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No. 3  “We have to walk toward that light at the end of the tunnel, and just hope it’s not a train coming.” -Jay (A Friend From the Road) As I thought over the experiences – the life – of the past week, I struggled with what exactly to write about. There was the drive from Denver to Kansas City; a drive filled with music, weed, a two-storied KFC, and the intense deepening of kinship and friendship. Maybe I could write about the conversations peppered with poetry and philosophy, meeting the director of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, getting kicked out of a Krewe Mardi Gras party. There was the time we set off a museum alarm that I’m fairly certain got the cops called to the scene (being the genius alarm trippers that we are, we were already blocks away by the time the fuzz dared to show up), or the time the three of us (Ryan Connell, our host and friend Phillip, and myself) wandered around the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, only rejoining, by happenstance, to stand in awe of a painting that rendered each of us dumbfounded for a small eternity.
That was it. Though inhabiting a vast swath of the spectrum of experience, all these events and conversations and poems and pieces of art held in common the motif of harmony, of balance, and vitality. My dear friend Phil (not the Phillip mentioned earlier) once posed a sort of theory to me as we were discussing depression and anxiety (the basis of many of our chats): depression isn’t just the result chemicals gone awry or missing in our brains, but can also be the manifestation of living in opposition to our core values and beliefs. I felt an initial resistance to this idea. I liked being able to point to science to explain away my lifelong depression; anything else was an onus foisted upon me. As an experienced shirker of responsibility, I fought this one. Yet as I sucked on this sour gumball of truth I began to wear down the shell to find the sweet center of his words. Even if my depression was caused by malfunctioning chemicals and receptors, I was truly depressed by how I was living my life, how I passively watched it play out. I spent days and months locked indoors in my room drinking, getting high, lying in bed, watching television for upwards of sixteen hours a day, over or under eating, over or under sleeping, and with little to no feeling, no sensation. Those months turned into the better part of the last decade. What was I at odds with within myself? When I started up with my most recent therapist back in May of 2017, she had me do an activity during our second session. She presented me with a deck of cards, and split it into two piles. I was to go through the first pile, read the word on the card, and then, without taking more than a few seconds, decide if it was something important or resonant to me. I did this until we whittled both stacks down to nine word cards. These were to be reflective of my core values and beliefs, things that I felt defined me and the life I wanted: Nature Curiosity Love Adventurous Intelligence Awareness Creativity Competence Solitude Up to that point I had either had my values delineated for me by religion, or, in the absence of a structured value system, I wandered undefined through my life and the world. (Footnote: I do not believe that we need to have our values so clearly defined and organized, but we need at least an inkling of who we are and what we consider paramount in life.) I was depressed from my brain chemistry, from circumstance, and from living a life in obstinate and direct opposition to the things that were my “I”. The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word ‘I.’ “I” had been living a life of slow, prolonged suicide. Though I longed for a physical death, my finest suicidal work came from the agonizing erosion of the “I”, of self. My life was that of an exotic animal kept as a pet, except that I was both the ignorant cruel owner and the whipped, starved tiger. My “I” was abused, but patient and ferocious…waiting. I warred against myself for so long that I no longer had any basis for understanding harmony, balance, or self. Whether I was beating myself back with a rod, or swatting and growling low in the corner, I was war. There was starvation and decay; the desolation of a rich inner life, of purpose, of being. Who I performed as hated the raw authenticity of my vibrant, sharp truth. War had become my natural state of being, whether I be the whipper or the whipped. As Ryan and I made our way from Kansas City to Tulsa we both were shocked and amazed by the quality of the experiences and connections we had and made thus far; jubilation and carefree-ness both foreign to our usual states of existence. “You know, I think it’s that we haven’t had time to think about being depressed.” “That’s true. Huh. I guess up until this week we’ve just been locked in our rooms doing nothing with nobody,” I mused in reply. We’ve been living in opposition to our core values up until now. That week on the road found us driving through the great plains of the United States, eternities of sky and land spread before us; every day saturated, oozing with culture, knowledge, learning, nature, comradery, expansion, adventure, bursts of shared creativity…you know, soul food. Ryan turned up the volume, and we both wailed out along with Sufjan Stevens: And for what felt like the first time, I was well.
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