Dance in seven time

The first time I heard a first-person description of depression, I was in Cary, N.C., cleaning the living room with the talking lamp yapping in the background. A reporter was interviewing a woman with clinical depression, and her words stopped me cold: It’s not that you feel bad; it’s that you feel like you’ll never feel anything other than bad. Oh, I thought, so that’s what this is.

About the same time, I saw an ad for a clinical trial at UNC of a new anti-depressant, and I signed up. The doctors confirmed that yes indeedy, I had clinical depression, so I trotted over to Chapel Hill every week or two to have my vitals taken and answer a battery of questions, one of which was, “On a scale of one to ten, ten being very good, how are you feeling today?” I consistently scored myself in the two to four range. At one point, the Hungarian doctor put down his fountain pen (this was before laptops and internets, children) and asked (out of genuine curiosity), “On your best day ever, what score would you give it?” I had to think hard on that one, but eventually I said, “A seven.”

(After several months of this, I finally asked Dr. Hungary, “At what point should I start feeling different?” He hesitated to respond, because it was double-blind and all. But the answer was that if I were in fact getting the drug, I should have felt the difference long before. I was getting the placebo, so we ended my participation then. However, for whatever reasons, that drug never made it to the marketplace.)

I have to tell you that three decades later, I struggle almost every day with that unrelenting darkness that Winston Churchill referred to as the black dog. It’s not passing through the Slough of Despond, it’s being imprisoned there with no key to the door. Every joy is muffled, while every rejection, pain and fear is magnified. No amount of telling me to get a grip, look on the bright side, count my blessings or anything else helps. And despite my best efforts, medically, I’m beginning to think nothing is going to help. Ever.

When every day is the exact same shade of charcoal, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s Valentine’s Day, your birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving or even Christmas. You watch others diving into it, but can't muster up the energy. This tends to make the delta between the Season of Mandatory Joy that’s relentlessly shoved down our throats by pretty much everything and everyone, and what I'm experiencing, feel like a knife between the ribs. That's why I try to focus on the music of Advent during December. I keep looking for the light that I often don’t believe is there for me.

So I get it that, for the generations of humans before the proliferation of manmade lights, people kind of held their breath through the longer nights and made a big splash on the night of the Winter Solstice. Bonfires, songs, feasts, alcohol—calling on the Higher Powers to do their thing and drive back the darkness. And why Christians co-opted those celebrations to mark the birth of the Messiah (which more likely occurred in the Spring, if we go by the astronomical and meteorological clues in the Gospel narratives). God-made-man = light of the world. We can follow that light and find our way out of the Slough of Despond, which for some is merely seasonal.

For today’s piece, then, I’m taking a curve in this pilgrim’s progress and heading back to the music of my youth—"Solstice Bells”, by Jethro Tull. Yes, not really Advent. My blog, my rules, my prerogative.

And I’m cranking up the volume.