The Human Conditions

From room to room, window to window, pile of clutter to pile of clutter, I seem to wander, as I try to escape from the tyrannical inventory of my preoccupations of the hour, these cruel robbers of sleep who enjoy forcing me in an endless, sordid worry-go-round. In the Full Moon room, temporarily out of reach, I silently congratulate myself from replacing the ink cartridge of my printer. For weeks, the anticipation of such a simple task had somehow filled me with terror: that I would not be able to remove the empty one and put the replacement without breaking something, without creating a Rorschach test on my white shirt. Depending on how down I feel, similar to-dos appear insurmountable. Such paralysis of the volition is the reality of countless people. Yet, we make it an undesirable entity by labeling it disease, illness, disorder, like a stain of shame on the identity. Depression. An often invisible and silent struggle. It is so common that over decades of encountering patients suffering from it, I came to see this phenomenon as an almost inevitable developmental stage in the form of a necessary existential crisis. Many people feel transformed when they emerge on the other side of it. Depression, just like any crisis or imbalance, can be an opportunity to learn and to recalibrate our lives, our priorities. It can also be a warning sign telling us to leave or not to choose a certain relationship or job. It is a reminder that we may have become disconnected from our divine aspects. It invites us to go inward, connect with our suffering, understand human condition, hence others' suffering. It can lead to spiritual growth and enlightenment. If we avoid hiding from it or creating defenses like anger, obsessions, greed, addictions, it can be a teacher showing us the path to more compassion. And compassion is a bridge to a deep and fulfilling life.

Unfortunately, the field I chose as a career still medicalizes it. Sure, sometimes external interventions like medications are necessary, but they are rarely sufficient. This is a complex syndrome, final common pathway of so many conditions of the body but also of humanity, including social factors like loneliness, migration, grief. The molecule of the hour or anti-depressant flavor of the day are maintaining an illusion that there is a quick path out of it without doing the hard work. I believe that befriending the emotion or the inner narrative (hopelessness, victimhood, self-loathing etc) must take place. During this time, we sit in silence while protecting ourselves from mental ambient noise. The wisdom or deep knowing is more likely to be heard. A multimodal, holistic approach often needs to be considered. During my lectures, I often refer to it as the bio-psycho-socio-spiritual model. The spirituality comes into play by asserting that we are interconnected, that we are divine and therefore worthy, and that our trauma or wounds do not define us. It brings the sacred dimensions of our beings at the forefront and can produce mantras that seek to reassure us that we are intact, that we have a source of resilience in us. Suffering has taught me I could access inner resources or gifts I would have never thought of putting at the service of the world otherwise. If we don't pay attention to the teachings arising from an episode, it risks recurring until we finally get the lesson, the message. Feeling down or disconnected might be indicating that it is time to let go, de-attach or recognize that we are not living our truth or not doing what lights us up. 

Depression is not necessarily sadness, and sadness in and of itself is not sufficient to "diagnose" depression, and some of the markers of sadness, tears, are not an anomaly. What characterizes depression is a lack of aliveness. Truly depressed people might mention having no emotions, feeling like a ghost, or "dead inside". This numbness of the soul is alarming if a person stays stuck in that state instead of looking at this manifestation as a pointer or compass towards the soul classroom to learn how to accomplish our divine purpose. It is like a murmur of the heart trying to tell us that we are getting a second chance to heal a sadness we might not have paid attention to or have tried to repress because at the time or surrounded by unsupportive people, it was not acceptable to pause and make room for it, or because it was too overwhelmingly painful. But what is not embraced fully tends to linger and get bigger or consolidated into something denser and harder to overcome, like a depressive episode and other complications (self-harm through behaviors or auto-immune processes). Doing more of the same, like running away from it will just lead to more defenses and more problems: acting-outs, pervasive Angst, resentment, contempt, hatred, and other destructive phenomena.

Hearing and seeing the first rain since I moved in, as I tried to stay connected with the enchantment that my house aims to foster and protect, another neglected item caught my eye: white linen curtains strewn on the couch for 4 days, abandoned after I immediately saw, quite puzzled, that they were not the right length. And I have to blame my obstinate illiteracy of the non-International Metric System that the Americans refuse to let go as obstinately, in a disconcerting denial towards the fact that the inches, feet, yards and miles are quirky and outdated. No matter how hard I try, I will mix up the values, writing down in inches (because that is how they are listed on Amazon) what I just measured in centimeters... Or vice-versa, then reconverting from cm to in and leading to the disaster of skewed measurement through shrinking. I knew I needed to return these, otherwise I would lose 20 dollars. But every time I walked by the blue couch, I battled this inescapable fear of being confronted with my inability to put them back in their plastic wrapping. From a young age, I discovered that things tend to get out more easily than getting back in... Eventually, I harnessed my courage and was able to fold them decently well so they would fit in the bag they came in. Another piece of data in my self-efficacy-meter... 

As human beings, we need to feel resourceful and effective in decision-making, problem-solving or fixing. That is what self-efficacy is. Those little, trivial tasks were significant as they helped me consolidating just that: my sense of self-efficacy. Because of my sky-rocketing stress levels and helplessness over the past years, some days, I cannot trust myself to perform simple additions, even though I used to do enriched math in high school and got good enough grades in science to get into med school. So, if there is an activity that makes me feel like I am a still capable human being, that I am not completely clueless and useless, not to mention pre-senile, I will engage in it more. And that includes writing poetry.

Death Valley, 2019. Youri, my oldest, is leading his brothers, Kristof and Andreas, and me, down this sandhill. I love this picture very much, of course because it captures one of my travel adventures with my top three favorite people in the whole world and it is always a treat to revisit such moments, and also because it landed with enchanting synchronicity yesterday on my social media memories as I was wondering what image to add to my blog for this week. There it was, like the perfect allegory of our spiritual evolution, following a path, sometimes each other, as we slip, trip, fall, stand up again, hold on tight to our hats in the face of a wind that seems to want to turn them into kites. This picture of 4 ant-like creatures, almost surreal despite (or because of) its simple composition and landscape, is like a poem. There is way more than the senses can perceive. And for those of you who discovered it, Death Valley is nothing but... dead. Similarly, there can be pretty flowers in a desert of the soul where we least expect it. Maybe the desert is the path to a rainforest of creativity.

"...well, that's dark. Reread it and maybe not quite as dark as I thought, but still definitely on the dark side."

A person very dear to me commented on a poem I felt compelled to write in order to express a complex suffering that has been so hard to process and heal from. I feel so disconnected from the world at times, discouraged by so many futile aspects, as if I had just had a near-death experience from the eternal source of light and came back with forceful protestations, like a child forced out of a fun playdate by his parent (that was my son Youri's story once, when he was two and had discovered a trampoline at one of my colleagues' house. I still see his eyes conveying clearly that he was not ready to forgive me for having brought him back to our living room, as he was tapping the immobile sofa, and saying, like a desperate attempt at a magic formula to shape-shift the furniture, "sauter, sauter!", "to jump, to jump!").

It is not as if I didn't know my poem was dark. That was the goal of writing it ! To express the unnamable in the hope it would leave me alone, and maybe help others. But was it any good ? That is what my soul, as ripped as it may be, needs to be reassured about. That there is still something positive that can come out of my suffering... Days later, I understood that even this person's reaction to my poem had an important teaching aspect to it: that a lot of people are still uncomfortable with suffering, and they simply don't know what to do with it (even though there is technically not much to do with it except sitting with it and bearing witness to someone else's suffering). Another lesson derived from the first one, in the sense that we need to have compassion with that. I should be thankful for such a reaction in fact, as it gives my compassion a precious venue to practice. 

When I think about people around me who went through a dark phase, I can appreciate what it taught me. About them, about me, through the impact it had on me, and about the human condition. Or human conditions, and the power of our dreams and aspirations. Many recovered, and some were even grateful for having gone through adversity because the experience was eye-opening for them, and they are also among my most inspiring, favorite beings. Being wounded sensitizes us and can make us more sensitive to others' pain as well. Sadly, another group stayed deaf to the teaching of their sufferings and let their depression consolidate into a rock of bitterness that turned them into energy vampires sucking others' life energy. All those voyages into the shadow side of human experience, either directly or by proxy, taught me what to make (and not to make) of my own phases of despair. Like Pema Chödrön wrote, suffering can help us soften our hearts if we let it. Our own, as lonely as it feels and unique as it seems (too unique for us to be able to find an immediate, novel solution) reminds us that there are in fact countless permutations to the pain of the soul, and therefore any suffering should make us more sensitive to each other's pain, because at its core, the experience is very similar. My beloved cousin Gabriel, who also read my poem, commented that he saw my suffering and reminded me of his love and that he is there for me. 

The more we feel together, the better we can heal together.

From soul to soul.