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A note from the Author:

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I just about passed including: Drifting Daily, the previous poem.  It just seemed a bit too whiny with none of the fight against the apathy or the disdain for the sinister elements of the world.  Who needs that?  But I thought about this poem as I looked it over, that was written in my early twenties, and I realized that it embodied a time that no matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to shake out of my fairly perpetual, hidden, low level depression.  It seems that I hear of a lot of people that have been there and can’t seem to get out of it.  This note is for you, or for anyone that thinks they know someone that may be in that position.  Believe me, the depressed person wants to figure a way out, but they just can’t see it.  That poem won’t get you out of it, and probably neither will the following lines…but!  It might plant some seeds that later help in a recognition to that ceiling door to the attic where you somehow get on the roof and back into the sunshine.  I can only hope. 

Here’s how it happened for me to get mostly, generally free of depression (and I’m not trying to be cute here, I know there is a lot of variables to that equation…a clarification in case I’m not an adept enough writer to get the point across).  I made a decently above average amount of money for a while in sales to suddenly just a touch above poverty level due to a territory cut, amongst other reasons.  I had never made much money until my thirties, but was never struggling financially, to then bleeding away savings exceedingly fast.  Then I went into a divorce (out of respect, I’ll leave it at that, but from my experience this is a soul crushing event).  I went from a fairly nice house to a beat up shack that had water literally coming through the ceiling with no heat at first (not as dramatic as it sounds, I think?  Hahaha, I got them fixed pretty quickly).  I was distraught that I would not see my kids as much and the level of time was up in the air.  I was alone a lot and filled with anger.  I no longer trusted people in general.  I could not sleep.  I basically took bad habits and went into addiction.  I was a prisoner to terrible, terrible thoughts and was in what I call an “anger cycle,” where I was mad which fed into more anger.  Angry thoughts feed themselves and keep themselves alive and strong. I was aware of this, but still couldn’t break the cycle and that was the scary part.  I thought I would be that old man that sat on a park bench and talked to himself like he was in an argument with a person that was not there.  I wasn’t sure after a year or so that I could ever come back to normal, and I realized that some people stay pissed off and in bad ways of living to never be wholesome again.  Was this my fate?

I can’t tell you an exact formula of how I broke free of perpetual low level depression, but it included speaking to family members and a lot of friends all the time.  To those five or so people, I send eternal gratitude because I was a broken record of being broken up, calling these people daily.  I started going to a counselor.  I put faith in the deeper elusive meaning that I believe does exist through some power beyond our comprehension that is mostly referred to as God.  I actively tried to review where the train of thought goes wrong.  I am a fan of Eckhart Tolle, his books: A New Earth, and The Power of Now, and his talks about them (don’t blow this off as just another self help book(s). 

The main epiphany was that no longer having the spouse and the person I thought I would spend the rest of my life with, having next to no money with debt rising, seeing my children have to witness something I thought was not too great (their parents splitting), and living with a swirl of seething anger and pitiful sorrow constantly engulfing my already susceptible to depression mind, I started to realize something as it subsided: IT DIDN’T KILL ME.  I was still here.  I still had life.  Where do I go from here?  What do I do now?

I had a choice: live in my mind’s prison of terrible thoughts spurring on more terrible thoughts or realize that there is still fun times to be had, there is still joy to be had, there are new experiences to get…if I was willing to accept what happened (my “tragedies”), and go out and do those fun things and find those joyful moments.  I was still alive.  Although fatigued, some how I didn’t go into a complete disease state.  No one was really trying to destroy me, no actual person at least.  Life was either a “vampire, sent to drain”-Billy Corigan of the Smashing Pumkins-or it was a challenge to rise up to…but not through revenge, through acceptance.  Not through anger, but through peace.  YOU lose with anger, and you can make it difficult on others, but you ultimately lose more than anyone.  You can’t run away from yourself.  If I could tell you how to let anger go, I would, but this is the closest I can get: these words here and in some of these poems.  It’s something that one has to learn through experience anyways, I imagine.  I guess that everyone has to find it their own way.

I still get angry at times, but it’s much shorter lived.  I lived in disgust for quite a long time, it’s a whole different thing.  Depression is a tricky, elusive foe, where you don’t really even know where the enemy is, or maybe that you even have one.  Most of the problems people have are in their thoughts.  I mean no disrespect to those who are battling cancer, or in the midst of a divorce like I was, or those who were truly wronged physically by other humans, etc.    I’m sure some people are born with “chemical imbalances” the way some can’t people can’t clot blood, but much of emotional pain is worrying about the future, or lamenting in the past.  Just be aware of that.  It might help you break free of unnecessary stress in your’ thoughts or an “anger cycle.”  These sad thoughts or worries don’t change the past, they just waste the present.  Worrying about the future, different than planning or preparing, doesn’t change the things that come they just detract from the present moment we’re in.  The most important moment is now.   If anything, worrying about the future probably paralyses or detracts from the ability to prepare and plan for what you are worried about, ultimately being counterproductive and therefore adding to what you are worrying about.  Or it just steals away from having fun or a nice time. 

So, I wish you fun and a nice time, (and a break from dark thoughts, remember, it’s more than likely you that controls them-particularly if you are someone who reads poetry), but not at the expense of others you poetry reading heathen.  We all are self serving sometimes, its ok, if you’re expecting someone else to take care of you, they call you some other derogatory term, and they’re probably right.  Ok.  Let’s move on.  And thanks for indulging me in that, because it might help one person, and that’s better than none.