#31 Depression as bliss

But first: Tammi Salas and I re-launched our 40-day sobriety email course, The Mantra Project. We created this course in 2015, sold many thousands of them, and shuttered it in 2019 before my book came out. We brought it back in its original, nostalgic form. I spent about 30 hours re-writing/updating the 40 essays and affirmations, and here’s my plug: Even when I passively immersed myself in this course, it had a large and positive effect on me. If you need some help shifting into a more positive mindset, or staying the course, or getting some inspiration, or making it through your first few weeks or your tenth year or remembering why life is good, etc., this is a great option. This is a course that anyone can use, you do not need to be sober or in recovery to benefit.

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My favorite Pema Chödrön story of all times goes something like this¹: Pema, decades into her buddhist practice (and probably a full-on buddhist nun by then), was on some kind of meditation retreat, and she was experiencing one of the coldest depressions she had ever known. That bottomless, suffocating, terrifying kind where it’s just dark and bleak and pervasive and you can’t even hold a pencil you’re so racked and I don’t even know why I’m explaining this because if you’re here reading this you’re probably no stranger to the Big D. Anyway, the point is, Pema had this very bad depression, and she kept on trying to fix it, to bring herself out of it, to meditate her way through it. And that depression, it would not budge, it just got worse, and she started to think there was really something terribly wrong with her. After all those years on her meditation cushion and all that work she’d done, there she was, stuck in a thick fog of worst feeling when she really should have been enlightened by then, floating on a cloud next to Jesus.

When she finally went to talk to her teacher and ask for help, and she told him about it, he interrogated her to understand what she was experiencing, and when she described the sensations his eyes lit up and he got very excited. He said to Pema, “Oh!! what you’re talking about is the Dakini Bliss!” and then he went on about how fortunate she was. To him, what she was experiencing wasn’t wrong, it was this rare, spiritually “blissed” state. Lols. Anyway, after that Pema got really excited to have such an opportunity to experience this bliss aka her depression, so she ran back to her meditation cushion, and just like that it totally dissolved.

There’s a lot packed in that story and I’m sure there’s meaning beyond what I can filter out that you might be able to, but there’s two things it makes me think of. The first is how familiar it is to feel like something is wrong when I’m feeling that kind of incapacitating depression, how much my fear of it and what it says about me and my inability to snap out of it ends up perpetuating it. In Pema’s case, she’s sitting there going “this should not be happening” and freaking out about her depression and trying to get rid of it and thinking there is something very wrong with her and it just keeps getting worse, and then plot twist—she discovers not only is it supposed to be happening but it is a rare and special opportunity, and then she runs toward it with her arms open and the whole thing evaporates.

The second thing it makes me think of is how when I’m not experiencing depression—when I’m miles outside of it and everything is possible and I can’t even remember what bleak feels like or that I even ever felt such a way—I get the concept of Dakini Bliss. When I’m biopsychospiritually integrated in a positive way (or whatever we call the “not depressed” state), I can completely grasp that the raddest part of being a human is how we get to experience all these wild states and that they all belong and that depression, too, has her rightful place. I imagine the next time I get super low, I’ll remember these things, and that I’ll get real curious and intimate with my depression like it’s some leading edge, transcendental state I am capable of witnessing and examining and having fun with. Then I actually experience depression, and I forget all those intentions, and I cannot separate myself from it let alone be grateful for it and I lose the plot and I want it to absolutely not be happening and I think there is something very, very wrong with me.

I bring all this up right now, this week, not because these past few weeks have been hard, which they have, but because the last few years have been. It has been an extended period of not knowing up from down, of forgetting the plot, of some serious nihilism. I will remember this period of my life as one of the darkest, not only because of what was happening personally, but because of what was happening globally. I’m not alone in this. The majority of people I know² are not okay and have not been okay for a very long time.

The thing I have tried to do the most during this time, these past few years and especially these last eighteen months, is to not escape it or fix it or transmute it or turn the specific suffering and loss and pure grief of this period into some kind of commodifiable experience, some lesson, some teachable moment. I have tried so hard to do what Pema’s teacher urged: to see this as a nearly orgasmic spiritual experience, a peak opportunity; to walk around the edges of all this pain and all this confusion, to be the witness, to not try and “fix” it or shoo it away or make it wrong or make myself wrong for being where I am. To let it all actually be here, fully existing, as a worthy experience, just as valid and wonderful as what I’d define as the more thriving or joyful periods of my life.

I’m not saying that’s what I’ve accomplished; I am saying that has been my goal. My goal has been to stay exactly within every awful, unwanted minute and experience. It has been wonderful and liberating and expansive. And it has been hateful.

There was a book I read last year in the thick of much unwanted change and unanticipated grief, called Transitions. It was written in 2004, and it laid out the three phases of all change: (1) the ending, (2) the “period of distress and confusion”, (3) the new beginning. Because I was squarely in the “period of distress and confusion” (the bologna of the change sandwich) I skipped straight to that chapter, which told me that most people won’t accept the discomfort the liminal space delivers, most people cannot stand the insecurity of the in-between or the inability to define oneself as this thing or that—to most of us, the place between no longer and not yet is total fucking hell. And because we don’t like it so much, because it completely fucks with our ideas of what being a together, functioning human is, we will often refuse to stay there. We will make a plan, we will reinvent, we will force the next beginning. We will not stay there in the fertile dark soil of the unknown, we will not allow for the ambiguity, we will not tolerate the groundlessness the in-between requires. And therefore most of us do not ever truly get to know ourselves; not wholly at least. We only know the version that is taking refuge in the construction of the next identity.

When I read all that I asked myself if I could live without making an escape route. I challenged myself to not reinvent myself, or plot, or plan. I decided to stay in the exact spot I didn’t want to be and as I explained to Emily on our podcast last spring, it felt a lot like taking off my skin suit and just standing there, naked, exposed, blurred. A double capricorn who’d spent her entire life figuring her way out of things, making shit happen, who finally just stopped and wondered if she’d even exist if she didn’t have a strategy, if she wasn’t fixing, if she wasn’t building. Wonderful liberating expansive. Hateful.

I think what I’m trying to say about depression, nihilism, the not knowing, the in-between, the groundlessness, or any icky states we run from or call wrong, is that they aren’t. In some ways, those places we think of as detours or failures or embarrassments are what is right about us. If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that I won’t spontaneously combust when I stay in the places that scare me, or the places I don’t want to be at all. It’s the opposite. Those are the places where I grow.

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Ten Things Right Now

Okay it’s twenty things this week. Kids that don’t want to work are mentally ill, sober people breaking rules is mentally stable, Roger Ebert’s final words, isolation vs. burn-out, a new mental health website, a guide to sober Paris, sweeping decrim legislation, pot soda gets a big check, a bunch of resources on intersectionality and recovery, a psychedelic conference, and Cher.

1. “This is what happens when adults agree to something and then one of them doesn’t follow through. This isn’t a punishment. This is a consequence.” Ana Marie Cox on defiant behavior and rule-breaking in sobriety was my favorite; as a lady who still likes to break rules for the sake of breaking them, I found this to be a really refreshing take.

2. I’m a little burnt out on all the Psychedelic Renaissance talk but in case you aren’t here’s a conference with forty speakers that’s free this week

3. Last week I went to a live show and there was this song called Roger Ebert about Roger Ebert’s final words and how he had this realization at the end of his life that this (existence, earth, life, etc.) was all an “elaborate hoax” and it slapped. Here’s an article about it.

4. This article in the New York Times on how fucked up teenagers are which used this qualifier—“B. wants to move to the countryside and raise dogs: ‘beautiful, innocent, fluffy dogs, just like mine!’ She doesn’t want to work, or make money, or have children, or be with anyone really”—as an example of what’s “wrong” with the kids. It took me 30 additional years to figure out what B. did in her teens. Maybe we should be more like the kids.

5. Is it burn-out or is it just loneliness?

6. I love the Craft Talk newsletter and I especially love this piece about how she is focusing herself to finish her book which feels like generally good advice to live well

7. A really big deal especially since this Goop-backed cannabis soda company just raised $27 million. Yes, let’s please let the mostly brown and black folks who are in prison for fractional marijuana possession out before Target starts selling us pot drinks.

8. In the last newsletter I wrote about non-alcoholic drinks being a slippery slope for me; here’s a really great HuffPo article, 3 Things to Consider Before Trying a Non-Alcoholic Drink if You’re Sober

9. It is entirely insane that we are more worried about people using drugs than we are about people dying. Harm reduction does not enable or encourage drug use and even if it did, it still doesn’t matter. People dying matters. People having access to humane treatment matters. People being able to test the drugs they are going to use anyway for potentially lethal ingredients matters.

10. If anyone is struggling with long covid brain fog, me too. Mine goes in and out, and I absolutely cannot retrieve words or remember things I’m supposed to remember and it feels awful; this article talks about it and also confirms it’s probably not permanent.

11. Megan Thee Stallion launches a mental health resource site

12. Forbes creates a Sober in Paris guide

13. “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be helping tobacco companies study teenagers”

14. Someone asked me for articles and resources on intersectionality and addiction and then proceeded to send me all the links from their research! Here are some great resources I didn’t know about: Intersecting Identities and Substance Use Problems; The Barriers of Intersectionality in Addiction Recovery; Exploring intersectionality and alcohol-related problems.

15. “Anyone who fails to recognize the condition this world is in can hardly have anything to say about it.” I’m not sure I agree with that statement but I did love this essay.

16. What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil?

17. The plot of Don’t Look Up, but real

18. Indeed, who are the original urban guerrillas, if not people with disabilities?

19. I spent about an hour going through the rabbit hole that is this database of consumer aesthetics. I’m not sure how many people are specifically thrilled by perusing categories of aesthetic consumer themes by year, but I am and “Corporate Hippie” and “Y2K Aesthetic” were thrilling

    moon_body

    

    A post shared by MIRIAM 🌹 Women’s Mentor (@moon_body)

1. please note this is entirely from memory (and hearing the story a dozen times) and there are probably errors in my recounting; also note in some places this story is told and she describes what she was feeling as anxiety, not depression, which are not the same thing. It doesn’t matter but it does.

2. It’s helpful to note most of my friends are mental health professionals, yoga and meditation teachers, artists and writers who are almost all in recovery. Sensitive people for sure, but also people who are well versed in self-healing, navigating ambiguity, working with grief and confusion, etc.