Depression By David Bock

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Depression By David Bock

As the title implies, this article is going to be more serious than what I usually post.

I’ve struggled with depression most of my life. By the time I was 18 I’d gotten through almost a decade of therapy, this helped quite a bit and I learned some good coping mechanisms. Unfortunately, depression is never something that completely goes away and the blue devils are always waiting at the edges for me to let my guard down.

I’m not alone in this. A great many people suffer from similar issues of varying severity and we all have our own ways of dealing with the internal darkness. Some healthy, some less so, and some tragically permanent.

This was where I was from childhood all the way through 2019 and leading up to the year that shall not be named or its sequels. Over the past few years I’ve taken some severe emotional blows. A number of people reading this know about some of them.

So if this is what I’m dealing with now, when the lights go on with the flick of a switch and the internet is there to distract me, what am I going to do if things get really bad? Not just for me, but in general.

What I’m not going to do is give up. That’s not in my nature. Will I have the occasional pity party? Of course, I’m a human being. But I’ll find reasons to carry on. In a survival situation we can’t afford to wallow in self-pity. We have to get up and get to work to ensure we see the next day. This can be very hard even in “normal” times.

To get me through the tough times, I have resources and abilities. I spent more than half of my life without the internet or cell phones, I can get used to going without them again if need be. I’ve been involved with a couple of living history groups over the years and they taught me valuable skills, these experiences also helped me add to my reference library. If we’re sheltering in place, I’ll still have access to my books and my tools. Regardless of where we are, I’ll also have my wife and our cats, they are four reasons to get up every morning no matter how much I’d rather stay in bed with my head under the blankets.

In August of 2011, we survived Hurricane Irene, even though our house was the worst affected in our town and the DEC considered ruling it uninhabitable. My wife and I lost a great number of things and the financial hit was significant, but we carried on and we were there for each other.

Which leads to my next point, one of the best resources we have to keep us going is other people, our tribe. Friends, biological family, or family of choice doesn’t matter. Be there for each other, be kind to each other, help each other through the rougher patches and we’ll all be stronger on the other side.

If you have, or know anyone who has, worked the AA program, you’ll be familiar with the phrase “One day at a time.” Dwelling on the past or over thinking about the future will interfere with living in the present. The general meaning is to focus on shorter term and smaller goals to help eventually achieve longer term and larger goals. When we can’t control most of what’s happening around us, we can focus on what we can control.

Having a routine helps. Make lists, keep the items on them achievable, but don’t get too granular. Try to start each day with a small success, it can help set the mood of the day. One of the things I try to do every single morning (unless a cat interferes) is make the bed. Is it a little thing? Yes, but it gives me a minor dose of endorphins from completing a task and makes the next one that much easier.

As Harra Csurik said to Miles when he visited Silvy Vale in the Lois McMaster Bujold book Memory “You go on. You just go on. There’s nothing more to it, and there’s no trick to make it easier. You just go on.”

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64 thoughts on “Depression By David Bock”

  2. Channeling Andrew Dice Clay, “I gor yer depression right here!”

    Sometimes, as difficult as it may seem, we need to put our big boy/big girl pants on and carry on.

    When you get laid off and the mortgage is due, when someone you love is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, when all seems lost, hang on anyway. Someone else may gain strength from your (our) suffering. And they may yet save us.

    There are hundreds of secular examples, from HMS Birkenhead (women and children first) to the Alamo (the line in the sand) to Rorke’s Drift (100 vs. 5000) to Bastogne (“To the German Commander: Nuts!”) and yes, Malmedy (where PoWs were slaughtered).

    We are NOT issued with a golden certificate guaranteeing we’re going to have Life give us cuddles and riches, and really good pie with our after-dinner coffee.

    Deal with it.

    For those like me who want a Scriptural answer, there’s 2 Corinthians 4:7-18 (among others). You can look it up.

    Our focus MUST NOT be on ourselves but our family, friends, and Nation. If we must die, let us do it so that songs are written. And if we can live, well, we helped others AND get to celebrate it. Maybe with really good pie with our after-dinner coffee.

    Live worthy of the people who died to give us our freedoms. “Forth, and fear no darkness!”

    Liked by 3 people

      1. Bad jokes, worse jokes, and puns is how I got through the latest brain poisoning “training session” sane. Sometimes, no matter how bloody, awful, dangerous, or emotionally tearing things get, you have to break the tension with something.

        Laughter makes the heart lighter. It is the natural enemy (not enema!) of tight-@sses and trouble. Bad jokes can remind you that things aren’t as bad as they seem. After all, we know that depression lies.

        Liked by 3 people

        1. Black humour, caffeine, and whiskey. The black sense of humour to laugh at the voices, the caffeine to make them squeaky, and the alcohol to make them mushy. Because you can’t turn them off, not permanently, but you can modify them. ;-)

          Liked by 1 person

  4. I understand. The isolation in my life is killing me. My career is over, unwillingly. My finances are very bad. I have no family. And I’m not thrilled with being a cyborg. Oh, I’m also having a lot of trouble reading, so that isn’t much of an escape.

    I know that I have run out of ideas to try, partially because I have no one to bounce ideas off of. It’s just me. Every day I think about calling it quits and this time of year is horrible because everywhere I turn there is advertising promoting spend time with family.

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    1. I hear that. I have horrible associations with Christmas music – long story, abusive faith community part but not all of it. So every year I get hit with The Darkness from the loops of music most other people just find annoying.

      Sometimes listening to more Halloween type music helps?

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Oh, I love that guy’s voice.

        And the Christmas Twee was intolerable 20+ years ago (when I stopped watching televsion); I can’t imagine it’s better now.

        (I still watch shows from time to time, but regular watching fell away when I was in college and I never saw the point in reinstating the habit.)

        Liked by 2 people

        2. It’s not that I watch “television”, but rather I watch a lot of stuff on Amazon which includes FreeV where they run commercials that can’t be skipped. Usually, there are only about six commercials in rotation. I am really sick of the ones about breast cancer drugs. The new Moderna commercial is really annoying.

          I’ve been working my way through “Bones”. I am really enjoying it and I am impressed by the way the neurodiverse are treated with kindness and sympathy unlike shows like “Big Bang Theory” where they are treated as dancing monkeys to be laughed at.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. That’s probably because “Bones” was a serious and thoughtful series, based on serious and thoughtful books (anathema to much of the current generation), while BBT was (is?) an adolescent sitcom with no real point, a la “Gilligan’s Island”.

            That said, while I have no experience with clinical depression, the advice I see above sounds good – one day/job at a time, and concentrate on the present while keeping an eye on, but not obsessing over, the potential future(s).

            Anyway, best wishes to you.

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          2. Back when Big Bang Theory was new, I tried watching it. Once. Didn’t make it past the first few minutes of the first episode, for exactly the reasons you mentioned. I saw that the show wasn’t laughing with geeks, it was laughing at geeks. Turned it off in disgust and never watched it again.

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            1. I watched one episode (travelling overseas and when starved for English, you take what you can get), a Halloween episode. One character was dressed as Frodo and made a comment that he didn’t want the girl character he was interested in to think he looked like a dork. Pause for the laugh track because “of course” he looked like a dork.

              Oh, another show making fun of geeks and nerds. Hard pass.

              I’d much rather watch Abed in Community for geek/nerd/neurodivergent representation. (Or even better read Heinlein for extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.)

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              1. We did watch the Big Bang Theory, all the way through. Can I watch it as reruns? No. Not a chance. What I did like about the show is it showed their growth. Still neurodivergent, still played for the laughs, but dang the difference between the beginning shows and last shows are huge. I appreciated how Amy, Bernadette, were both not only portrayed as beautiful and feminine, but intelligent accomplished PhD’s. Even Penny, while not a school educated intellectual, evolved.

                Liked by 1 person

    3. I know we’re just pixels on a screen, but you can bounce ideas off of us anyway.

      Sometimes even shouting into the Internet void gets useful suggestions back.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Back before web browsers were a thing, Usenet and related mailing lists were it. I had a very bad bout of the black dog one night, and the people I would have talked to were dealing with serious family issues already, (in my mind, it was a bad idea to lump more trouble on them. Might have been valid.) or unavailable. Had to dump a bottle of perfectly good Jaeger and managed to put the large freedom dispenser in the safe. As hard as it was to get the combo right, I was safe for the night.

        I sent out a SOS to a foodie (!) mailing list I paricipated in that night. Got some replies and reconnected to the world. A bit later, more folks I could talk to were available, connected with a pshrink (He was better at prescribing pills, not so much talking. OTOH, SSRIs did me more good than harm. Whew.) and shortly made a connection to a solid therapist. Figured out what issues were driving the black dog and made plans to tame that puppy. It worked. Usually. There are times when he comes back, but I’ve been down that road before and know where the turnoffs are.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I remember those days. The residents of the Internet/Usenet/email lists were very different than they are today. A bunch of socially awkward people who were happy for the company. Wow, how things have changed.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. Sarah. You might be more amenable to this info since you have done low-carb before and might not dismiss it out of hand. There is increasing evidence, a lot of it, that very low-carb eating is highly useful in combating many forms of depression. No really. Reference Dr. Georgia Ede and Dr. Chris Palmer’s book “Brain Energy”.

              Liked by 1 person

                1. I’m aware of that. I just wanted to point out to everyone that depression and any number of other mental conditions are proving to be manageable, or even reversed, with low-carb eating. It’s an exciting time in the low-carb sphere as many chronic conditions which which heretofore have been considered incurable, such as MS and many forms of cancer, are successfully being treated with a very low-carb way of eating.

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                  1. 1) eating more protein is a well known mood booster
                    2) those have been pushed as helped/treated by low carb for decades now.

                    I know because every time I tried to get help I was told to go low carb, and every time it didn’t work– or actually caused active harm– I was attacked as the problem.

                    I’m glad it works for some folks, but please don’t start up the one size fixes everything chant here.

                    Liked by 2 people

      2. Thanks, but after the responses I got when I talked about moving overseas were so hostile, I don’t think this is a good venue.

        Liked by 1 person

          2. I can’t afford to continue living in the US. I am getting to the point where I should not be driving and there is no place that is affordable to live without driving. Very few people understand what it is like to be old without any family. So, I’m trying to figure out where to live out my days in reasonable comfort instead of winding up homeless and surviving on dog food. Once I get my passport renewal back, I’m going to plan a trip to The Philippines to see if that is a viable option.

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              1. You really are completely delusional. I know several expats who are doing just fine. I have seen how you think that anywhere else than the US is a terrible and dangerous place to live. Well, you are just plain wrong.

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                1. several expats who are doing just fine.
                  ……………………..

                  For now. But, bet they will be the first targets when SHTF.

                  Something I have not pointed out to my BIL’s wife regarding her son in the Philippines. What good would it do? She is now 70. Her mother is 93. Here is hoping the SHTF occurs after they are dead and buried.

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                2. How many of them went through the relatively minor issue of COVID-19 disruptions, with health issues?

                  As opposed to everything shut down because it actually stopped working?

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                3. Were you looking for mental support? or just afirmation?

                  Free country. No approvals needed beyond the passport stamps. You are free to go wherever you want, and make the best of whatever it is you find there. Go! With gusto and a spring in your step. Seek there what you do not see here.

                  Just make really sure you actually -are- looking for whatever “it” is, or you likely won’t find it there, either.

                  Also, from some of your tone-deaf posts, look for places tolerant of foreigners with mismatched manners. I am told by a former resident that Thailand is amazingly tolerant of the usual leaning curve, provided one avoids certain taboo gaffes. If you have any connection to the US Armed Forces, certain places in the Philippines may be suitable. Also consider Panama.

                  Liked by 1 person

            2. plan a trip to The Philippines to see if that is a viable option.
              ………………..

              Just observation.

              Have a step-nephew doing this. He has bought property and is building a house. Right now taking a break from doing so. Getting the water well dug has been a problem.

              The other step-nephew, his brother, lives in Alaska. Has property inherited from his father (bought with his father, inherited the other half). His half brother (same mother) did not inherit.

              They are going down the same path of no family. Not that they don’t have any extended family. They do, through their mom, and more through their current step-dad (BIL). I have never met the older boy, he went to live with his bio-dad as BIL and bio-mom got engaged. Younger boy did the same to his bio-dad less than a year after they were married (seen him once in those 32 years). BIL is not a bad person. Just not a kid person and it shows (think “Cat-n-Cradle” song). Bio-mom chose BIL over her kids. Did I have any problems with BIL being around our son, as he was growing up? No. OTOH wouldn’t have wanted BIL raising him either (not a problem now, well past that possibility).

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            3. Just curious… Where do you live now? Have you looked at the prices in small towns, ones where walking to grocery stores and shops is a feasible option? They do exist, especially in the “Rust Belt” and the rural South and Midwest, and housing prices are usually far less than in most cities and “desirable” suburban areas. If you have either savings or a reasonable income (preferably both) they’d be worth checking. And if the SHTF at least you’d be in a high(er)-trust area where you can usually count on your neighbors for support.

              Just a thought…

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              1. I have looked at the possibility of a small town. The issue I have run into is that even if I can live close to a grocery store and a few restaurants, I would still have to pay $50+ each way for taxis/uber/etc. when I need something that isn’t within reasonable walking distance for an old man. Once a year would be doable, once a month, not so much. This is in contrast to where I just spent a month in Thailand, where taking a taxi across town was less than $3, a hospital was less than 5 blocks away, there were 3 pharmacies within 2 blocks, 2 7-11 within a block, more than 10 restaurants within 2 blocks and lots of English speaking expats. And even eating out all the time, I was averaging less than $10 per day for meals

                I want to go check out Baguio City in The Philippines. 300K population, which is about the size I like and at 5000 feet so the weather runs about 10 degrees cooler. Also, The Philippines is known for producing large numbers of nurses which if I need more care later on in life, I can get one to live in for hundreds of dollars per month and before that I can get a housekeeper/cook for a few hundred dollars per month. Home health care/hospice care here in the US means someone will stop by briefly a couple of times per week and is really expensive.

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                  1. Thanks for the well wishes. In 2019 I was planning to move to Ukraine. Obviously that is not a viable option these days. Less obvious is the amount of disruption that has happened in Europe because of the invasion, which is worth investigating from an intellectual standpoint.

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            4. You are going to need a support system anywhere you go. Consider “church”, which is a multi-thousand year system for supporting folks.

              And if your church of choice sends missionaries, you might get a mentally-supported trip to some interesting places where you can decide if your option is “stay”.

              Liked by 1 person

  5. Cultivating a grateful heart also helps.

    What is there to be grateful for?

    Make a list if you have to and write it down.

    #1 can be, My brain isn’t too damaged to make a list.

    #2 can be, My brain has been too damaged to figure out how to make it “look like an accident” and I want the insurance company to not have a reason to keep the money we’ve been paying them.

    I had a couple of years when that was my list.

    It’s a lame list but it worked. YMMV

    Once I could get a #3 on my list, the worst was past. So far.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. My “list” starts with. “Socks. And feet to put in them.”

      From there it’s pretty easy to expand the list. Not to actually feel grateful, but at least to know I should be.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Somewhere along the way in life, I’ve met a few definitely certain and unique people. People that, I am quite certain- are themselves because they have chosen a path less traveled.

        One of them in particular, I’m reminded of.

        No matter how bad things get, no matter how dark the clouds or how dire the portents I can at the very least say “I’m glad I’m not that person.”

        That person is doomed to wake up with and as themselves every. Single. Day. That person’s personality is their own worst enemy. Nigh all of their troubles stem from this one, single source, and those troubles are many.

        Knowing that it could definitely be worse puts the world into perspective, just a bit. I am qualitatively better. You- yes, you who are reading this!- are qualitatively better.

        Things may be bad at times, and often of late, are. But despite all that, we live. Defying the dearest hopes and fever madness of the left (who definitely wish we were so hard), we are not broken and bowed. Our very existence is intolerable to them.

        This thought warms me on cold nights. Petty? Perhaps. But the hate of those who hate me so much is a good thing. To stand on principle is to draw ire and enmity from those without proper principles. By our foes are we known just as much if not more than our friends.

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        1. What you wrote reduces to “There, but for the grace of God, go I”. and it, not turkey, is always the basic spirit of Thanksgiving. And sorrow for the object of “there” is a large part.

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        2. Once upon a time, a very wise Drill Sergeant told me

          “Some folks, their highest use is to be a bad example for everyone else. Dont be that guy.”

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        1. Alas, I can’t touch alcohol. Gave it up decades ago. So I cant use the internal disinfectant. And Rye humor is right out…..

          (Obviously doing better. Complex sentences and snark.)

          I find the Mountain House freeze dried beef stew is quite palatable no matter how sick. The chicken and rice turns into an agreeable soup with a bit of extra water.

          Segway to “prepper” stuff. Part of your food stash needs to be “foods easily eaten by very sick people”. Becuase you are going to need this the first time someone fails to sterilize yesterdays dishes. “Foods easily prepared by very sick people” is a plus.

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  7. Yes… keep keeping on.

    I’ve been in some really bad/crappy situations but put my head down and just plugged on. It worked. It gets “better” and it can, and likely will be “worse” but only for a time. This may cycle but never, ever give up. Reach out too – the collective “we” are here and in other places and are willing (even if it’s just typing back) to help however we can.

    Churchill said it too:
    “But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period—I am addressing myself to the School—surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force: never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago and to many countries it seemed our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of our country, were gone and finished and liquidated.”

    Source: https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/churchill-bulletin/bulletin-160-oct-2021/never-give-in-4/

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  9. The antidote to my depression was always love and humor. My wife could get me to laugh. Her love and the love of our children kept me alive. It truly is one day at a time. Just get through the day. First thing in my life that I couldn’t pull myself out of by my own bootstraps. Depression is not just a problem to be overcome. It overtakes you. My prayers go out to those who suffer.

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  10. Depression sucks big ones. I came out of Desert Storm with pretty severe depression. Like I wanted to climb into a box in the basement, and lock it from the inside level of depression. I got help from professional friends and my wife; but like all living things, damage leaves scars that never completely heal. But like David says, goals are an important part of overcoming/living with it. Daily goals, weekly goals, short term goals, and keep on making long term goals. The journey of a lifetime continues with each step you take.

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    1. Habit makes a bitch out of Willpower. Your habits will sustain you when nothing else of yours will. (Note: Faith done right is a habit.)

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    2. Depression sucks big ones.
      ……………….

      I have an aunt, by marriage, that tends to depression. Family, both her bio-family, and our married into side, kind of realized it. But it has really become a struggle over the last 24 years. What she tried to do is pull herself with her two surviving children, and new grand-baby, in to a hole and close the door on everyone and everything. Life didn’t let her. Fully understand what the trigger was (murder of your 12 year old by a drunk hit and run driver, despite what the legal system could prove, will do that, fragile or not. See Oregon’s Katie’s Law. Passed because this happened.) It is an ongoing problem. Only now she has two grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. With more grandchildren and great-grandchildren in planning. Right now my mom, and another SIL, act as a listening valves for her. Eventually, my sisters and I will be an alternative with the other SIL (given mom is 89, and both aunts are only a couple years older than I am).

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