I’m a mental health professional, but I am also human. Therefore I experience the slings and arrows of life, which sometimes land solidly under a chink in my armor, and as I cannot be objective about myself, I suffer as others do.

Recently I wrote to my friend, Marta:

IÂ’m treading water of my own depression.

I could be happy, content — I ought to be. I am healthy (mostly), employed, loved, housed, fed, clothed. People like me, they really like me! BUT. Instead I feel numb, or emotionally flat, and my body aches a great deal. I carry out my daily duties and smile and laugh, but I also feel resistant, unsettled, and clenched. Meeting new people and making friends is trying. I miss you. I miss my other peeps. I avoid the phone because I want in-person connection. Ah, fuck it.

And I haven’t made art. Though I did color this weekend — a mandala. Does that count?

What is WRONG with me? I ask this in light of my recent encounter with death. Why the hell am I not embracing my life, cherishing it? Living it with joy?

And bless her wise, enormous heart, she wrote words of comfort and meaning.

That is a cliché. Encounters with death do not make us cherish life more. I think people say that because it is expected. It is what you’re supposed to say. Maybe they do sometimes, in moments of sunshine and cool breezes on the skin and what-not, but I think they often make us more fearful, more stressed, more tired. When my mother died I felt that there was nothing except a great, horrible void all around me. There was no floor under my feet and no roof over my head, just space and the knowledge that for the rest of time as I knew it, my mother would not be there. Perhaps because her death was unexpected, it made me feel that death waited around every minute of every day. It takes a while after that to feel that any of the small things that normally bring joy had any point at all. There is nothing wrong with you. You’re grieving. It isn’t easy and it isn’t tidied up with pithy sayings and clichés. But a moment will come when you’ll realize that you have been cherishing life, and you won’t be sure when the change came. At least, that’s how it was for me.

I have grieved deeply before. The last time I was also experiencing a moderate depression, and the loss which evoked grief deepened that episode. I have much more insight now, and a vastly better support system than I had then. Pharmacology helps too. Of late, I just find life draining and irritating. I become annoyed with the unexpected, when I would rather meet it with equanimity. Cognitive behaviorists would prescribe that I need to change my thinking. Buddhists would suggest I meditate and notice my ego. Athletes would recommend more exercise. Psychoanalysts would infer that this was connected to a long-buried childhood pattern or experience. All may be true, but this doesn’t change a thing.

I long for (and perhaps this is part of the problem) the following experience, and wish it to be the general tone of my life:

I arrived for one of my last sojourns at The Farm on a chill sunny day quite early in June 1979, just after Aunt Jane and Uncle Kip had moved up for the summer, while the lemon lilies and iris were still in bloom, before all the asparagus had gone to fern. After settling my considerable baggage in the downstairs front bedroom, which would be mine now that I could no longer climb the stairs to the one above it, I wandered back into the kitchen. It was new to me, the ample wooden cabinets and yellow Formica counters and stainless-steel sinks and especially the wide bay window above the table. I stood staring through the newly ample panes at the sweep of garden, lavendar flags and yellow trumpets against a tangle of green, the whole blurred in the long spreading shafts of late light.

     “What are you looking at?” Jane asked behind me.
     “Just the garden,” I answered. “I was feeling the pleasure of being exactly where I want to be.”
     “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Everyone should have one place where, when she’s in it, she’s exactly where she wants to be. And if she can no longer return to it, well, at least she’ll have been there. That’s something.

–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: an Erotics of Space & Place

I have experienced this before, numerous times, in my original home state and then during my Texas years. But not since I moved to California.

I write about my personal struggles here both to cope with my life (the expression is curative), and with the hope that others reading it might find a kindred spirit and thus feel less alone in their journey.