The Gumshoe’s Guide to Getting Off the Couch, Part 3: Station Identification

[The third in a series of I'm-not-sure-how-many-yet posts about how I healed from lifelong depression without medication. This is my personal story, and I am in no way, not-uh, not ever going to criticize anyone who needs antidepressants, or tell anyone what to do. You might want to start here. Also, this post contains a trail-mix of metaphors, so proceed at your own risk...]

One of the most frustrating things about depression for me was feeling like everyone around me was able to do basic tasks with apparent ease. Wake up. Go to work. Exercise. Socialize. Accomplishing any one of these things felt to me like pushing a giant boulder up a hill.

And yet occasionally, even in my haze, I’d have a moment (or a day, or a week) where these things didn’t seem as difficult and heavy. Sometimes this happened if I started a medication that worked for a little while. Other times it felt like a suspiciously random gift. It was as if the tv channel in my brain had simply been switched, and what once seemed difficult would (briefly) feel easy and natural. Like carrying little pebbles in my pocket while taking an enjoyable stroll up a hill.

I started to wonder, is this what “normal” people feel like? Are they simply on this channel most of the time?

Eventually I realized that while trying harder and having more willpower might occasionally get the boulder up the hill, they never ended up changing the channel. I started to think, maybe I don’t need to push the boulder up the hill every day. Maybe I just need to wait and see if the channel will change.

I was “lucky” because the year I was at my worst, some hugely horrible things had happened to me. So I was able to allow myself to just be where I was, to embrace it. Oddly enough, it was this allowing that permanently switched the channel.

I know, that’s easy for me to say now, right? But what if you’re sitting on the couch, with no “reason” to be there? Isn’t that just giving up? Shouldn’t you force yourself to do things?

The thing I found was, once I started observing what channel I was on, I could become the observer. I literally started existing within a different part of my consciousness. A part out of reach of the swirling, contradictory messiness of my noisy thought-soundtrack. (Meditating helps with this. Of course thinking I must meditate can be overwhelming, so just observing is plenty to start with.)

Before I knew the first thing about Buddhism I referred to these swirling contradictions as my “reality graph” (it looked a little something like this.) My emotional reality was truly all over the place, spiralling this way and that depending on external circumstances. It was exhausting. I fought so hard against the channel I was on.

If I had to heal from depression again (which I will, I know, but that’s the subject of yet another post), here’s where I would start: Narrow my focus. Stop pushing the boulder up the hill for a while (where possible). Observe. Be on the channel.

[ETA: Click here for Part 4]

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