My Interior Castle

Feeling super suicidal, the holidays draw near and I look around and listen. I hear the quite intake of my own voice and the hum of a dishwasher. I want six yards of rope, a drink and Handel blaring on the speakers. I have no connection to the world around me that feels secure, no lifelines, no friends that can haul me out of this world of almost relentless darkness. I am a castle, made entirely of cut crystal. A sun blazed in the center one time, years ago. I felt infinite, like god. Now we are cold and dark, my walls are opaque and dirty. God does not dwell here any longer, and personally, I care not to either.

My mother first took me to a psychiatrist when I was almost ten years old.  She believed my being overweight was caused by depression.  I was found to be depressed; also fat, but depressed now in addition.  I was predetermined to be unhappy, it seemed, and this terrified me.  Yes, my happiness always seemed pale in comparison to my peers.  Tears of anger and frustration were common as a child.  For days I could never pinpoint exactly why I felt so terribly alone and separated from everything.  My family, friends, and the activities I sometimes enjoyed began to repel me away from them.  Over the years, I gracefully mastered bright eyes and smiles for the surrounding world to see.  I simply did not want to give anyone a reason to talk to me about the deepening sadness within.  An almost constant sadness I would eventually come to know intimately as darkness.  As a result of living with depression, I have come to find that god “is a belief, with wings, and arms that can carry you. It’s not to be afraid of, and if it can’t hold you up, seek for something new” (Tony Kushner).  This is about how god could not carry me, and what I have been rebuilding since.              

In August of this year it became the fourteenth anniversary of my diagnosis of what is now called treatment resistant depression; mine specifically is a combination of major depression and dysthymia.  I also have an anxiety disorder and have insomnia.  In mid October I went to the Student Counseling Center, a place I find and know intimately by the time I leave any given university, and I suppose I want to share some of my narrative of how depression has diminished my life and, at many times, my very will to live.  It has also shown me many things I believe I would have missed understanding had I not experienced the world in such a way.  I have attempted, in the last fourteen years, to develop a language and rhetoric around depression to help me contain, for whatever time possible, that which I believe may ultimately consume me.  Daily, I have to force myself to get up, go through motions, paste on smiles, and remind myself that tomorrow might be better.  In the in the words of Mary Anne Radmacher, I have to “speak quietly to [myself] & promise there will be better days.  Whisper gently and provide assurance that [I] really [am] extending [my] best effort.  [I] console [my] bruised and tender spirit with reminders of many other successes.  Offer comfort in practical and tangible ways—as if [I] were encouraging [my] dearest friend.  [I] recognize that on certain days the greatest grace is that the day is over and [I] get to close [my] eyes. Tomorrow comes more brightly…,” or so I ought hope.              

There is immense frustration and feelings of hopelessness in knowing you have a disease that affects every facet of your daily experience that cannot readily or fully be treated or cured, despite the amount of pills you choke down or the people you bear your secrets begrudgingly to.  I take a deep breath and listen: I realize that sometimes, it is easier to change the world than it is myself.  A recent morning, while others were not in a psychiatrist office, I found myself in a place I know well, a waiting room filling out paperwork about suicidal tendencies and listing well beyond the space of the box provided which medications I take and for what condition.  Then came the family tree of psychotic and physiological predispositions (leaving me, as usual, to wonder how my person ever came into fruition from such destructive genes).  There are boxes for feelings of loneliness, anger, disconnectedness from non-familial persons, and naturally for how much alcohol and drugs one consumes.  This is depression and this is graduate school, what exactly do they want me to say?  I streamlined the process with direct answers: intense, sometimes but controlled, almost completely disconnected, less than six drinks per week.  Finally, the questions and paperwork are complete and while I waited I look discreetly but carefully at the other patients waiting to be “cured.”  I knew better than to hope for a cure and I awaited the further probing upstairs that would soon follow.              

These intakes all begin to feel the same: the practitioners ask the same questions, I give the same responses, receive the same diagnosis and we throw more darts at the mental dartboard hoping one hits and bursts depression, allowing happiness to flood into my being.  Questions concerning suicide, a history of psychotherapy, peaked interest in my abusive father, his death, my mother’s recent marriage and insistence that I need yet more therapy two times per week for the aforementioned things.  I am tired, tired of talking about it and receiving the same hollow promises and prescriptions.  My mother no longer speaks to me, having moved on with her life after my father’s passing, and I, a part of her old and also painful life, have been forcibly forgotten.  I am in a new place, mostly disconnected from my nuclear and extended family, internalizing a recent diagnosis of spinal stenosis and bulging discs, the pain associated with that, and of course, the almost ever-present depression.  I can talk about this all I want with therapists or friends alike, but at the end of the day, there I am, with the choice of letting myself be overcome or moving on.   I have decided that the depression, at least, is something I will always carry within me, though with further exploration I can hope to interpret and control it with more sensibility and grace.  Moreover, it can potentially be a positive teaching tool.             

Depression, for me, is a struggle against death into light, a willingness to live so that I can be a light in the world, despite living in darkness.  I struggle intensely with depression which I do not use in the vernacular; that is, I am not simply “depressed,” plagued with light mood swings when little events happen here or there.  I live in a vortex of light and dark, vying for some promise of salvation should I make it to either side completely, complete, alive.  I rarely feel the emotion of joy like others.  Depression hurts, it wounds, and you have the option to keep carrying on or…what?  My perception of the world around me is vastly different than that of many others, which is both a blessing and curse.  On one hand wounds, healing, and lessons from a childhood resisting this darkness taught me to dream and hope: I stretched toward my dreams and found them to be quite tangible, if only because I believed something was left living within me that needed to soar, in spite of being chained to my sadness.  I learned to do human things: sing, write, bake, garden, and play instruments to illustrate that I was still living and capable of doing things others could do.  I needed deeply to be with others, desired some solidarity with others who felt like me.  I did not find this and realized at that time, that despite being able to do human things, my vision was altered.  Even now, others can see the world filled with bright colors and joyously reach for the morning sky, but I see a mist in which I can neither escape from nor scatter, and believe me, valiantly I try.             

Despite my best efforts at staving off this darkness, it manages to deform and reform me.  Mostly, I feel as if I cannot illuminate myself any longer, at least not to the degree to which I need or long to be filled (with light and life), but I can feel value in my life knowing I function as something useful in a community.  That is how I rationally save myself from unhappiness, carving out and fighting for my space and function on this planet.  I grow tired, even knowing I have a space on this earth, and despite the need for solidarity, I cannot help but feeling the need to be away from everyone, to collect my thoughts and remember myself.  When I am pressed others, my context, and depression, I metaphorically kneel and let my spirit sink into the earth.  I grow quiet, restless, and forsake the company of anything that looks suspicious, human and happy, those I see as so much better than what I have let myself become. Meister Eckhart echoes this similar sentiment in more elegant words, saying that this foreign feeling of darkness is leading the soul nearer to the alien divine, and in depression “the soul is now becoming alien and remote from common sense and knowledge of things, in order that, being annihilated in this respect, it may be informed with the Divine.”  I am often in a place of spiritual sigh (imagine the exhale of a deep breath held in attempt to stave off pain), where I find my self and my relation to the universe after having been freshly destroyed.  Long walks outdoors, hours spent in practice rooms, over the stove, or writing, trying to find some way to connect myself to life again in the ways that feel most organic to me, while also trying to connect to all the places that are missing within myself.  I process at night when I cannot sleep, there are so many thoughts constantly running through my mind, worries and secrets held only by the thin gauze of science and psychology.   When everyone sleeps, all I manage to do is listen to the hum of street lamps, and know intimately every ridge upon my thumbnails.  I await dawn and hope tomorrow I can be better, relate to the world in better ways, do good things.              

I was indoctrinated with god as a child, came to experience and accept Him in my adolescence, then transformed into it when I realized the power and creation of god lies within each of us.  I am coming to know through this god process that, though I often dwell in darkness, my capacity to understand, experience and even reflect light is not diminished, but heightened as a result.  Dark nights are a time for the spirit to reflect and grow, to find its right relation to the universe.  St. John of the Cross wrote about times of darkness with a graceful understanding: dark nights are a time for searching and finding, becoming greater when we rise out of darkness into light once more.  Living in darkness is painful, though contemplation and gaining of wisdom of the darkness can transform the experience into something incredibly light.  Often, however, the pain causes us to feel abandoned.  We are plunged into darkness and we merely feel wretched, incomplete, and flawed.  John seems to believe that this feeling of iniquity must be assailed by the divine, but when it meets with us, the feeling is terrible, excruciating. “The divine lays siege upon the soul in order to make her new and to make her divine, stripping her of habitual affections and attachment to the old self which she had been reconciled…. In the face of her misery, the soul feels herself coming undone and melting away in a cruel spiritual death” (Dark Night of the Soul).  When it seems we have been destroyed beyond all measure, when we have been stripped naked, this is when we arise into light as new, whole, and blessed.  The pain of giving birth to a soul, imagine it!  The coming out of darkness into light is followed by grace: “A delicious feeling will wash over the soul, accompanied by a generous knowing of all things, human and divine.  These things do not fall into the old realm of common sense or ordinary knowledge… [here the soul] can be informed by the divine” (John of the Cross).  It is the process of becoming nothing in these dark nights that we may grow to be more, that we may come to know more of ourselves and of the divine.              

In her book The Interior Castle, Teresa of Avila discusses the transformation of the soul who experiences darkness, the transformation that occurs when this dark night approaches.  The soul is a crystal castle with many chambers or dwelling places.  In the seventh dwelling place, the soul finally comes to rest by “dying to itself,” praise and blame no longer have a negative effect, because rather than focusing on one’s self, the focus is on the divine that has instructed the spirit while in darkness.  One becomes aware of god in the very center of his or herself, united with the divine in such a way as to seem inseparable, like rain water in a river system, or two streams joining as one, or sunlight from two windows coming joining together into one brilliant ray of light.  Now god’s presence is felt at all times as a constant companion because the soul has recognized that the divine perpetually dwells within us, even in darkness.  Despite trials and tribulations, senses, and passions, the soul has better inner stability and a determination to recognize light.  Why this painful road to knowing then?               

The higher aim in bringing the soul to this devastated state is to re-define it and create something better.  The darkness was never meant to destroy us, but to help reorient us to the world, realizing through our divinity that it is not “the greatness of our works, [but] the love with which they are done.”  Great faith comes out of darkness, we can be transformed in our pain as we remind ourselves that the divine dwells within all creation and is constantly reworking and redefining us and it can help us connect with others in community.  I must say, however, that I believe the dark night induces a depression of enormous weight.  The immense loneliness experienced during this darkness is unlike other loneliness, certainly a painful progress.  In order to transform, it creates the feeling of complete rejection, of being an outcast in the world.  I think “god splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching,” Kushner again perfectly captures the experience of wrestling with god in depression. Within the struggle there is an inner numbness, an unbearably empty womb.  The situation is absurd and beyond the boundaries of the conscious mind, certainly by the beaten ego. Here we are made to learn, by severest experience, that divine reality cannot be confused with conscious reactions to it, nor with mental reactions to it: darkness is made bearable by knowing it belongs to an unknown and unknowable realm that transcends human faculties and defies human perception.  It is still our job to do the painful stitching.  

I do not regularly use god language, but the experience of John and Teresa is too unmistakably like my own to not glean the wisdom they provided for generations of those plagued by depression to come: find the calm within the storm and learn from it without letting it destroy you.  Let it be transformative and provide contrast; for if one has known true darkness, experiences of light and grace will seem that much more profound, they will have the ability to further shape and define.  Feeding the hungry, being with those who need a hand to hold and ears to patiently hear, or simply seeing the sun rise become miracles that remind me of my creative and wonderful powers to be an active agent of good on earth.  That seems sensible and intuitive to my soul, at least, and perhaps that comes out of my need to survive.              

Ultimately, I have come to know the world through my depression. In a Gnostic account of the beginning, there was darkness, something infinite out of which arose Sophia, or wisdom.  She is an emanation from the god-source, “her will manifested itself as a likeness of heaven, having an unimaginable magnitude; it was between the immortal beings and those things that came into being after them….  She functioned as a veil dividing mankind from the things above” (The Untitled Text).  Coming to know the divine was, for me I think, only possible through darkness; it became part of the mechanism in attempting gnosis, giving me the ability to lift the veil in my struggle for darkness into light.   Christ said that “It is fitting for you (pl.) to receive the word of truth, if one will receive it perfectly. But as for one who is in ignorance, it is difficult for him to diminish his works of darkness which he has done” (The Testimony of Truth).  To receive the truth, the soul must be humbled, diminished, outcast so that it can know that, even in the darkest abyss there abides the spirit of truth, the spirit of god. It is said in the Third Stele of Sethe that the spirit of god, living within Christ, “is on every side. We are not able to express him. For thy light shines upon us…. Knowledge of thee, it is the salvation of us all.”  It rests within us and within all creation, reaching out and through us, begging to connect us to one another in right and truthful relations.             

I think I will always battle this darkness that has been present within me from a young age and resists medication and treatment.  However, it has and will continue if I allow it, to provide me with useful knowledge about the world around me and her people.  The one thing I believe because I have hope, despite my hesitant construction of god, is that whatever god-source we came from, a spark dwells within each of us that gives us capacities not unlike god, that we only have to recognize our own power and origins, our ability to light up this darkness by reaching out to each other.  “Souls were rising… and the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim [of broken ozone in the atmosphere] absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so” (Kushner).    Like Kant, but for slightly different reasons, I hope.  And like Gatsby, I too believe “in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter,” writes F. Scott Fitzgerald in his famous last page of the Great Gastby, but “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”       

In what I find to be a message of immense hope, I find it only appropriate to ask that each of you, for having shared in this with me, be “Anointed by the charisma of experience, all transformers of history. In the experience which we call sometimes vision, sometimes prophecy, there abides an intimate relationship between the experienced transcendent, named with the name of god, and the imminent man. The conduit of that relationship is a living being, the human who touches and is touched by an experience of  “Other.” Thus from our mouths may “their flow the living water that gives to religion new life….an experience of transcendent vision which leaves upon heart and tongue the savor of Divine communication” (The Gospel of Thomas and the Hermeneutic Visions).  Go forth, be like Christ, be living Christs, in the ways that you stir others who see or experience your actions or words, thus becoming illuminated, active agents of good and hope in this world.  I.e. Let us light up the world’s darkness.

“Waking into the new day, we are all of us Adam on the morning of creation, and the world is ours to name.  Out of many fragments are called to put back together a self again”