For most of my adult life I have lived with clinical depression. We are typically conditioned to view states like anger, fear, or depression as simply bad — as experiences to be eliminated as quickly as possible. I have come to see them differently. These states are often the catalysts for our deepest evolution. Depression and grief break the heart open. And a broken-open heart has more room in it than one that has never been cracked.
What follows is a journal entry I wrote at twenty-five, during the most severe episode I have ever experienced with the illness. It was the most painful and arduous experience of my life. It was also one of the most illuminating — and it gave birth, ultimately, to my spiritual awakening.
It was at once the most painful, horrific, cathartic, and healing experience of my life. I literally felt myself going crazy. The essence of my reality had not only been torn — it was being completely decimated. Truth, love, power, and beauty were being obliterated before my eyes. As I observed the world through my state of anxiety and abject sadness, everything had lost its color and shine. Fear was gnawing at my mind. Sorrow was overtaking me. All I could do was watch, trapped inside my own consciousness, as everything I believed I knew was being taken away by some unseen, unknown, malicious force.
I stood on a street in Southern California, tearing at the hair on my arms, listening to laughing, mocking disembodied voices in my mind. My mind was swirling with disbelief and I began to cry — because I truly believed there was nothing, absolutely nothing, left for me. No place existentially, physically, emotionally, or spiritually to which I could turn. I became convinced that the only remaining option, the only action that would bring an end to this suffering, was death.
It is common for people to view suicide as the pinnacle of selfishness. In my state of mind I saw no truth in this. I felt that in dying I would leave something of the world intact — as though my reality were the supreme reality, as though the world had been born from my mind and my thoughts were bringing about its destruction. This was megalomaniacal, I know. But I did not feel powerful. I felt I was simply persevering. In death, perhaps I would leave the world its last remaining shreds of truth.
There was a vortex in the deepest part of my being eating away at my spirit, my mind, my sanity. I felt I could feel, see, hear, and taste everything I knew escaping my reality. I knew I was losing my mind and I hated it.
And then — one shred of sanity remained. A whisper. A shadow in darkness telling me that none of this was really happening, that these thoughts were not truly me, that another alternative existed. That shred led me to seek help. In that help I found more pain, more uneasiness, more confusion. But ultimately the relief — the truth — was found in the recesses of my own being. Through meditation, silence, and self-inquiry, I found peace.
I am grateful for what happened. I was forced to see what remains when everything else is gone — when there are no stories left, no searching, only the bare fact of stopping. In that stopping I saw the truth of being as it is. From the most intense suffering I had ever known, I was introduced to the deepest, most genuine peace I have ever felt.
For that I am thankful. And blessed.