Don’t give up. Keep pushing for the help you deserve. Find a GOOD and KIND doctor. Find a CURIOUS doctor. Research for yourself; be informed. Ask a friend for help if you’re too depressed to do these things. Ask someone who has been there. Don’t accept “okay-ish.” Docs love SSRIs and maybe those aren’t for you. Try something else.

Pausing to Consider My Medicine

A photo from almost ten years ago

If you’ve read my about me page or known me for any length of time, you know that chronic depression ate my love of dance by my mid to late 20s. It wasn’t until I was 40 that I returned to the very thing that was the medicine for my depression.

We are all born with medicine. It’s the thing that makes us US. It’s the thing that makes us lose all track of time. It’s the thing that when we’re doing it, we enter the flow of eternity and infinity and know exactly who we are.

But our medicine is attached to the thing that will challenge us the most in this life. Thus its necessity as medicine.

Furthermore this medicine is not just for YOU. You’re meant to find it, use it, and then share it with others.

This looks as many ways as there humans on this planet.

And this is the root of the importance of community connections in our lives and the importance of shared community experience and ritual.

All of these most essential things have been lost to us in the competitive structure of capitalism that teaches us we are only worth what we can do and turn into dollars.

When other humans are seen as competition for limited resources, the divisions get deeper and the depressions spread wider.

We are, for the most part, I believe in my soul, not mentally ill but emotionally starved.

As I look back over this ten years where I’ve had the privilege of moving with thousands of (mostly) women, I am thinking of how to expand the community over the coming ten years.

As I look back over this ten years and the work and the processes I’ve developed, I wonder what direction that work can be taken in that will touch even more lives, create even more beauty, deepen our accessible well of love even more.

It is seed starting time where I live, so contemplating exactly which seeds to plant and what types of fertilizer to use seems like a good use of this time.

But even more, this 50th year of mine, seems like it deserves this sort of pause and breath-taking before leaping into what’s next.

Year of Magic 2019: Mountain Monks in Japan

This 10 minute documentary is a sparkling jewel, a meditation, and an inspiration that I can feel has entered into the bloodstream of my own work after only one viewing. I can already sense it leading me into my own sort of mountains…and there will be unexpected climbs ahead.

This makes sense, as these monks practice a religion that is a combination of Buddhism and Shinto, both of which are strong underpinnings of Butoh, the movement art that transformed my own practice years ago, when I had the opportunity to study with Maureen Fleming who studied with the founding family of Butoh in Japan. Lineage matters and I am proud this is part of mine.

The Magic of Right and Good Questions

From this past summer. Photo by Mr. Handsome, of course.

“Why do you think you’re depressed?”

I was spending some time with my father so my mother could do some things. He’s on a new medication during his post-stroke rehab and he’s just getting used to it so being alone for long stretches can be challenging.

And because he’s my father, an inquisitive and caring and smart man, he took the opportunity to try to talk to me about this depression cycle I’ve been so damn stuck in. He wants to help. As a dad and a physician, he wants to make it better. Of course.

“Why do you think you’re depressed?” It seems like a question I should be able to answer after all these years of suffering these cycles, but I can’t answer it. It’s complex and maybe it’s also as simple as “this is my brain.”

Whatever the reason, here I am.

But that question stayed with me into the evening when I had my choreography group. We sit and talk a bit before getting to work, and I shared this story.

And I heard myself saying this:

“Maybe we need to turn this around. Maybe there’s a more helpful and more productive question… why are we still here?”

If that sounds macabre, it’s not. At all. It’s very life affirming.

Because every day, each of us, whether aware or not, really do choose to be here. We choose to get up and out of bed and move through our days. We choose to be around people we care about and to do things that matter to us.

And for those of us suffering from depression or any other mental health challenge (and let’s get real… that’s a huge majority of us), this decision to stay can get clouded by the effort it takes to cover the basics.

But what if we started each day or ended each day with this potentially magical question:

WHY AM I STILL HERE?

Why, in this state of suffering, do I keep going?

Because the list of beauty and love and truth that that question would elicit from me… it would startle this depressed brain.

It would CHANGE this depressed brain.

It’s a twist on the scientifically backed practice of writing down things we’re grateful for.

It’s a twist in that it asks a direct and important question that those of us who suffer MUST remember:

We are here, because regardless of everything, we keep saying YES.

And isn’t that an amazing, strong, courageous, and magical thing?

The Meaning of Life, as taught to me by peonies

When people go through the illnesses of loved ones, they often speak of all the loving and wonderful lessons they learned.

When my father had his stroke and then needed a feeding tube inserted into his stomach and then three weeks later coded and then had to have a trach and then had to have a different feeding tube and then started having hospital psychosis and then and then and then… I didn’t think there was anything loving or wonderful I was learning at all.

I was angry.

And I got more and more confused and lost and despairing and cynical. I’ve always been skeptical, which I think is healthy, but cynicism was not my usual mode.

Fast forward over three months later, and he is home, tube free, and making more progress at a faster pace every day.

In the meantime, I started my deep dive into tantra yoga philosophy, and I really committed to that after the new year.

But I kept landing in the same dark, nihilistic corner… painted in by the banality of it all.

Wondering what could possibly be the point of being human if all there is is pain and suffering awaiting each and every one of us sooner or later.

Life is cruel. That was the only conclusion I could come to, and if there is some sort of thinking/creating God, he/she is even crueler.

I do not believe in a God or Universe who “sends us lessons.” Bullshit. First, that’s mean and if I believe in any God it is LOVE. Second, it’s illogical in the context of free will. Life happens, and if we are lucky, later, looking back, we can create meaning from suffering, we can write stories of our own making about why what happened was ultimately important or “right” or whatever, because that’s what humans are at their core — story making machines.

Thank goodness, because this capacity to create story saves us, I think, from going insane.

I’m stubborn. It’s one of my more positive traits, I believe. I believe it has saved my life over and over and this time, wrestling with these ultimate things, it would prove itself my strength yet again.

In trantra yoga, the ultimate underlying reality (worshipped as Goddess but just for the simplicity of anthropomorphism that humans respond so well to) is awareness.

All is awareness, and we, then, are ultimately that same thing — awareness.

Awareness then has experiences through our individuated material bodies.

But ultimately we are already that awareness.

And here I am sitting in that dark corner, thinking, if we are already that awareness, WHY DO THIS!?!

But I had an intuition that the answer was in this tantra stuff… if I could just pull the right thread.

Here’s the thread: Awareness is two fold and a lot of people forget the second part.

Firstly, awareness is the noticing that we expect it to be, but the second attribute of awareness is actually about ACTION.

Awareness is, by its nature, constantly creating, destroying, resting, starting over.

Sound familiar?

I STILL wasn’t getting it, until…

I was lying in bed, sick, and my husband was gently rubbing my back so I could fall to sleep, and instead I entered into a deep and peaceful state of meditation.

Suddenly my skull was full of the universe, and I realized, oh, right! It has been there all along. If awareness is this cycle of creation, destruction, rest, and starting over, it’s literally written in the stars.

And from that cycle — from the very nature of awareness — eventually we, quite simply, get to the evolutionary point from which humans arise.

Lying in bed, the universe in my head, suddenly, a PEONY flower arose and unfurled in my skull.

The peony can only be the peony. Period.

I can only be this human.

I’m not here to “be taught” or to “ascend.”

I’m here, simply, to be awareness and to allow for the natural cycles that are born of the nature of that awareness.

My peony self is teacher/dancer so that’s what I’m here to be awareness through.

And when I die, I will simply continue being the awareness I already am, but, as Ram Dass says, I will remove the too-tight coat of this human experience.

Dreaming the Body

From early in a piece during Bodypoetics class in which I asked them to dream their bodies, to imagine they’d never met this body before. They’re encouraged to start on whatever plane feels right, and so Annie chose a chair for her experiment. I keep these classes small to ensure a depth of intimacy and safety.

I don’t know about you but I am cruel to this body. Even after 10 years of teaching this work, after 25 years of yoga studies, after so long of battling depression and making it smaller and smaller, after telling hundreds upon hundreds of women that beauty is ANY body moving…and being completely sincere in those statements.

I am still so cruel to this body.

This body that can make such beauty in movement. That surprises even me sometimes with its abilities. This body that my husband finds perfect in all its ways of being since I’ve met him.

I am still so cruel to this body.

And I know I am not alone in this so I know I can tell you this and not be judged as somehow deficient or a failure on the spiritual path blah blah blah.

As if anyone ever gets to the damn finish line. As if there is a damn finish line.

No matter how much I work on this, there’s always another layer waiting for me, and I think that’s actually the point — finding that next layer, never stopping, always persisting, falling and rising.

Because even just ten years ago, wow… my head was full of cruelties that make my present head look all soft and fluffy.

Progress. It’s all we can expect.

If you have a fantastic love of your body, congrats. This isn’t for you. I’ve never actually met a woman in person who has that kind of love. I’ve seen it projected on social media… #Thingsthatmakemegohmmm

So I teach what I teach because I need it. Isn’t that always the case? And isn’t that who we want guiding us?

Even now, as a teacher who is always on the path of learning, I know I can lose my grip on the beginner mind that some of my new students come to me with. That’s a huge challenge — to always be remembering that beginner mind and not your current version.

But being in my own beginner mind allows me to constantly be creating new maps and tools for people to navigate this dark forest of small self and old stories and unproductive coping mechanisms.

Which brings me to dreaming the body… a phrase that came to me just about two years ago but would not have come any sooner because I was not there yet. I could not even imagine such a phrase.

And beyond the imagining of such a phrase, I could have never come to any understanding of it, much less explained it in a way that it be helpful to others, that it inspire some sort of change in their minds, some sort of new in their movement.

And as we practice these things in dance, so they eventually come to impact the entirety of our lives.

Dreaming our body eventually will become dreaming our lives.

Tantra Yoga, Magic, and Depression

Magic. Truth. Beauty. Love. None of this is easy stuff. It’s not pretty. It’s not fluffy. It’s not for the faint of heart.

It’s all rather like a large body of water, especially an ocean. It can look so lovely and yet it can kill you. And when it does, it didn’t mean to. It was just being itself.

Part of my intention for this year is to dive deeply into the philosophy and practice of tantra yoga, and already, only 14 days into this new year, it is revealing a huge and unhelpful chasm in my approach to life. This is stuff I’ve always kinda known was there — we all know it’s there. But like most of us, I danced around it. I thought about it here and there. I could talk about how I was unlearning it, but in reality, it was growing in size and threatening to swallow any happiness in its path.

And all happiness is in the path of this one.

I know I’m not alone with this. I see it at play every day all around me, in particular in the number of people suffering from lifelong, debilitating, chronic depression (like myself).

William Styron wrote a great and very personal account of his lifelong depression, and he wondered if a depressed brain is born or made and he decided that it doesn’t matter, that we can never know.

Here’s what I think: I think some of us are born with a brain that is more susceptible to depression, a brain that is more “sensitive” to stimuli, but also a deeply inquisitive brain that kinda… gets lost in its inquisitive nature… a brain that follows dark lines of thought and then can’t find its way out.

Over time, this starts to look like a neurological or chemical imbalance, but like all disease, it starts elsewhere, an elsewhere that current medicine is not able to locate or understand yet. (And do NOT read this as a “blaming” of the sick. NOT. AT. ALL. My point is that we are complicated, feeling, thinking organisms for whom those thoughts and feelings play a much larger role than we currently understand, but then those thoughts and feelings meet up with environmental factors — from family to community to earth — and that’s where the complicated comes in.)

WIth my study of tantra yoga, I’m coming face to face with this: I believe that life is being DONE to me.

But this begs so many questions: By whom and for what reason and to what end?

A God who “does things” to us, including all the difficult things, to “teach us lessons” just sounds like an asshole. A human made asshole.

Humans made that God out of their observation of human assholes writ large.

I don’t want to believe in that God, but deep down, in that dark chasm, I DO.

If I’m sick, I must have been bad.

If someone dies, I am being punished.

What? It hit me yesterday that THIS — THIS — is the blackened heart, the very core of my depression. Who wouldn’t be depressed thinking that they had so little power in their life? Who wouldn’t be depressed thinking that their “God”, the larger universe was out to get them? Who wouldn’t be depressed when every little or big bad thing that happens (normal things that happen to everyone because this is LIFE) was a judgement of their value as a human being?

Tantra yoga, on the other hand, is a philosophy of nonduality. There is no “out there” God. There is only one soul of which we are all part. We are drops in an ocean of soul.

And life happens because life happens, and whether we evolve or not is about how we react to that.

Everything that happens is neutral, neither good nor bad. It’s only what we label it and our labels hold all the power. Our labels determine our experience.

I’m sick because I’ve been at the highest level of stress in my life for three months because I was helping my mother help my father to not die.

We know, more than anything when it comes to the disease process, that stress leaves us open to “catching” illness. We are not “unlucky.” or “bad” or “sickly.” We are stressed.

And THAT is something we have control over.

Again to refer to tantra yoga: the ultimate energy, the ultimate underlying reality is awareness itself. And we come from that and so we are that.

We can wake up, right now, to this reality. We can decide to embody that awareness.

It won’t be easy — there’s no magic spell here. It’s a matter of observing ourselves and catching reflex habitual thinking and asking, is that really how I see the world? Is that really the world I want to live in?

This is scary to me.

Even thinking about changing this way of thinking makes my stomach do flips. The known is comfortable. And what the hell will happen if I decide to live in a FRIENDLY and LOVING world? What will I do when “bad” things happen? If I let go of my grief and despair, who the hell am I?

I am the ocean, that’s who I am. I am the drop in the ocean, and I am the ocean.

And like I said, truth and beauty and love and magic — not easy and a whole lot scary but a life of freedom and no delusions and feeling what is and not labeling? Yes, please, because THAT sounds EXACTLY what I know when I am dancing.