Rediscovering joy

At the recommendation of a friend, I've been reading Andrew Solomon's Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression for my nonfiction. I'm only 94 pages into it, which is not very far. The book is close 500 pages of prose with a 40 page bibliography. It seems to cover depression from every different angle. 

On pages 34-37 the book tells the story of a Cambodian woman named Phaly Nuon, who survived the brutality of the Pol Pot's Killing Fields. For reference to how ruthless the regime was, one out of four people in Cambodia were murdered or died of starvation during that time. For the size of the population he ruled over, Pol Pot was many times worse than Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong.

Afterward, in a Thai refugee camp, she saw women who were wasting away PTSD and depression. She treated these women by following four steps: forgetting, working and loving; and then the most important step, teaching them that those three are all inter-related, part of a whole. Phaly has had so much success, that she has been a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize more than once.



 I recognized the steps-- or the first two-- in things I've done by accident, and it  explains my recent good spirits and recovery. As Phaly said about the first step, you're not going to forget your depression and traumas entirely, but I can work on it little by little. I've been forgetting the things that depressed me. Unfortunately, this involves avoiding my family of origin, at least socially and for a long while.

I was already working on my writing, and now I'm focused on it. In fact, by fall 2009, I was at the point where the only thing that brought me pleasure was writing. I threw myself into it. I didn't care how good or bad it was by then.

Depression does that in the long term, even if you manage to resist the drive toward suicide, it soils everything you enjoy. My depression didn't get treated for a long time, and after that, it wasn't competently treated. I developed some great coping skills to get through the workday, working through watery eyes, telling people it was allergies.

In my personal life, however, I was wasting away. I swear this is true, I didn't watch TV for three decades. About the same thing happened with music. I didn't collect hardly anything at all. I seldom went to movies and couldn't get myself to sit still and watch one. I'm confessing here that I'm not that very well read for a writer. For twenty years, I maybe read two books a year. My interest in writing was dead from about 1998 until 2002-- when I tried it for a short time only to get discouraged-- and then was dead again until 2009. I had completely given up on it. I couldn't get any encouragement. Little did I know at that time, but of course the writing wasn't going to show any promise because I hadn't practiced nearly enough. Therefore, no one was going to encourage me to do it.

I had fun hanging out with friends more than anything. In fact, being with anybody was better than being alone with my depression and anxiety. However, there were also long periods where I went out and waited for enjoyment that never came and closeness that never connected, until conversation itself became unrewarding. 

The Internet both made my withdrawal worse and made it tolerable. It provided distractions. All the while, I used sex as a palliative, also care of the Internet. I could sometimes escape into a game of Civilization and not emerge for 36 hours. (I'm old-fashioned. I still love turn-based Civ 4). 

But with forgetting and consistent work, I'm finally enjoying things that I haven't really felt satisfaction in for decades. With the Attention Deficit problem also treated, I've been able to focus. I exercise every day now. I also watch movies and TV, but man, there's a lot to catch up on. Same with books, but I'm speed-reading them now. You can't do that with movies. Noonday Demon isn't the only one.


Two others I'm reading now: Glen Duncan's Talulla Rising, that's the sequel to The Last Werewolf and The Beyond by Jeffrey Ford. This is the second book in The Well-Built City trilogy. For a while, I'm just going to be reading all the books that have accumulated over the years, the ones that have followed me around forever. I'm also going to read what friends recommend.