The abyss...

I’ve been in a deep, dark funk.

This isn’t all that out of the ordinary for me. I’ve been dealing with extreme depression for many years. It comes; it goes. I try to hold on tight and ride out the storm. Sometimes it clobbers me and I just shut down completely. When that happens about all I can do is sleep. That’s mostly what I’ve been doing for the past four or five days.

If you’ve ever been depressed—not sad, but clinically depressed—you know that one of the most frustrating aspects of it is that you can’t answer all those obvious questions: What’s wrong? Why are you depressed? What can I do to help?

And of course everyone asks those questions. I get them all the time. And it’s okay, really. The people who ask them care about me and are trying to help. Besides, they really are good questions. I often spend days, even weeks, asking them myself. I just rarely come up with any answers.

But I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve learned that sometimes there are answers, or something that passes for them anyway. Sometimes I sense a dissonance within the dissonance—so faint that I used to miss it. It hides like a shadow in the dark and it whispers to me. And if I listen hard enough, it will tell me what's bothering me. Not why I'm depressed, exactly—but maybe what brought the depression to the surface and fed it.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past several days, when I haven’t been sleeping. Listening.