Dave's Place

It is a wonderful thing to have a dream: a vision of your life and what you want it to be will get you through hard times, it will encourage you and give you strength; it will help you to rise above what you thought to be your limits and overcome them.

But, contrary to all modern American philosphy might teach, it’s not magic, and it won’t, by virtue of mearly existing, cause you to overcome all things at all times. The world is bigger than any of us, and as miraculous our ability to overcome can sometimes seem to be, there comes a time when it’s just too big, and it will plough us into the ground. Markets crash, illness strikes, loved ones die, and madmen gain power. Often you can overcome, but sometimes you cannot.

Hollywood tells us that love conquers all. It doesn’t. It can give you strength, but it won’t help you if a suicide bomber sets himself off in your bus, or a lost kid brings a gun to school and opens fire on your child. Hollywood also has this mad idea that Rock-n-Roll can conquer just about any problem; well, inspiring music might help you rise above your self-imposed limits, but it’s not going to help you rise above the cold, hard, facts of life.

I don’t mean to be discouraging, or rob anyone’s hopes. But I get mortally weary of all the feel-good advice people shell out when things are going badly. Sometimes you just have to endure. And sometimes you have to go another way.

So hold loosely to your dreams. I think the heart of any successful life philosophy is to be flexible. When the Insurmountable Thing gets in your way, you might not be able to find a way over it or around it. Certainly, you should try, if there is any change of getting to the other side, and grit and determination may just create that way. But you also have to accept that just maybe you will just need to go another direction. Dream those dreams, but be willing to make new ones if you truly must. If you cannot do this, eventually, life is going to crush you.

With all due respect to Bobby MeFerrin’s hit song, somethimes it just isn’t that easy.

I got to thinking on this the other day when I saw a news artcile about a class that helped to re-train people to “think happy” to overcome depression (sadly, I can’t find it again to provide a link). Like any other news article, you had to take it with a grain of salt: the journalist, of course, was not an expert on the topic, and could only report the most superficial aspects of the class; the people interviewed were the ones who benefitted most from the “treatment;” and the subject itself is hugely complex … no one who knows anything at all about depression would be fooled into thinking this would be any kind of breakthrough for everyone that suffered from it. But it’s good that some find it helpful. At least that many can find some relief.

However, I also find it somewhat discouraging. By and large, people just do not understand depression and the peole who suffer from it. Here is a disturbing, and very sad link from a depressed young man that sums it up rather well. His family doesn’t understand, and he feels trapped and lost. I don’t think a “happy class” would help him.

One of the causes of depression (and I emphasize, just one of them), is what the medical community describes as a cognitive disorder. To put it in simplified laymans terms, it’s not being able to think straight about certain things. I believe that everyone on the planet suffers from one degree of cognitive disorder or another. It stems from the way the brain learns things: cause and effect create a pattern, and you remember it. If it repeats enough, your mind and your psyche treat it as established fact. But we don’t always learn things that are completely reflective of reality.

A relatively benign example of this is the way some sportsman get attached to specific clothing, like their lucky socks. The guy wears this pair of socks, and he wins his race, or his game; he doesn’t wear them next time, and he loses. Next time, he happens to be wearing them, and he wins again. On a lark, he wears them next time, and wins. Now, the pattern is set: if he wears his lucky socks, he’s going to win. It becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that the very act of putting on those socks bolsters his confidence and makes him feel better about his chances to win. It gives him that extra kick that often is the difference between winning and losing. If it goes on, he may truly come to believe it is the socks themselves causing the win. I call that a benign example, because I don’t believe most atheletes with a “lucky” article of clothing really think it’s the clothing; it’s just something to laugh about. But some really do believe it, and that can get very dangerous for their mental health. It’s patently, demonstrably false. Even the times they lose while wearing the item get explained away; they are no longer entirely sane regarding their lucky item.

A far less benign example is paranoia. Something bad happens to a person, and they discover (or perhaps it was obvious all along) that a “friend” caused it deliberately and maliciously. Let’s say this same person grew up in an abusive home, and such betrayals are part of the warp and weft of his character. He may have escaped becoming paranoid if he grew older and found some people that he could genuinely trust, but it didn’t happen. Now, every time he even thinks there is a possibilty of something bad coming down, he immediately starts looking for the person who is causing his trouble. A co-worker he admires neglects to say hello when passing him in the hall: the other may have been preoccupied, or mentally engaged in any number of innocent distractions, but our subject can only think, “uh-oh, I better watch out for so-and-so … he’s plotting something against me.” It’s the pattern his mind set, and it doesn’t help a bit that he was justified in forming the pattern in the first place. Betrayals did happen. But not every suspicious act constitutes such a betrayal, nor is every unpleasant event spring from one. But the paranoid is no longer capable of considering that, not really.

This ties into depression when a person develops an entire set of cognitive disorders that make the suffered feel trapped and hopeless. They might think, “I’m fat, and no one likes me” (no consideration for the fact that quite a few fat people have friends and loves all the same). They may think, “Mom always said I was worthless, and now I lost my job. I guess she was right.” Pehaps they don’t even make the connection anymore to what Mom said … they believe themselves the are worthless, and the loss of a job proves it. There could be any number of reasons they lost that job that have nothing to do with their worth; it may be that they really didn’t measure up to performing the way they needed to … but eiether way, it has no bearing on their actual worth as a person, it just seems that way to them. And nothing they do can break them of the mental habit of looking at themselves this way, so they become depressed.

Which leads me to the whole point of this getting-rather-long entry. Can training on being positive and thinking “happy” help someone stuck in that kind of a rut? Well, it depends on how deep they are in it, and just how many things in their life they are not seeing straight. Some like D. Karrow clearly can be helped, and was helped. But what if an extended depression has actually altered your brain chemistry? Or there is a physilogical factor (like post-partum depression)? Again, it varies on the case and the individual, but there is a good chance that what worked for one person may not work for the next. And, the worst of scenarios, what if the disorder has become so severe, they are incapable of seeing any sort of reason in the matter? What if our paranoid is so paranoid, he is truly convinced that every person that reaches out to help him is reaching out to strike at him in some way? That the “happy class” is really just a ploy to seperate him from his money? How do you deal with that?

There is only one way out: the sufferer has to realize they can’t “see straight” and they have to get help. They need to get to the place where they recognize they must have an outside view of their own lives, or they are never, every going to crawl out of the morass their mind has dropped them in. Sadly, a great many people never get there. Some remain functional, many do not. And some, like my old friends, die of it.

I’ve only recently heard of the deaths of two friends. Neither was a close friend, and I had fallen out of touch with both of them, so I hadn’t heard of either’s passing until well after the fact. As it happens, I heard of both deaths at the same time from yet another friend who I have remained in touch with; she had been looking up some of our old assosiates and so got the news.

The first apparently suffered from a fairly severe form of schizophrenia. He believed he heard voices. Whether due to the stigma, or some reason born of his illness, he kept the knowledge of his suffering to himself, and dealt with it by self-medicating: he drank a lot. Because of both the drinking problem and his own social troubles from the illness, he had some difficulty holding down jobs. When his last job fell through, he contacted his parents to ask them to put him up until he “got back on his feet.” His mom says, when he came to the door, he was exhausted and his skin had taken on a yellow tone. She took him to the doctor, who said he had advanced liver disease, and there was nothing to be done. He died within a few weeks.

The second, I know less details about, but I do know that there was a history of abuse in his family. It has been said the nature of the abuse was sexual, but I have never heard any more than that, nor had it confirmed. His sister committed suicide at the age of 16 (this is going back over 25 years), presumably because of the troubles in the family. When we were in high school, he and I used to have conversations about heaven – he found life so unendurable and depressing, he wanted me to talk to him about something that would cheer him up. I thought he had gotten past it; he married the girl that lived next door to me when I was a kid, and he became a school teacher. I once teased him about how he used to hate school so much, that now he made a career out of it. I thought he had adjusted. So I was shocked to find he had committed suicide. He wasn’t as well adjusted as I thought, and his personal demons caught up to him. He left behind his wife and a three-year-old daughter.

I understand very well how mental illness can dirve a person to self-destruction, and both of these cases are suicides in a sense. And both were needless. I find myself wishing I could have had a talk with either of them before it became too late … I don’t know that it would have made a difference, but I do know neither of them was seeing life or their circumstances very clearly. And that is exactly the nature of mental illness: your mind gets caught up in a process, where you are convinced things are a certain way, and no  evidence can get through to convince you it’s only faulty perception; the eveidence itself is filtered through the faulty thinking, and only an outside source that is trusted has any hope at all of getting through. But of course, if the ill person has isolated themselves, there is very little hope of that. And at the heart of it is generally a deep, personal fear, something the person will avoid at any cost, that keeps them from seeing things any differently.

Though most people don’t go so far as to destroy themselves, I believe this kind of self-deception is very very common. People who “won’t listen to reason;” “that’s just his way, ignore him;” any number of quirky behaviors that we tend to brush off as mere idiosyncracies. Often, they are pretty harmless, but the fact they exist at all tells me there is a problem. It’s somewhat like comparing a cold to a flu. The former is almost always a very minor thing and not to be worried overmuch about, and the latter might range from a miserable and difficult time to something fatal.

All of us suffer from our sniffles and colds, and for some they are even chronic. We may treat the cold, and we might just ride it out. But for a flu, you really ought to get some help.

I wish my friends had gotten that help, but, sadly, it’s too late for them. I can only hope for others who may be feeling that badly, that they will find the help they need.

There is an expression I heard, many, many years ago; I have oft repeated it myself, mostly after observing a young child bouncing off the walls, or a teenager waxing rhapsodic over plans for the weekend. It goes: "Why is youth wasted on the young?" Young people have such a surfeit of energy and drive, and so little idea how to effectively apply it.

I had the opportunity to apply the adage to my own younger self the other day. I was engaged in some Spring Cleaning, and was going through an old trunk. Amongst other things, I found a stack of photographs, pretty much from the same time period. Though they contained a fair representation of all my friends of the time, and the things we did together, one young lady appeared in several shots that were clearly meant to capture her, with no other consideration in mind.

It might be said that I had a crush on that girl, but it wasn’t strictly true in the way that term is usually used. I liked her; I was very interested in the possibility of a relationship with her; but that could be said of several young ladies at the time. She was just one I focused on more than the others. And I focused on her rather relentlesly, for several years before she decisively rebuffed me and I moved on.

The thing is, I was completely clueless as to how to start a relationship. Most likely my efforts were doomed from the start … she was just a teenager, and I was in my early twenties. Ironically, my wife is that much younger than me, but she was much older when I met her. At this age, I was an old man to this girl, and more than likely, my inexpert attentions drove her away rather more than attracted her. Yet I persisted: wasted youthful energy … wasted youthful drive.

There is another salient expression: "If only I knew then what I knew now …" If that were the case, I would have been content from the start just to be friends with this girl. It’s entirely possible I could have founded a romance with her, if I had been more confident, if I had been more direct, if I had been more patient in some ways and considerably less in others. But that’s all wisdom I have learned since, and no small amount of it from my failures with her. But I also would have recognized that there were several other young ladies who would have loved to make better aquaintance with me. I learned years later, far too late, of these interests. But I was focused too much on just a few, the few who didn’t really want that much to do with me. And the upshot is I might have been far less miserable, and I could have enjoyed my youth so much more, if I only just knew a few things better than I did …

Or would I? That’s what I have been thinking about the most. Both myself and the young lady are happily married now (and not to each other, in case anyone was thinking this is that kind of story). It worked out for us, in the end. And I could not imagine myself being happy with some of the other girls that had an interest in me; yet, if I had known, I would have paid them more attention than I did, and it may not have turned out well. I thought myself wise at the time, but an older wisdom tells me this: when passion knocks at the door, reason often gets locked in the closet. It’s just as well I was a bit clueless.

So is youth really "wasted" on the young?  No, they need all that extra energy simply to survive what their lack of experience puts them through. Older people have the reputation of being less resilient; but I have found that in most cases, they are capable of doing what they must when unusual circumstances come upon them. They simply don’t launch themselves into those unusual situations willy-nilly, because they know better. They have a better idea when to quit, and even when to push forward … and they don’t require a constant flux of emotional energy to get them through the bad choices.

Looking back, I wouldn’t want to go through again what my youthful inexperience once led me to. I probably couldn’t manage it; I don’t have the reserves for that kind of thing. Thankfully, I don’t need them.