When it’s thrust upon you…

“What you’ve done takes a lot of courage,” Danny says as we round the corner for our second circuit of Page Park.

Danny’s my next door neighbour and one of a handful of people I wanted to open up to when my depression took a savage turn. Mike, who lives next door to Danny, was another.

“So what’s going on?” Mike had said, after I cancelled our drinks pleading low mood.

He’d been through something similar, too, I learned, sitting down with pizza and wedges he’d rustled up in his clanking oven. He’d even taken the same medication I’m now on.

Mike was not remotely phased by my story. Neither was Danny, who started texting me links to well-being apps that had helped him. Later that week, Mike took time off work (he’s an MD and everything) and drove me out for a 3 course lunch in a country town. Danny texted to say he was rooting for me and scheduled us in future circuits of Page Park.

Men, eh?

My wife was waiting up when I got back from Mike’s.

You’ve gone from being so secretive about your struggles, she said, to wanting to tell the whole neighbourhood.

It was true. I felt this primal need to be held in community. Each person who I shared with acted as a point of connection, as a twinkling node of light in a web that could just about keep me off the ground. It wasn’t long before I shared what was going on with neighbours the other side of us, too.

“I don’t feel particularly courageous,” I replied to Danny as Page Park cafe hoved into view. “About being open about my struggles. About letting myself be vulnerable.”

Making yourself vulnerable involves the choice to let your guard down. But my depression had skinned me alive and when you have no skin left on you, there’s no guard to let down. I was a pulsating, horripilating mass of vulnerability. To paraphrase Shakespeare, “some are born vulnerable, some achieve vulnerability, and some have vulnerability thrust upon ’em.”

I was definitely in the latter camp.

“Yeah, but,’ Danny went on, “it’s not as if you spend your days necking vodka and watching game shows to drown out the pain. At least you’re trying to get to the bottom of it.”

That much was true.

But if I’d known what was ahead of me when I started this blog, I don’t think I’d have chosen to walk this path.

Parker Palmer is a much revered American author, activist and educator now in his eighties. He was rapping about his white privilege and the genius of Rosa Parks 30 years ago, long before it was woke. He is also a Quaker elder and a phrase from the Quaker tradition provided the title for his opus maximus, Let Your Life Speak. In it, he writes with a shocking candour about his experiences of depression.

“Twice in my forties I spent endless months in the snake pit of the soul. Hour by hour, day by day, I wrestled with the desire to die, sometimes so feeble in my resistance that I “practiced” ways of doing myself in. I could feel nothing except the burden of my own life and the exhaustion, the apparent futility, of trying to sustain it.”

He goes on to say that it took him a very long time to write about his depression;

But I’m so glad he did.