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.

Reclaiming Feminine Mystery & Magic with Burlesque, Butoh, and Tantra Yoga

WHEN: Saturday, February 16th
TIME: 10 AM to 1 PM
WHERE: Pranayoga -- A Little Breathing Room, 1001 West 6th Street
COST: $45

You MUST preregister. CLICK HERE.

When I first started teaching 10 years ago, right after one of my first few classes, a wise, wonderful, beautiful woman came up to me and said this, which I didn't realize would be something that I would hear over and over again in the coming years:

"I was always taught that I had to pick between being smart and sexy...that I couldn't do both... So I picked smart... but now I feel like I CAN have and be both..."

Until that moment, I didn't realize how much I had internalized that same exact message.

Another woman would tell me that suddenly, after months and months of classes with me, she was letting herself buy things she thought of as "too pretty for her" and things with "sparkles!"

She was shocked and delighted by this.

So many of us have learned to turn off certain parts of ourselves to succeed or even to survive.

We've bought into so many of the myths of being a woman in a misogynistic culture: that to be pretty or sexy is to be vapid. To be "too sexy" invites "wrong attention." To be attractive means you won't be taken seriously.

To wear this article of clothing or this much makeup or this sort of shoe could even put your life at risk.

Even more insidious, of course, is that only certain types of bodies are even ALLOWED to THINK of themselves as sexy.

And it's reflected in the dance and movement arts world: only certain types of bodies are ALLOWED to perform, or on a more basic level, to even consider themselves dancers at all.

Bullshit. We all call BULLSHIT.

And yet, these parts of us HAVE been silenced and to reawaken them can be difficult and even a bit scary.

But in community it all becomes so much easier, so much more fun, so  much more joyful.

With the witness of #Treesters in a supportive circle, we can grow into our fullness in every way.

We can embrace our unique beauty and our uniquely wonderful moving bodies.

We can embrace our softness that is another kind of strong.

We can sink into the flow of our innate body wisdom, our intuitive knowing, and our empathic intelligence.

We can OWN all that has been either taken from us, hidden from us, or looked down upon as less than.

In this workshop, we'll move into these spaces within us and explore how they want to be expressed, how they NEED to be expressed, and what these desires are telling us about the kind of world we want to create around us.

We'll be using methods from Burlesque, which promote an assertive sensuality, but we'll do so with no regard for the male gaze. This is for YOU.

From Japanese Butoh, we'll use mindfulness techniques along with breath to discover the deep wells of strength that flow under the skin.

And from tantra yoga, we'll learn of our power of awareness and the paramount importance of and ritual approaches to experiencing through all of our senses with no shame.

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.

And So Begins Spring: Imbolc

Today, February 1st, though it can be hard to believe, is the first celebration of spring in the pagan wheel of the year. It’s a time of subtle hints, but if you pay close attention, you’ll find plenty that mother earth is saying about what’s to come.

The light in the sky is different, for one.

And there are moments, even when there’s still snow on the ground, that I can hear the ground waking… trickles of water wending their way through dirt to find seed and root.

In the Celtic tradition, we celebrate Brigid. She’s one of my favorite goddess archetypes, overseeing FIRE and POETRY and creativity in general.

These are the things of spring, are they not? The sun is strengthening and soon heat will again penetrate skin to bone, igniting fires within, often showing up as a desire for more activity — and thus cabin fever and spring cleaning and the mountain of garden catalogs as we dream bigger and bigger the longer the cold winds blow.

It can be quite simple to celebrate this time:

Light a candle and center yourself with long deep breathing.

Take a pen to paper and write out your dreams for what you’d like to create or nurture over the coming months.

Place that paper on an altar or in a dreaming box, and when it is finally and actually time to go out and plant something, place that paper in a deep hole with seeds or plant it at the base of a favorite rose bush or favorite tree.

And take a few moments today to nurture your heart with some poetry in Brigid’s honor. In particular, you could spend some time with Haiku… little seeds that can work some big magic.

"Managing Depression:" Why This Approach Fails

One of my favorite photos from our brief time living in Vermont.

I’ve never flown a plane but the metaphor is too good to resist.

When you’re flying inside a storm system, you have to work extra hard to maintain flight within that system. All your energy goes to getting through.

But if you fly above the storm, you have energy to look around, to enjoy the flight. The storm might be doing its thing below you, but you’re in blue sky.

Either way, you’re using the same instruments, doing the same sorts of checks, etc.

In situation one, you’re stressed, getting exhausted, not learning anything new, just surviving.

That’s been me since our move to Vermont and back home to Pennsylvania again.

Being away from everything and everyone triggered my depression in a way I hadn’t experienced in some years. When we returned home, I told everyone this version of things:

“Before Vermont, I had achieved a high level of management of my depression. That’s how I got so happy and functional.”

And so I went back to trying to manage all the bits… like the pilot in the storm.

I had checklists. I was doing “all the things.” I was going through the motions.

And I was not getting back to where I had been… I was in survival mode. There was no thriving and no sign of it to come.

My frustration, as you can imagine, was profound. WHY was this not WORKING? My management skills had not decreased. I knew the “things” that worked.

Then I was reading the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying one night. Re-reading some passages, to be exact, and after, I got in the tub, the place where I do some of my best thinking.

And this sentence went through my head: “DESIGN YOUR LIFE TO ELEVATE YOUR MIND.”

Otherwise: fly this damn plane out of this damn storm and get into blue sky.

In a lot of meditation circles, they even say things like, “get into Big Sky Mind… mind above small mind… small mind always has problems but above it, all is clear.”

This was the KEY: when I had gotten to a place of peace and joy in my life, I was NOT “managing my depression,” I was LIVING IN ELEVATED MIND.

I was not “doing things off of a checklist to feel better.” I was doing things that helped me to live from my higher mind.

Depression was always still there… below me…

I knew this at the time. Daily, I could sense it, see it, smell it… lurking. But I didn’t fly down into it. Even on rough days, everything I did helped me to stay in elevated mind. Everything I read. Everything I watched. And soon, subsequently, EVERYTHING I THOUGHT.

Depression — true mental difference depression as opposed to circumstantial depression — is really like Diabetes type 2. You never get rid of your diabetes type 2 but you can live above it by eating and exercising and taking your medicine. It is always there but it doesn’t DEFINE you; it doesn’t RULE your every day.

Managing my depression was really my depression managing me, but creating a life and an environment that elevates my mind, well, elevates my mind.

And PS this is NOT magical thinking. I’m not “thinking my depression away.” I’m thinking above my depression’s mindset, and in that higher space, I know I am MORE than my depression and from there I will always make better choices for myself which then feeds that higher self and on and on … a positive cycle created and maintained that is more powerful than the negative cycle. No more wasted energy… no more FIGHTING it. Much like the Japanese martial art, aikido, I defeat it by not engaging.

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.