mary oliver Archives - Lawyers With Depression

A Stroll Through The Park on a Sunny Day

During my depression, my world narrowed. I just didn’t want to go anywhere. My life was lived inside coffee shops, on the couch watching television, sitting in my office with the door closed. There was something deadening about this. In hindsight, I guess I felt that doing something else wouldn’t make a difference anyway.

I have learned over the years that nature is a powerful antidote to depression. Being in nature does make a difference. Maybe it’s because there is such power in nature. It’s always in motion, isn’t it? There isn’t any clinical depression in nature. Humans evolved from the natural world, not from concrete and office towers. One study found that a walk in a park or countryside reduced depression whereas walking in a shopping center or urban setting increased depression. This summer, I am going to reconnect with nature by taking my daughter on nature walks. During these times, I just want to let my incessant conversation with my depression go and let nature speak to me.

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How to Design a Self-Care Prescription for Depression

Depression blogger Therese Borchard’s great piece about developing our own “healing packages” of activities, resources and comforts. Read her Blog

Pushing Back Against Depression

Depression will push our backs up against the wall. It often seems bigger than us: a bully. If we let it, it will pound us down. So, we’ve got to push back.

If we don’t fight back, together with the help of others, depression can consume our lives leaving only our pulse and some air in our lungs, but precious little else. The vitality, the passion and full array of emotions that make life worth living may be sucked up out of us as if by an alien ship from above.

There are many tools to fight depression. They can certainly help us regain our footing and make our lives functional and productive again. But isn’t life more than just about a return to “normal”? We all have dreams and aspire to live them. Theres’s something wild about dreams. So often, they are outside our “normal”. And regaining them is a big part of recovery for it is these passions that bring us most fully alive in the cosmos. And we have to fight for our dreams.

Just like fighting a bully, pushing back against depression takes courage. We have to reach deep down inside ourselves to listen to that part of our life force in us all that gives us the grit to say to depression,“no more”. We must say to ourselves, “I’m sick and tired of being ‘sick and tired’”.

When we’re ready to make some changes, we push the bully back. A small push in the beginning will do. We gain some space and separation from this goblin. We stop defining ourselves as a “depressed person,” as if our identity were wholly made up of our affliction. We are not our depression. It is a part, albeit a very painful part, of our lives. But it need not be all of it.

To fight back against depression, we need to empower ourselves to level the playing field. One of the best ways is learn mindfulness. With it, we gain detachment from our negative thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness teaches us that pessimistic thoughts and disturbing emotions are clouds passing in the sky, not reality. Check out the excellent book, The Mindful Way Through Depression to learn more.

If we don’t buy into the depressed stories our minds spin out, we can begin to see them for what they are: puffs of cerebral and neurochemical smoke. We don’t have to buy into them. We don’t have to live by that script.

This takes a lot of practice and we have to start slowing. This is, by no means, a quick “fix”. But in detaching ourselves from our mental jumble and the over reactive emotions that accompany my anxiety and depression, we gain freedom. We again have choices in life. We need not walk in the deep ruts of depression anymore.

And this is empowering.

Poet, Mary Oliver in her poem, “The Journey,”beautifully captures the sense of determination we need to recover from depression:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Rear-ended by Depression

The abject pain of clinical depression is magnified expontentially when one considers that sufferers usually blame themselves for their plight. “What’s wrong with me?” is a common refrain. Most people with depression feel “bad” to their core. They can’t always articulate why this is so, but they know that they can’t shake their own self-condemnation. There is no place to hide from it, no true rest for the weariness it brings. We lay awake at night and hope that tomorrow it will be better.

I had a conversation last week with a mental health professional who asked me, “What in the world do lawyers have to be depressed about? They’re rich and powerful. Lawyers should stop complaining and realize how good they have it.” Yet a lack of gratefulness has little to do with depression. I used to recite a list of things I had to be grateful about – and there were many – but it all fell on depression’s deaf ears.

When others tell us to “snap out of it,” we may buy it hook, line and sinker and even believe that they know what they’re talking about. Well-meaning friends may try to reign in our sorrow by suggesting that they can identify with our suffering.

In her book about her own depression, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Mood and Madness, psychiatrist, Kay Redfield Jamison writes:

“Others imply that they know what is it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable.”

Such attempts by others, even when well intentioned, always brought about a deep sense of loneliness in me. I had, like most people, gone through my fair share of difficult experiences in life like losing a job. But this experience – this blast furnace of melancholy – was not that. We get over losses in our lives, we adapt. We can’t just “get over” depression.

There is a sense that we have been rear-ended by depression; out of seemingly nowhere, our lives are crashed into and changed forever. In a very real sense, we will never be the same. Some will recover from their depression, many will not. That’s not a very popular thing to say, but it’s been my experience from talking with hundreds of lawyers from around the country who I’ve been privileged to share with. For many, recovery will be an on-again off-again sort of affair. They will have to work hard to recover and make lots of effort to stay healthy.

Part of the reason why too many lawyers don’t get better is simple: most don’t get any form of treatment for their depression. A study by the National Institute of Mental Health revealed that as many as 80% of people in this country get no form of help whatsoever. Looking out a window, I wonder how high the rate is for lawyers. It’s most likely a mixed bag. While it’s true that people from a higher socio-economic class tend to get treatment – mostly because of their access to good medical care – most attorneys still don’t because of the stigma associated with mental illness.

Such shame – dumped on people from others and the self-inflicted variety – is particularly deep for lawyers. This is so because of the myths surrounding their internal world. Lawyers feel like they’re supposed to be veritable Supermen able to bend steal and solve all manner of a clients’ problems without wrinkling their power blue suit. If they’re in pain, they’re told to “suck it up.” We live in a nation of winners where, deep down, many feel like losers.

This sort of mentality, in part, explains the epidemic rates of depression in the law. Studies have concluded that lawyers suffer from depression at a rate of twice the national average or about 20%. This means that 200,000 out of the one million lawyers in this country suffer from depression.

What’s a depressed lawyer to do? First, one must stop blaming oneself. This is tough because most people with depression have been living with this cognitive distortion for a long time – maybe their whole lives – and this corrosive self-talk promotes the viscous cycle that is clinical depression. If one can’t stop blaming oneself for having depression, it’s tough to get better. Little by little, we need to learn to let that bullshit go and start walking a healthier path.

The poem, The Journey, by Mary Oliver, captures some sense of this path for me. I hope it will for you.

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice – –

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do – –

determined to save

the only life you could save.

Father’s Day By the Sea

It’s Sunday night, still Father’s Day. I’m on vacation with my family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The ocean’s waves are right outside my window reminding me of mysteries that I’ll never understand. And I am thinking of the man who was my father all those years ago.

My earliest memories of my dad are deeply troubling. His life was defined by violence, alcoholism and neglect of his family. I know that sounds morbid, even to me. But, it’s just the plain truth.

When I look back on his life this day, I think about the time that he was dying in the hospital for a month. One night, I stopped by after everyone else had gone. Only the florescent light from the hallway made sense of the room. My dad was tired and I told him just to sleep. I pulled up a chair beside his bed. My back was turned towards him and I was hunched over in the silence. I thought he was asleep. Minutes passed.

Then I felt his warm hand on my back. He was rubbing it as he never had before. We both said nothing. Yet, there’s no doubt what it all meant in that moment. He was saying that he was sorry and that he loved me. He couldn’t say those words no more than he could say at AA meetings, “My name is Walter and I’m an alcoholic.”

I asked my sister and three brothers about their memories of Dad dying. My one brother, Tony, said, “Danny, I know that you’re trying to find good in Dad. But really, he was just a big asshole.” Yet, I’m not so sure that’s what I was trying to do; to find “good” in him. What felt truer to me was the mystery of grief. Such an experience seems a strange mix of sadness, loss and the weight of existence. It’s a mystery that I can still touch today – especially today – when I think of him.

My sense of this is captured in Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Visitor.”

My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.

But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open
and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hallow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.

A Walk in the Park

I have learned over the years that nature is a powerful antidote to depression. Being in nature does make a difference. Maybe it’s because there is such power in nature. It’s always in motion, isn’t it? There isn’t any clinical depression in nature. Humans evolved from the natural world, not from concrete and office towers. One study found that a walk in a park or countryside reduced depression whereas walking in a shopping center or urban setting increased depression. This summer, I am going to reconnect to nature by taking my daughter on nature walks. During these times, I just want to let my incessant conversation with my depression go and let nature speak to me.

A favorite poem of mine, “Wild Geese”, by Mary Oliver, speaks to me of the beauty and healing power of the natural world:

You do not have to be good – You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

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