CHAPTER 11: LIVING IN THE BROWNS
Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.
C. S. LEWIS, THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER
I’M WRITING THIS a few days after Thanksgiving—that weird holiday stuck between the Halloween buying season and the Christmas buying season. It’s about food and football and a little about faith—a time when we take stock of all our blessings. All that we have to be thankful for.
That makes it hard for some. They think about a nephew stricken with stage 4 cancer. They sit by a loved one with Alzheimer’s. They stare at the empty spot at the dinner table.
Depression can make gratitude difficult to reach too. It’s our very own wet blanket, constantly wet and constantly smothering. It can turn the cranberry sauce bland, the football boring, and the people—even the people you most love in the world—insufferable. Even Uncle Howard’s annual rant about how lizard people have taken over the postal service can lose its appeal. Depression makes it hard to be thankful about much of anything.
So you might want to sit down for the next part: I’m thankful for my depression.
Yes, that comes with plenty of caveats. I’m aware that my own depression is not nearly as severe as what other people may suffer from. I’ve never needed electroconvulsive therapy or been on a cornucopia of medications. I can’t speak for anyone else but me. Nor is this to say that I like depression, or that I enjoy depression, or that I really miss the days when I’d literally lie around for weeks staring at nothing, either feeling dead or wishing I was. Depression is just the worst.
But it also helped make me who I am.
Any eleven-year-old boy can tell you that scars are kinda cool. They’re like horrific little bumper stickers that tell the world you’ve been through stuff, man. A cool divot down your cheek? You could’ve gotten that in a knife fight, by golly. That crooked little finger? MMA tournament, of course. If you wear an eyepatch, you’ll never go dateless for the rest of your life. Scars tell the world (rightly or no) that you’re not someone to be trifled with.
Emotional scars are, admittedly, not so cool—especially when you’re a guy, and those emotional scars make you more inclined to weep during Avengers: Endgame. (I’m not admitting anything.) But they’re still a part of us. They remind us, if no one else, that we made it through something tough and survived. Those scars speak to a part of our story. And I think sometimes the most glorious stories can be the hardest to get through.
When was there ever a great story free from drama and trauma and tragedy?
We struggle and suffer—suffer more than we’d like, certainly, because who wants to suffer at all? Not me, that’s for sure. But would we ever appreciate moments of happiness if we never understood sadness? Would we appreciate the light if we’d never seen it dark? When I think about my favorite things to eat or drink, I think about doughnuts or bacon or Mountain Dew. No one would ever say water. Water is about as bland as it gets . . . unless you’ve just come in from an eight-mile run and drink a cold glass of the stuff. Not even a steak from a five-star restaurant could compare to the exquisite, sharp, fresh taste of water—the sort of sensation that goes beyond smell and taste, but hits you in the back of the throat, your chest, your fingers.
My anxiety and depression make it, I think, harder for me to feel the sort of happiness that some others feel as a matter of routine. So when I do feel joy—when I’m at ease with friends and family, when I’m at peace with myself, when I wish I could live forever and feel like I just might do it—those moments are all the more special for me. It’s like that water after a run. It’s the law of emotional capitalism: supply and demand. My psyche doesn’t allow me as many of those moments, but when I have them, they seem all the more special to me. And honestly, sometimes I wonder if our emotional bank accounts—deposit boxes filled with all our lives’ loose joy—wind up looking just about even.
Obviously, when depression’s chewing on your psyche like a dog with an old tennis ball, those moments of joy can be very rare indeed, if they come at all. But I think that even when we feel incapable of free, laughing happiness, we can find a different, quieter sort of joy.
This is a hard thing to articulate, but let me try.
My family has deep Colorado roots, and they sink the deepest in its sprawling, arid San Luis Valley. My great-great-grandfather homesteaded there in 1887, just eleven years after the territory became a state. My great-grandparents raised most of their fourteen children in a tiny log cabin there. Grandpa Carl (on my Dad’s side) was a farmer and fireman in Alamosa, the valley’s biggest town. Grandpa Ted (on my mom’s side) sold furniture there. Lots of my relatives still call the valley home, and they would not want to move anywhere else.
But none of them would likely say it’s ever been an easy place to live.
When most folks outside Colorado imagine the state, they picture Aspen or Vail or Rocky Mountain National Park: green and beautiful and, well, kinda rich. I’ve never been to Aspen, but I’m pretty sure town officials check your credit score at the gate.
The San Luis Valley is as Colorado as it comes, but it’s cold and dry and poor. Alamosa gets nine inches of rain a year, about the same as Phoenix. With temperatures drifting to 20-, 30-, or even 40-below-zero in winter, it’s often colder than Fairbanks or Fargo. Poverty rates hover around 20 to 25 percent.[1] My great-great grandmother, Martha Minnesota Nelson, died just weeks after she moved there, from (according to another ancestor of mine, Nellie Patton) “the cold, high altitude.”[2]
I loved visiting Alamosa when I was little. The Christmas decorations sparkled on Main Street, the old locomotive stationed in the park fueled a hundred stories. But by my sophomore year of high school—when I was most full of myself and my biggish, Colorado Springs–city ways—I didn’t find Alamosa so charming. I loved my Grandma Dorothy and still enjoyed our visits, but in my tiny grandma’s tiny house,[3] heated only by a gas-powered Franklin stove, I was growing more conscious of the relative poverty there.
That consciousness felt like it hit its apex in my sophomore year, when my family went down to visit my Grandma Dorothy late one fall, when Alamosa’s charms felt at their lowest. It was warm for Alamosa in November . . . which meant it wasn’t very. Everything was dead. And for some reason, Dad wanted to go for a walk through a vacant mile of weeds nearby.
My sister and I dutifully pulled on three or four sweaters, slapped on a stocking hat or two, wrote our wills, and dove into the sparse Alamosa air after my father. We trudged through thin, shaking brush and under the skeletal elms and cottonwoods. We poked around the trash and explored some old, metal ruins of what might’ve been part of an old city project or depot or burned-down insane asylum. I don’t think I’d ever seen a landscape look quite so scrubby and lifeless and poor.
And just as I was thinking how ugly everything looked, my dad stopped, put his hands on his hips, and said, “Isn’t this beautiful?”
Beautiful? I thought. “Beautiful?” I said.
“Yeah,” Dad said. “Just look at all those browns!”
I looked at the browns and remained unimpressed, convinced my dad had finally lost it. At the time, I was pretty sure that when I became a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, I was going to settle down in Oregon or Washington, somewhere that actually got some rain. For me, the beauty of nature was dependent on nature being green and lush. Or, at least, green. In nature, brown was the color of dirt, of grime, of dead leaves, of . . . well, other less pleasant things. Of all the colors in the average Crayola box, brown seemed like the worst color.
But now I understand.
Now, when Emily and I run through the scrub in October or February, through yellowed grass and bare trees as the wind sets them all to shivering, I sometimes say, “Look at these browns!” mimicking my dad but, truth be told, mocking myself. “Isn’t it beautiful?” And we agree it is.
It is beautiful. It’s not beautiful in the same way as a Hawaiian beach or an Oregon rain forest or a snowcapped Colorado peak, but look closely, and you’ll find a subtle beauty just as rich, just as powerful. Shades and textures blend and meld, like mellow rivers of honey and earth. You see the architecture of the trees, the graceful shoot and brush of the grass, hear something rustling deep in its hidden paths. It’s the sort of beauty that doesn’t translate into postcards or Instagram pics, but somehow imprints itself somewhere inside you.
I’ve seen plenty of typically gorgeous places in this beautiful country of ours: Yosemite and its cliffs of white and green; Carlsbad’s endless, shimmering stalagmites and stalactites; the Hoh Rain Forest’s cool, moss-caked woods. Anyone can look at these places and see the beauty in them, even if they’re fiddling with their phones. But to see the beauty in the browns requires your attention. You walk. You stop and listen for a while, to the wind carve past the twigs like a skier through trees. Listen to the branches creak and brush against each other with dry familiarity. Watch the shadows define the seeds of the grass. Feel the poke and prickle against your fingertips. Smell the earth underneath.
Depression helps you see the beauty in the browns.
Sure, it robs the color and vibrancy of your days and weeks, and as you begin to crawl out of its smothering embrace, the color returns only by inches. But as it comes back, I think—if you’re willing to look—you can see texture and shadow in the folds of your life that, perhaps, you’d never have seen without it. At least that’s how it feels to me. And moreover, you find comfort there. When the noise and splash and feel of the world grows too loud, those browns . . . the gentle creases and seams you found in the threads of your life that perhaps you discovered when you were miserable . . . are there. And you wrap yourself in them like a blanket.
There was a time in my life, when I was feeling pretty good about myself, that I stopped reading. I rediscovered books when I needed them, in the aftermath of depression, and now, as I write, I’m surrounded by them—old friends with me always, even when I feel alone. I enjoy hearing the clock tick and the refrigerator hum, listen for cars two streets down. I know nothing about cooking, but one of my favorite things to do during quiet evenings is flip on a cooking show and watch it with Wendy, still holding hands after all this time. These are the browns of life—easily overlooked but both strong and gentle, warm, comforting. The touch of bark. The scent of topsoil. The warmth of a river rock clutched in your hand.
The silence you feel from God, the separation you feel from others, and the deep, nightmarish introspection of depression are horrific. But traveling through that depression helped unlock an understanding that there are good manifestations of all those things, in moderation. When I crawl free of depression, even partly, I see that some of its most terrible elements and emotions can mellow into things that look a lot like virtues.
When I’m depressed, I obsess. When I’m not, that depression has given me a better ability to reflect. When I’m depressed, I feel worthless. But that depression has also given me the tendency to be, I think, a little more humble, a little more realistic about my own weaknesses, than I otherwise would be. I’ve learned the difference between being lonely and the quiet joy of being alone. I think I’ve learned that, sometimes, what seems like God’s stony silence can really be God’s quiet presence. Perhaps these things would’ve been a part of me without my depression. But I kind of doubt it.
Several chapters ago, I wrote about a man dying from cancer, and how he sometimes felt so alone in his prayer time. This same man had a brother who was a cancer survivor. He knew, intimately, the struggles that come with the disease. He said something that impacted me deeply.
“In the Western World, we Christians tend to pray, ‘God, take this burden away from me,’” he said. “In the rest of the world, Christians are more likely to ask, ‘God, give me the strength to carry this burden.’”
That’s my prayer these days. Not for God to take away the static or to wipe depression clean away from me and make me “normal,” but I pray for the strength, if and when it comes back, to deal with it. Because, honestly and with a deep sense of irony, I feel closer to God because of it.
It pushes me into a place of dependency. When I feel worthless and alone and weak, I understand how much I must trust in Him to carry me over and through. Like Peter told Jesus, where else would I go? No one else can save me. No one else can make me feel whole. When I’m down, I know that I have no virtue, no strength, no talent to offer. I’m a supplicant with knee bent, neck exposed, begging for grace. I have no other hope.
For the Christian world, depression is a vexing mystery. Is it borne of sin? Is it possession? Is it a lack of faith? And if it’s none of those things, why did God see fit to allow this affliction to visit those who suffer from it? Why so burden the loved ones who have to deal with it in someone else? What kind of God would have us be in that sort of pain and melancholy?
In 1958, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a letter to a person named Rhona Beare, trying to explain a point of theology behind his creative opus Lord of the Rings and the idea that the mortality of man, while a punishment borne of Middle Earth’s version of original sin, was something else as well.
“A divine ‘punishment’ is also a divine ‘gift,’ if accepted, since its object is ultimate blessing, and the supreme inventiveness of the Creator will make ‘punishments’ . . . produce a good not otherwise to be attained,” Tolkien wrote.[4]
In an interview with GQ magazine, Late Show host, practicing Catholic, and self-professed Tolkien geek Stephen Colbert unpacked a terrible tragedy in his own life, when his father and two of his brothers (Peter and Paul) were killed in a plane crash when Colbert was just ten. He describes how his own mother was broken but never bitter. How he learned from her example and tried, always, to make her laugh. How she drew on her faith in that terrible time, and how he learned from that, too.
“That might be why you don’t see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage,” Colbert told GQ’s Joel Lovell. “It’s that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”[5]
And then, Colbert paraphrased Tolkien from that 1958 letter. “What punishments of God are not gifts?”
I love that. What punishments of God are not gifts?
Depression is a disease. It is an affliction. It, perhaps, can be a punishment for sins too tightly held. I hate it, and I hate what it does to me.
And yet, it can be . . . a gift.
I’m grateful for every moment of my life—every scar I’ve collected, every pain I’ve suffered. I can’t imagine life without having experienced and earned them. The days I’ve spent in the browns I’d not trade for weeks in beauty.
Pain is a gift. Sadness is a gift. Even suffering can be a gift if we learn from it or it makes us stronger or if someone else can find a gift of his or her own drawn from our struggles. We are tools in the hand of the Almighty. And sometimes, I think our hurt—as awful as it can be—can also be an instrument of healing. When we suffer and still believe, when we doubt and yet hope, maybe we help illustrate another side of the Christian journey, one not often publicized in chipper praise music or inspirational talks or too-easy smiles on Sunday mornings, a journey walked among the browns. And maybe that hurt can help even the hurters, too.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote this famous passage:
So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
2 CORINTHIANS 12:7-9
I don’t know what depression is for me—a thorn in the flesh, a disease, a punishment. But I believe that in my weakness, God can work. When depression makes me feel empty, perhaps God can fill me with something better.
I have no real assurances that “I’m all better now.” I think depression’s a little like cancer: Sometimes you have it and get rid of it, and it’s gone for good. Sometimes you have it and get rid of it, and it comes back. And maybe, for a few (or more than a few), it never fully goes away. It shrinks or grows depending on myriad factors and maybe its own unfathomable timetable. As much as running and writing and friends and family and God have helped me through the days and years to stay relatively sane and relatively hopeful, I’ve learned that depression loves its little surprises.
But I’m not scared of it. As most directors of horror movies know—most good ones, anyway—the fear is in the unknown. But this horror, I know. I’ve seen the face of depression. I’ve heard its lies and half-truths and nihilistic whispers. And I have a better idea how to quell the rising static if and when it returns. I know how to fight it, and how you can too.
You live.
You stare depression in the eye and live. You drown its whispers with your own song. You push it away with counseling and meds and friends and family and laughter and joy whenever you can find it, in what meager doses you’re allowed. You read. You run. You work. You play. You love your kids, love your parents, love your friends, love all of this glorious gift of life you can, because it is a gift—even when it doesn’t feel like it. To feel the miracle in each breath, to feel creation’s treasures under your touch like tiny jewels, to listen for the melody of this impossibly ancient and always renewing universe that we’re a part of.
Depression tells us we’re as good as dead. It’s a lie. Depression tells us we’re better off dead. Not when we still have so much of our story to live.
Several years ago, folks were getting tattoos of, of all things, semicolons. You’d see them on people’s wrists or ankles. It seemed to me like an odd choice for a tattoo when I first started seeing them. Most folks don’t even know how to use them in an actual sentence. Why adorn your body with a bit of outdated English punctuation?
But that tiny, outdated bit of English punctuation—a dot and a comma that signifies a break in a sentence, a transition to another, related thought—tells a story of its own. Many of those who bear it thought about turning their lives into a complete sentence—putting a period on their existences and closing the book. Over. Done. Dead. Instead, they kept going; they decided to go on, just as a semicolon allows a sentence to go on.
I’d encourage that use of our life’s semicolons—to go on, leaning as we do into faith, and hope, and love. We embrace faith even when we can’t hear God; we insist on hoping even when things feel hopeless. We love even when we’re sure we’re unlovable. Our will is a testament to them all. And that will is not a feeling, it is an action, a decision, a statement of power. We believe, we hope, we love because we choose to. We choose.
We live. Because no night lasts forever. Light and warmth lies just east of here, on the horizon. It’s there. If you wait, you may see its glimmer, out there in the gloam.
But in the meantime, like Dante, look up, too. Look up and see the stars. Look up and see the sky, spreading so vast and broad and deep. Look up and see its Author, and yours. Trust Him to finish your story.
I can’t promise you will be without pain, without suffering, without confusion and doubt.
But it’ll be a story worth reading. Of that I am sure.