Entry 30. Snow.
Watching the Wheels: A journal of treatment for depression.
Roughly fifteen years ago I was in the Netherlands, having just finished my undergraduate degree at the age of 39 and on vacation with my family. My ex-wife is Dutch and we travelled frequently to the Netherlands, spending several weeks in her parent’s hometown 100 kilometers or so from Amsterdam. Our son was a little over a year old, our daughter almost four, I was relieved to have finished college after dropping out at the age of 19. I had completed 20 credits before I went back at the age of thirty-five, a fear of failure mixed with trepidation that kept me doing what I loved to do. Drinking and selling records. Perhaps drinking and all things music is a better explanation. These were the things that had painted my life, the paint so thick with so many layers that it was thicker than the thin walls of mh life themselves. I did those two things until I hit a point where they no longer moved me, well, the drinking did move me, it pulled me somewhere that it had kept me from for so many years. It waited, biding its time until it had me firmly in the jungle of alcoholism, then it pounced. Music had also been slipping away, with the community of my friends getting married, having children, diving deeper into alcohol, drugs, madness and dying. It was no longer the most important thing for me, although my relationship to my wife was the most important thing in my life, I did not act like it. I stayed out late. I was unfaithful. Prone to dark moods. Angering quickly, I was feeling out of control.
When I graduated with my undergraduate degree in social work, I knew what I was going to do next. I had gotten accepted to a prestigious university with a scholarship, I had graduated at the top of my class and was excited to continue to learn. During that stay in the Netherlands I started writing about two friends, one who had died and one who would live for another seven or eight years until her own struggles with alcohol and mental health would exact their payment by taking her last breaths as a payment for a life filled with incredible highs and brutal lows. Those writings eventually became a blog which became a sort of touchstone for many people who had survived the 90’s underground scene and eventually it became the basis for my first book.
Today I am writing from Amsterdam just days before Christmas and much of what I had gathered and been present(ed) with since I got sober has passed on, small flickering ashes of something that once burned so hot that I thought in the pain and pleasure of that heat that it would last forever. My marriage. The loss of loved ones. The loss of a relationship that has left me bereft at times. As someone who is now wondering if the high joys I once felt will be present again. I went to an AA meeting the other day, and I attend these very infrequently at this point in my life for a variety of reasons, anyway, I sat in a room that was probably at least four hundred years old, high ceilings, ivory-colored walls, framed posters of AA slogans on the walls. “One Day at a Time.” “Keep Coming Back.” “Think Think Think”, this one turned upside down. The Serinity Prayer. They must have been on the walls for over twenty years. I realized halfway through the meeting that I had been to it before, probably fourteen years ago when I was studying in Amsterdam as part of my Master’s program. This time I sat, I listened, I meditated and spoke after a Scottish man whose was a sort of combination of both Sean Connery and Belle and Sebastian, a partnership of gruff and heavenly lilt. He was raw. And I was moved.
When I drank, I had thought sobriety would be boring. Full of a type of normalcy that repulsed me growing up. Sitting in front of the television at night watching mindless flickering lights that were yelling at me. Canned laughter. Early bedtimes and spending the weekends buying groceries, writing checks, making a list of dinners for the week, board games, trying to rest for a moment before the monotony of the work week. Canned life. What I have realized over the past twenty-three years is that I am striving for a calm life which does not mean a boring life. These are very separate things. Drinking provided a distraction from the outside world, it provided a panoramic technicolor view of a world that I felt was absurd, difficult, mean. Making it bearable, funny, and I was less tethered to it. Sobriety changed this, attending AA meetings, Buddhism and writing all transformed my relationship to the outside world to focus on my inner life. For this I found many years of serenity, an acceptance of life and of a nature of things I don’t understand nor do I feel compelled to search for any longer.
Depression, and not the type that finds a solace and accompaniment in a melancholy song (cue “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying”) but the kind that crawls not only under the skin but in the deep recesses of a person’s organs making the lungs work harder as if they are trying to breath in the darkness of a winter night, barren, on fields of ice where every inhale feels as if the brittleness of life will crack until the out-breath. Where the heart is not only heavy but an anchor that lies on the floor of the past, where second guessing and wishful thinking doesn’t bring relief but only more anxiety, and where the brain has trained itself to play only one song over and over and you’re fucking sick of it. This sort of depression that no longer wants an external distraction, because (trust me ) they no longer work but desires an internal distraction.
This is where TMS and ketamine have made an impact in my life as I completed one and still undergo ketamine treatment every few weeks. Taking the incredible hotness, I don’t another word to call the desire to want to quit living into something else, cooler and put away, “not now child” it might be saying. For now, that is all muffled. And I look for the internal responses to change; at times they do but the doubt is there. It has always been there, for this, I am sure.
I have not wanted a drink, or shall I phrase it as I have not desired a drink in many years, my last one was nearly a quarter century ago and I am not too concerned about taking one. There is zero illusion in that I could drink normally, even the desire to drink normally isn’t there. If I drink, I want all of it. And to get drunk as quickly as possible. Twenty-three years later and this part of my relationship to alcohol has not changed. The obliteration that drunkenness provides may feel appealing, but I also know that to take a drink would engulf me in anger.
In all of my sober relationships whether with lovers or dear friends, there is always a point in the relationship where I am asked if them having a drink will bother me, somehow cause me to want to perhaps toss my life away because they are drinking a glass of red wine. Or a craft beer. Or a silver-dollar-pony. I realize that these questions were out of consideration to check in as a way of not wanting to tempt me into something. An act of kindness. In retrospect I sometimes wonder if they were questioning themselves in some sub-conscious way. As if drinking two drinks every night, nothing more unless there is something important or someone important going on, is enough. The search of internal calm usually entails the introduction of something external into the body. A drink. A cigarette. A cell phone. An Instagram. A twitter. A Tik-Tok. A new lover. A new food. I am no different and my own journey of recovery, which is a word I have never liked as it still points to an otherness that I have always struggled with, as a conjecture of not empathy but sympathy. No thank you. Anyway, I still put things into my life which cause me harm. Others harm.
The difference between solitude versus isolation is one of contemplation over fear, or should it be said of contemplation despite the fear. I woke up this morning alone in my hotel room on the outskirts of Amsterdam, I had slept in too late for my sober self, but it was ok. I woke up wanting another body next to mine. Naked next to me as the morning broke free from my hibernating brain. To kiss the back of the other, hands slightly holding hips and feeling. Just feeling. I also realize to have this is also another step into the snow, into the crisp unknown of life as it lays before me, and when I turn back I can see all the other footprints in the snow, the brown of mud and the small imprints of the forest animals, the V-shaped markings of birds who had landed and hopped over the snow, beaks burying into the coldness rooting out nuts, berries, any nourishment. Alive. Cold. Cool.
