Depression whipped me into grace. (I have published versions of this story before too, but not in this context, or toward this end.) Just as terminal cancer might make a man love his wife or his rosebush with more intensity than before, or as winter generates passion for spring, so my depression taught me what I needed to keep from committing suicide, which, believe me, I thought about, with more precision and frequency than I did the grocery list or the plans to build my daughter’s sleeping loft or writing this book, thought about every hour during every day. In the midmorning department meeting, before the postlunch chair nap, during my run later on, and at night, I had visions in my head, Blu-ray lucid, of going into the basement, where my father’s old shotgun leaned behind the boiler, and exploding my skull, chunks of my brain splattering the 1915 brick; or of throwing myself down my house’s stairs one still-dark morning, my neck breaking about halfway, and there I am dead at the bottom; or of emptying a bottle of Ambien into the back of my throat and then swallowing the pills down with half a bottle of Bombay gin, just like in the movies; or of hanging myself; or of asphyxiating on exhaust; or of driving off a cliff; or of leaping in front of a car or a train. Really everything but drowning, in that regard, lacking the courage of Woolf, who weighted her pockets with stones and walked into the river Ouse.
In junior high, I often slipped into my room after dinner and lay a long time in the darkness, thinking weird and morbid thoughts, relieved to be free of the judging gaze of my parents, teachers, anyone, really, in town; in high school, I often couldn’t sleep the whole night, nervous about nothing, and sometimes decided that I wouldn’t say a word to anyone at school for days; after leaving West Point, I became a triathlete, trained three to four hours a day, starved myself, slept three hours a night, went into serious funks when I got any grade below an A; once I reached grad school, I stayed in bed entire weekends, the lights low, refused to answer the door or return phone calls, and started drinking a six-pack of cheap lager every night. I assumed that all these activities were normal for someone self-conscious, ambitious, thoughtful, cynical, morbid.
But in the days following the birth of my first and only child, sweet Una, the brooding turned suicidal, and the anxiety became mania. During the years before her birth, I exhausted these increasingly intense negative feelings by working, working, twelve, fourteen hours a day: reading, researching, writing, teaching, grading, motivating myself by the promise of praise, success, accolades. I also drank heavily, martini after martini, once the day’s labors were done. But when Una was born, these habits were compromised. By choice. I could have continued them, neglected child and wife, but I wanted to be a good father and an improved husband.
So I found myself at the age of thirty-five, forced to face what my working and drinking, now diminished, helped me hide: I was a deeply sad, anxious man, vacillating between the pain over my failure to make anything feel meaningful and my numbness toward the failure. The hurt pushed me toward suicide. The apathy might as well have killed me. Both exhausted me, as did my constant performing of the roles of father and husband, rote, mechanical, soulless.
How I groped from this deadening mixture of indifference and despair to a psychiatrist remains a mystery. Maybe it was the fear that if I didn’t come back to life, my wife would leave me, taking my child, who would soon not know or care about me, who would have another man for a father. Maybe it was some internal will to live, evolutionary or spiritual, that overpowered my death drive. Luck, possibly.
I found a psychiatrist who gave me my current bipolar diagnosis and prescribed medicines that actually helped, lowering the suicide sirens to a background hum and so giving me barely enough tranquillity to imagine a life beyond the cemetery.
This psychiatrist also recommended that I see a psychotherapist for weekly counseling. This man emphasized that I am not simply equal to my biochemistry, which is killing me, but greater than, able to alter how I see the world and act within it. How to express this power? Through implementing a therapeutic pragmatism close to that of William James (though this psychotherapist—let’s call him Dr. S.—had never, to my knowledge, read James).
Dr. S. probably learned a version of James’s pragmatism from the Landmark Forum, which I attended, at his behest, one long weekend, painful—since I held to my vow not to drink alcohol during that time. I had to sit for about thirty-seven hours a day in a dingy chain hotel conference room and confront all my hidden hang-ups, fears, misplaced commitments, sometimes verbally, in front of total strangers—but powerful, too, this weekend, because of the primary idea: outside of our meaning-making narratives, nothing is. So if your life is not going well, change your narrative.
According to Dr. S., I was currently the author of a novel in which I, as the protagonist, was a loser. That’s what he said, and he meant it. He argued that in my narrative, I had it that—he loved that phrase, “had it that”—the depression was controlling me, and I need not be responsible for my actions. “How can I be expected to be a good husband or father,” I was tacitly whispering to myself (according to Dr. S.), “while I’m suffering from bipolar disorder, which is all the time? You wouldn’t expect a cancer patient to run a marathon, would you? No. Then why would you expect me, ripped between mania and depression, to be open, affectionate, intimate, energetic?”
Having it this way, I was, Dr. S. opined, addicting myself to victimhood, one of the perverse pleasures of the weak. Even though the victim is oppressed, mistreated, imprisoned, he often savors his role, because he is free of responsibility. He can do whatever he wants and blame it on the oppressor. To have it this way, however, is to alienate oneself from fertile human relationships, which require agency (choosing one action over another) and responsibility (following through on what one vows to do).
Dr. S. maintained—no, bellowed, for he was a crazy man, not afraid to go to the floor and scream to make a point—that I would never be able to be a good father or husband, or indeed person in general, and never be able to find a jot of joy until I stopped treating my depression as a tyrant determining all my moves. I needed a new narrative.
“Go home, Eric,” Dr. S. urged. “You’re an English major guy and so should enjoy this; construct a new book of life, a novel in which you as protagonist have power and grace.”
And damned if I did, more out of arrogance, I suspect, than desire to get better; being a victim, let me tell you, is weirdly enjoyable, in a totally destructive sort of way. I wanted to show Dr. S. that I was creative, able to fashion a work more beautiful than any he’d ever encountered.
I established the principles behind my new novel. First, my depression is simply a part of me, not the cruel controller, no different in kind from my lungs, foot, or heart, so, I can shape it, just as I do my breathing, beating, leaping. Second, my depression, though painful, is also a gift, since it has fostered a contemplative life, my propensities to brood over the meaning of suffering, loneliness, despair. It has also revealed to me what I need to feel intensely alive, surrounding me with a darkness that can be broken only by the strongest beam.
With these ideas as my starting points, I reimagined my life, viewing my periods of greatest depression as natural parts of my development, times, indeed, of greatest spiritual growth.
That was as far as I got before seeing Dr. S. again, a kind of outline or proposal. When I told him about it, he stared at me for about fifteen seconds before screaming, “You get an F, Professor!”
I said, “Hey man, you just fucking with me?”
“No. I gave you a failing grade because your little proposal isn’t about you wanting to connect more intimately with your family; it’s about you trying to show off for me. I can see right through your bullshit. Go back and start over, this time with more specific actions. In fact, that’s your homework: come up with one new habit and carry it out once a day. Don’t worry about writing the narrative; it’s too tempting for you to try to be clever, which you’ve been your whole life, as a way of defending yourself against real intimacy, which requires vulnerability. If you make everything a joke, then nothing’s serious. C’mon, man. Get serious for once.”
So I went home and tried to ignore Dr. S.’s F, convincing myself that he had failed me just to keep me on my toes, in the same way that I sometimes, as a professor, return papers ungraded, saying they’re not even good enough at this point to get an H.
But I couldn’t. He was right. I was more interested in appearing intelligent than in getting better. I reconsidered the new assignment: just create a new habit. Less grandiose than novel writing but also more doable. But what to do?
It came to me. I will forget being a PARENT, all responsible and serious, and become Crazy Dad, like a sitcom character, my sole goal being to make Una laugh, laugh, laugh. I know. Sounds stupid. But it’s what I thought, probably because this habit allowed me to do what I was best at, performing.
I as Crazy Dad made a strange game for me and Una, at the time four, to play. I was a teacher, and my class was composed of Una, several stuffed animals, some blocks, and a ficus tree. I called roll as though it were the first day of class, giving each student, with Una’s help, a ridiculous name. Una answered for each creature, “Here.” As I neared the end of the roll, I fell into an epileptic fit, flinging a book or two—gently—around the room, mimicking a professor having a nervous breakdown in front of class. Una would laugh epileptically herself, and we had a fine old time, better than we had ever had, and grew closer each time we played, more at ease with each other, and I actually starting desiring to be with her, not out of duty but pleasure.
I won’t bore you with the other such absurd games she and I created, though one involved attempting to capture the voice of a toad in a foul mood that speaks only French and is lost in Russia, in terrible need of food. Recounting parent-child games is almost as bad as telling a group of the dream you had last night: after the first sentence, all auditors brace and endure.
To say that Dada saved Dad is sort of true here, since the happy consequences of my newly created Crazy Dad role inspired me to fashion other roles, not as crazy and not just to foster more satisfying relationships with my daughter—with my wife, too, and my friends. And the performances—some much more successful than others—helped ease the depression’s pain.
They kept me aware of the cognitive distance between my bipolar biochemistry (my brain) and my interpretive capacities (my mind). Calling myself Crazy Dad, instead of Depressed Parent, and acting as though this identity were real and so enjoying a more zany, capricious, playful, capacious, love-charged, creative existence: these behaviors illustrated to me repeatedly the power of my imagination.
Performing thus, I resembled a madcap Chaplin pushed from a tightrope into a lake. Gravity, like biochemistry, controlled my tramp ass, limited my choices. I couldn’t Wile E. Coyote–like climb back up to the edge on air (only to fall again, waving a resigned bye-bye on the way down), just as I couldn’t will happy neurons. But I could choose how to fall. I could flail and scream and belly-slap the water and gasp and sputter and, once under, come close to drowning, thinking, “I’m gonna die!” Or I could relax into the downward rush, execute a flip or a gainer (a little ungainly, though—this is slapstick) before cutting into the ripples like a knife, splashlessly, in charge of breath and body, dipping into the depths about ten feet before arching upward and shooting through the brown-green-blue shimmery water with the shabby, soggy grace of Charlie himself.
Gravity, marker of what we can’t do, becomes, for the slapstick performer, a muse to what he can. He is able to transform the downward push into leaps ten laughs high. And so, when I was successfully performing a happy role, my depression morphed from sign of my limitation to enabler of my imagination. Performing, reminding myself of my ability endlessly to perform and of the transformative powers of the acting, I experienced what those depressed lack: hope.
Dante was right. Hell is the abandonment of hope, existing with no future toward which to raise the anticipatory gaze, enjoying no vibrant past out of which this exciting future will grow, but rather stuck in a dismal present, static as a stake stabbed. Purgatory and paradise, though, are imbued with hope, that sweet sense that life develops, dramatically expanding and contracting, decaying and recovering, pushing toward a grand purpose.
I am far from cured; never will be. I’m not a positive person. I still go stupid with gloom and get fevered with mania. But now I know I am not a victim of my disorder, and so, when the depression wrestles me down, I fight back, for days, weeks, however long it takes, and subdue the creature once more. It will slap me down again another day, and another day I will give as good as I get, and this will be the drama of my life, perpetual conflict and resolution, eminently worth undergoing, because from this play I can learn how to love even though I lose and grow more generous in spite of my pettiness.