Intermission

Things are a little lighter on this page, so it's back to the normal white. If somehow you jumped directly here, the first part is a testimony of depression.

The Manchurian Candidate, the marvelous 1962 Sinatra original, I watched last night. I guess it's not a coincidence, given that the modern flick opened this weekend. It is funny, since my lecture notes for my class - developed two years ago - used "The Manchurian Deck" to introduce hypothesis testing. That's felicitious. Besides really liking the flick, there's a little piece of the movie that's worth quoting here. Raymond Shaw, the manipulated man, is gathering clothes for his honeymoon. Major Ben Marco, the army officer who has figured it out speaks to his day-old wife Josie, stating that Raymond needs to come in for questioning.

"Raymond is sick, Mrs. Shaw, in, uh, kind of a special way. He doesn't even realize it himself."
"Sick! He's not sick! He's the healthiest man I've ever seen in my whole life. You can, you can tell that by just looking at him."
"That's not the kind of sick I mean."
[after a beat.] "You're wrong, Ben. You're wrong. He's tied up inside in a thousand knots, I know that, but you can see for yourself how he is with me."

The lovely Mrs. Shaw convinces Ben to let them have a short honeymoon, 48 hours. "Ben, you've got to believe me and trust me, I can make him well." Of course, the compassion turns out to have consequences. I really like that the consequences aren't obvious; there are at least three possible endings until the final minute. I won't spoil the ending for you - go watch it!

Hopelessness and Worthlessness

Depression is being sick, not in the way of Raymond Shaw, but nevertheless in the mind. Also, like the effects of the conditioning, it's not always easy to see, even by those relatively close. What I did, and what happened, is easier to describe than the emotions inside. Emotions are more ephemeral by definition, less tangible, and thus further from my strength of turning chaos into order. Yet I'll try. There are two big feelings in my despair, lack of worth and lack of hope. I'll tackle them in that order.

Worthlessness is the ability to deny any positive or redeemable qualities in oneself. My paper copy of Roget's Thesaurus gives nice synonyms, uselessness, inadequacy, barrenness, and paltriness. For me, there's the earthly part and the theological part. The earthly part is the ability to discount any positive remark, obsess over every negative remark, and then go beyond obsession into creating negative thoughts about myself. To take a basic example, say I look at my teaching reviews from a past quarter as a teaching assistant. There are 18 positive comments about me and three negative. It's a high number of positive comments in a class of about 100, meaning people took the time to write something. It's also a very solid percentage. By comparative standards, I did well. What happens? For the next half hour, I do nothing except muse on how terrible an instructor I am. It follows me for another day or two.

Depression goes farther than reacting to every bad event, however; I am proactive in finding ways to criticize myself. Mostly they're about interactions with others, with perfectionist standards. Did every one of the 15 people at fellowship have a great time? He came last time but not this time; did I drive him off? Why was our attendance ten less then expected? It's always my fault, my error, my shortcoming, when something happens with someone else. What's that Johnny Mercer song? Accentuate the negative, eliminate the positive?

In this phase, any worth I find comes from others. My list of "pretends" has in the number one position the following: "I am worthy only when I do good things for others, which is why they like/respect/tolerate me." This is better than having no concept of self-worth, I guess. But it's still horribly flawed, plus it leads to a stock picking approach. Because I'm almost 30, still single, and not particularly popular, it means I have low value; like Raymond Shaw, not very lovable. After all, isn't marriage just a personal economic market? My unkissed status places me very low, below all sorts of physical forms, and all sorts of personalities, even those I found reviling and repulsive. They have girlfriends and dates and wedding rings, and I don't. Timothy McVeigh even had a marriage proposal. If I were a decent person, or in any way desirable, I'd do better, economic man concludes. No demand for little ol' me.

Economic Man is a very powerful ideology in modern America (helped, I would say, by the current dominant policital party.) On the other hand, observant readers would note that I call myself Roman Catholic, which has a rejection of total Capitalism. Shouldn't that provide a different foundation? Well, that's the theological problem. I teeter toward what fundamentalists miscall Catholics. It's salvation by works. In my misguided sense, I have to build my account for the bookkeepers of the Lord. If there's a Heaven and a Lord, only my good actions will save me. There's no currency in the self, or faith. I cannot find mercy or grace. Actually, it's almost Pelagian. The doubt in others, that they only look at me because of my actions, applies to God as well. It leads to a lot of 3 AM sightings, and even less sleep; sleep's closer to doubt, closer to fear, closer to the idea that God doesn't even want me.

Having God not want me is a denial of hope, and that's a problem. This type of hope is eschatological, that even though things don't work now, rewards and improvements will be available after death, in the world to come. It's a hope that nonbelievers cannot comprehend. What if there is no next life? Then eschatological hope is fruitless. That's not really my problem, though the challenge of belief sans reason pops up occasionally. What if there is a next life, but my transgressions or failings have denied it from me? That's more substantive in my heart. That can lead to self-punishment or sacrifice, and I don't deny that I think about that, and must be very wary. I have managed to deny myself down to four meals in five days in past bad stretches. I can carry a good bit of Kings and Chronicles vengenence. Even my comforter, Isaiah, speaks of wrath in chapter 30: "His breath is like an overflowing stream that reaches up to the neck - to sift the nations with the sieve of destruction, and to place on the jaws of the peoples a bridle that leads them astray." Will I go to hell? Perhaps. But to close the door helps no one.

Thinking about the theology of hope matters, but I also have to consider lack of hope in temporal matters. Here, I drive myself towards hell, at least according to Buffy: "What is hell but the total absense of hope? The substance, the tactile proof of despair?" Unlike the end-times approach, or worthlessness, it's easy to define temporal hope: things will never get better. Not only am I repulsive, not redeemable, and failed, but I cannot become attractive, saved, or passable. No mechanism exists. So why try? The downhill spiral requires so little, feels so right, so simple, so encompassing.

Of all the issues described here (self-loathing, worthlessness, faith) hope is the one most influenced by others. When I hate myself, I hate myself. I generate the loss of confidence, the resort to tears, the pain. Since I'm in that world, I easily ignore positive comments and positive actions. The evaluation example is illustrative of that. And who talks about faith anymore? In contrast, people talk about the future and the state of life all the time. When I'm in earshot, it matters. Pessimism breeds pessimism. When a priest derides the world as broken, it makes me slightly more so. When a dinner companion wants to return to 1348, it makes me less hopeful. (Of course, given that 1348 was the height of the Black Death, I can quickly dismiss that.) An organization that describes Christianity as an escape from nothingness implicates me as part of nothingness, and thus nothing. Then I get worse. Even moderate negativity or halyconicity extinguishes my faint candle of hope.

I have to be progressive. It's the idea that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. Not literally everyday, of course; if I had a marvellous dinner with a friend, I don't expect to have two marvellous meals tomorrow. I mean that the world is less painful, that the order of statistical science improves life, and that personally I'll reach a point where I believe in myself enough to fully function. Theologically, it's allowing a great role for the Spirit. Sometimes I wonder if the hope deniers think God has abandoned us. They forget the promise of transformation, or perhaps modern communications has made the world seem barren and forgotten. That leads them to become regressive, or even retrogressive. That will not do. I never want to feel full depression again. Things have gotten better, but unless I consistantly hold the self-confidence and positive outlook I sometimes grasp, well, there are more than tears.

Written August 9, 2004, for intermission and worth, September 1 for hope.