Days.

Depression, Identity, and Senior Literature.

“You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.”

The first semester of my senior year of high school was a rough one for me. I’m not sure what it was, but I just felt especially alone. There was one day when I just stopped hanging out with my friends because I didn’t think they wanted me around them.

I still had one thing I looked forward to that year though. It was a literature class, and the teacher was awesome. He really believed there was something meaningful in what we studied, and his passion showed.

We read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest part-way through the semester. It’s about a guy named Randle Patrick McMurphy who is sent to an insane asylum instead of jail after being arrested. An abusive nurse wards over the place, and most of the patients there hate it.

As a prisoner and a criminal, McMurphy couldn’t leave the asylum even if he wanted too. He assumed everyone else there was in the same boat. As it turns out, almost all of the other people in his ward were there voluntarily. In fact, they could leave anytime they wanted, but they all choose to stay despite the conditions.

When he finds this out, McMurphy is livid, and he asks them why they stay. The quote at the top encompasses their reasons.

The men in the ward would rather sink into a soup of medication and meniality than face real life.

There are some days when I wake up and the world feels especially alive. It feels like there’s something expanding in my chest, and if I don’t let it out, I’ll explode. It comes in the form of plans or goals or blog posts written in a flurry, much like this one. On days like that, it feels like I can do anything, and I’ll spend those days trying to do everything.

Those days are great, but there are also days when I wake up and just want to go back to bed. Not because I’m tired, but because my view of myself is so low that I just can’t believe anybody would want to see me. I don’t believe that I could do anything productive either, and so I assume I ought to give up and start again tomorrow.

My senior year consisted mostly of days in the second category. So, when I read that same passage from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I found myself crying. There was a part of me that understood why the men in the asylum made the choice that they did.

Here was the problem. I loved the book, but when I had to do homework for it, I couldn’t complete the assignments. It was like trying to pick up a playing card that is stuck to a table; I just couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it.

The book had something to teach me about myself, but that lesson would not come without pain. Instead of confronting it, I fell back into the fog of life to avoid the hurt. That meant I didn’t do any of my work, including a project that counted for 10% of my grade.

Midway through the semester, I was failing the class, so the guidance counselor scheduled a meeting with my mom, the teacher, and me. My mom stuck the label “depression” on what was going on, and she scheduled me an appointment with a psychologist who confirmed the same thing.

On a medical level, I was depressed, and so it is a genuine reason why I deserved special treatment. By the end of the meeting, the teacher agreed to let me make up homework I’d missed, redo the project, and more or less, scrape by with a C in the class. To be honest though, it always felt like a cop-out.

That teacher had been through a lot during that semester. I have no idea why, but by the middle of the semester, he just didn’t seem as confident or in control of the class. In our meeting, he showed me a vulnerability I rarely saw in authority figures.

“Lorne, we all have bad days. I have bad days, but that doesn’t mean we can stop living. You just have to keep trying.”

That’s more of a paraphrase than a quote, but you get the picture.

I grew up with a family history of mental illness. I have seen people I desperately care about out of control of their emotions and themselves. It felt like the title of depression condemned me to that same life.

In my mind, depression meant I might as well give up already and go live in an asylum. I was incapable of doing anything, and I didn’t have the strength of will to ever change that.

In One Flew, the patients in the ward saw the asylum as inescapable; they refused to believe they could survive outside of it. Some people can’t live on their own due to their mental state, but the guys in that asylum weren’t those people. Frankly, I’m not one of those people either, but both the men on the ward and I allow ourselves to become convinced that’s who we are.

The problem is I’m wrong. The summer before my senior year, God spoke truth about who I am over me. At a night of worship, I felt Him put His hand on my back and say,

“This is my son, with whom I’m well pleased.”

In calling me His son, God has called me good, even though I’m very much not perfect. Whether I like it or not though, my brain chemistry predisposes me to have a low view of myself.

God has called me good, and because of that, I am good whether I believe it or not. I have limits, but that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of living as a functional human being. I just imagine my limits as far more pronounced and far wider reaching than they actually are.

I will have good days, and I will have bad days, but how those days go depends largely on my approach to them. Especially on the bad ones, it will be hard, but I refuse to assume that means I’m going to fail.

I will confront the reality of this life, especially when it hurts. I’ll probably fail along the way, but that doesn’t mean I should stop, and it certainly doesn’t mean I need to give up.

I don’t think anything about what God does is accidental. He knew I was going to have a rough senior year when He told me I was His son. I just hope and pray that every time I slip I reach for the one thing that can hold me up, and that is the truth of who I am in light of who He has declared me to be.

Dedicated to Mr. Brock. Thank you for the grace you showed me, and thank you even more for what you said. It’s made a bigger impact than you could ever know.

Originally published at theforlornemoose.wordpress.com on February 22, 2017.