I was thinking about leaving

Dear Bloggers,

As I read through the web for conversations, questions, ideas about depression, I am struck by how many people who write to forums and blogs are desperately asking for help not for their own depression but for that of their spouses, partners, loved ones. So often, they report bewilderment. They feel stunned to find anger and rejection in place of love. How can it be that the person I have known so well is suddenly different, alien, hostile and wants to break out of the relationship that is so precious? 
 

What is this longing to leave that so many depressed people feel? I have no simple answer to that, but I can describe my own tortured experience with an almost irresistible drive to break out and start a new life.
I spent many years feeling deeply unsettled and unhappy in ways I could not understand. Flaring up in anger at my wife and two great young girls became a common occurrence. I’d carry around resentments about being held back and unsatisfied with my life, fantasizing about other places, other women, other lives I could and should be leading. 
 

My usual mode was to bottle up my deepest feelings, making it all the more likely that when they surfaced it would be in weird and destructive ways. I’d seethe with barely suppressed anger, lash out in rage and, of course, deny angrily that anything was wrong when confronted by my wife.

I was often living on the edge, but there were two threads of awareness I could hold onto that restrained me invisibly. One was the inner sense that until I faced and dealt with whatever was boiling inside me, I would only transplant that misery to a new place, a new life and a new lover. However exciting I might imagine it would be to walk into that new world, I knew in my heart that it would only be a matter of time before the same problems re-emerged.
The other was a question I kept asking myself : “What is it that I am leaving for? ” What was this great future and life that I would be stepping into? Could I even see it clearly? More often than not, the fantasy portrayed a level of excitement I was missing. Crazy thoughts or a very lively fantasy I would call it now.

Some buried part of me knew that a life based on getting high on non-stop brain-blowing excitement wasn’t a life at all. Maybe it wasn’t alcohol or drugs that lured me, but it was surely the promise of intense and thrilling experiences, the opening scene of an adventure film without the need to wait for the complicated plot to unravel. There was no real alternative woman out there waiting for me, only a series of fantasies with easy gratification, never the hard part of dealing with a complicated human being in a sustained relationship. And inwardly I knew, I would still face the fears, depression and paralysis of will that had plagued me for so long.

That bit of consciousness kept me from breaking everything up and leaving the wonderful family that I’m blessed with.

So just imagine what my wife was going through. She had to face the rejection of my anger at the deepest levels. At the worst of it, she had to hear me telling her she wasn’t enough for me, that I needed more than she could give. And the tension and pain between us, the frequent rage that I felt, spilled into the lives of my children in ways that slowly and painfully were to emerge over time. 

That is the hardest part of talking about this now, to grasp how my closest loved ones disappeared from awareness into the haze of my own self-hatred, my own feeling of emptiness that I was desperately trying to fill. I had no idea how my behavior spread in its impact, like widening circles in water, to touch so many around me I’ll continue with this theme and try to get at what can be done or said to someone possessed of a longing to leave.

The longing to leave one’s intimate partner brings out something that isn’t much discussed in descriptions of depression. It is the active face of the illness. We often focus on the passive symptoms, the inactivity, the isolation, sense of worthlessness, disruption of focused thought, lack of will to do anything. But paradoxically the inner loss and need can drive depressed people to frenzied action to fill the great emptiness in the center of their lives. They may long to replace that inadequate self with an imagined new one that makes up for every loss. 
 

My experience with this phase of illness occurred when I had only limited awareness of the hold depression had on me. That may be a key to understanding the dynamic and how to respond to someone in the grip of this drive to turn life upside down. Unhappy without knowing why, I had to find an explanation, and the easiest way to do that was to look outward. I could only see my present life, my wife, my work as holding me back, frustrating my deepest desires. In effect, I was blaming everyone but me for my misery. In that state, I could only focus on the promise of leaving, finding a new mate, new work, new everything.

Every suggestion my wife might make that there was something wrong with me only brought the angriest denial. Every time she said how much she loved me only felt like a demand that I stay stuck in this unfulfilling life and do what she wanted me to do. I knew so clearly that I was not the problem, certainly not sick but for the first time on the verge of escaping into the exciting life I should have been living all along.

There is something very close to the power of addiction in the fantasy of escape. I found it almost impossible to see through the dreams of a new life. It meant so much – my survival as a person seemed to be at stake. Unaware of the full effect of depression, blocking out what my wife and others were trying to tell me, I inflicted a lot of pain on my family, thinking that I had to be brutally honest in order to save myself. Fortunately, as I noted in the last post on this subject, I had been through enough work in therapy to have glimmers of the truth, and that helped me step back from the brink.

I’m big on offering advice, but the potentially devastating impacts of depressed people on those closest to them leads me to go a bit beyond just reflecting on what I’ve been through. I see it different now my wife is stuck in a similar situation that has caused a burn out due to her boss.

If you’re trying to deal with the sudden transformation of an intimate partner, get help, starting with friends and family. You’ve likely felt such a deep assault and wound that it would be easy to get lost in the sheer humiliation, hurt and anger of the experience, searching for what you’ve done wrong, what you could do or say to set things right. That’s a trap set for you by the voice of depression. That voice tries to persuade you, just as it has persuaded your loved one, that it’s your fault. Not true. It’s your partner’s illness that’s at the root of it. 

Those closest to you and your partner have doubtless noticed something strange and may have been hurt as well by new behavior. That will remind you that you’re not alone in this. And remember that you can’t cure someone else with your words and love. They only backfire. At most, you can help your partner gradually gain awareness. It will take the combined influence of you and many others to get a depressed person to start seeing a different explanation for what’s wrong. Only your partner can do the heavy lifting. Only your partner can experience the inner change of thought and feeling that comes with the recognition that there is an illness to be dealt with.

I realize how different everyone’s experience is about the impact of depression on their marriage, and how desperately hard everyone works to reach what is for them the right answer about staying married or not. For me, though, it was a fantasy born of depression. I often wonder how it is, given where I began in my struggle to build a loving relationship with another human being, that my wife and I have stayed married for so long. “Marriage is survival,” I once heard someone say at a wedding, and the uncomfortable laughter in his large audience confirmed the truth of it. Despite all our struggles, we’ve managed to survive the worst of times.

For so many years, though, and long beyond adolescent dreams, I was searching obsessively not for the real work of two people always learning about each other. Depressed and full of shame at who I was, I searched desperately for someone who would make up what was missing, gifting me the worth I felt I lacked, so that I could feel like a whole person at last. I simply imagined I was falling in love. 

It would start with an attraction that soon became obsessive for a woman whose spirit and warmth I reached for instinctively to take in as my own. This was falling in love in a strangely one-sided way. I needed the responsiveness of the other person, to be sure, but only to a certain point. I can try to explain with a story, really a moment when something began to get through to my isolated mind.

I had, or imagined I had, an intense bond with K for nearly a year in my late teens. Her loving me meant everything. She was beautiful, talented and lively, and deep down I felt not just proud that she was part of my life, I felt alive and justified because of her presence. More than that, I projected into the minds of everyone I met the love of my live because such a woman loved me. That was the reality of what I needed from her, the sense of self-worth that I lacked on my own. I ignored what was clearly happening so desperate was I to believe that we would be together forever. After all, I was nothing without her. Our relationship came to end and I have been sick for days. My life was over. I promised myself not to start a relation again but to enjoy life

I was home, and we were up early, getting dressed and ready to get up for breakfast. I was avoiding deep talk. The windows were open to a fine Dutch winter morning. I was dousing my face with cold water in the bathroom as I had great hangover when suddenly I was startled by a beautiful singing voice floating in coming from the bedroom. It was a woman’s voice pouring a haunting melody into the air. It seemed to surround me, and the feeling and the sheer beauty of the tone put everything else out of my mind. I relaxed into its flow for a few still moments, and then I started to move. I had to find out where my future would start again. It seemed that I was ready for life again and I opened my heart and started a relationship again with the woman that I now call my wife. When I snapped out of my memories, I walked back to the bedroom and found my wife quietly sweeping a brush through her long blond hair.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?”
“That incredible singing – it was the most beautiful thing. Where could it have come from?”
“Oh,” she laughed, “that was just the alarm clock.”
“Just now? Just right now? I mean, it stopped a few seconds ago.”
She nodded slowly, still brushing.
“I mean … I never heard that song before.”
She smiled into the mirror. “Well… now you have.”
She finished brushing her hair. We got our clothes on and left the room. 
 

To say I crashed when she left is putting it mildly. What could happen when my sense of who I was and what I was worth in the world walked away? Gone! There was nothing left! I would start drinking heavily, fall into complete depression, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work, crying a lot, burned with the obsession of having to get her back. For the second time in my life, I don't think I will survive and end up at a psychiatrist. To heal enough so that I could function. Then I’d be able to resume my obsessive quest for a woman to make me feel whole again!

And so the pattern continues for years. When I met my wife and we got married, things seemed so different. But as soon as we got past the intense early years into the time when the relationship gets real or gets broken, I picked up again the habit of obsessing over that shortcut to fulfillment. I could dream of other women, other places, other careers that would end the inner fear, emptiness and pain. It was the sort of dreaming that would always keep me from hearing the song close by. The dreams gave me a way out instead of opening up and talking to the woman who loved me about the real crisis I was in. There was always a fantasy person elsewhere who wouldn’t need all that talking and honesty!

It took me many years, but finally the escape artist in me called it quits. Those fantasies came in such abundance that I just couldn’t take them seriously anymore. Only then could I get on with the work of recovery and the work of marriage.

I understand now when my wife says to me: “Are you still in love with me and if you don't than you should leave.” I guess that she is having a hard time now.



The Old Sailor,

Down memory lane with funny feelings

Dear Bloggers,

The new year just has started and nothing really has changed, our house is still for sale and I am still married to the the same women that I have met nineteen years ago. My god I am getting old as I talk about my yesteryears. Yes I have f***ked up life pretty much but who cares I was happy. I was doing all kinds of things as I was smoking, drinking and all kinds of other things when I was a youngster, I tried my luck Down Under but came back broke and disappointed as a recession broke out. And my job came to an end.

I am going to have some funny feelings now.  Somehow I am embarrassed at how often in the past I have publicly posted about my deepest desires, thoughts, emotions, confessions, bowel movements and my good old days at sea.  So if you’re somebody who doesn’t want to hear about Old Sailors past trauma, you may now run away. Strange how all of a sudden these memories can jump up and swing you back to your “good old days.”

Let us begin with my teenage years. As we needed to pick up someone from the ferry we past a farm and that is not that strange in the North as we are the dairy part of the country. Close to the island up the coast of Holland there was an old farm; there were outbuildings, a woodshed, a barn, fields, and a beautiful salt cove that leads out onto the bay. Every single room and outbuilding and crawl space on that approx 80 acres of grass fields, and every dark saltwater inlet haven, is filled with memories, just how it should be with an old house. These are some of the only really good memories I have of my childhood. I only know what it feels like to be truly, deeply carefree and happy, because I remember a time when I lived together with my brother and sisters on my parents ponyfarm and was surrounded by love.

I had a great youth but also some rough times as a kid. But there were more happy than sad moments in my life eventhough there was nothing really challenging in the little village where I was born and raised, I left home at twentytwo and moved halfway across the globe to figure out who I was outside of that place. For me home is both a precious gem and a bed of quicksand. After I came back and brushed my old life again, I met a girl but my dreams were still wild and i started sailing. I left her behind to start a different adventure again to work as a bartender on a cruiseship. Although the job was good the money was ok, I got for the second time in my life homesick. Then life is really getting painful. When I had been gone long enough, I figured out that I could someday go back and reconcile with Home, really face my past and maybe let some things go, but I never did.

Until one day my mum and dad sold the house and later also the ponyfarm. It was time for them to retire and enjoy their own lives as they were giving many kids a second home at the farm. I actually lived in a live childrensbook story and that was kind of strange but on the other hand so familiar, it felt like having some extra brothers and sisters. All of a sudden the so well known place was belonging to someone else.

A couple of years later my mum past away although my dad is still around, he is getting really old and more and more fragile. Together with my sisters and brother he is the last one that know that little boy from those past years. Even when I grew up now and saw a lot of things in my turbulent life, I probably might have hurt a couple of persons feelings but that is because I can be pretty straight forward knowing that life can be crap and reckless.

I’ve moved around my whole life and had more then ten different jobs. I am  like a sailboat pulling anchor during every storm, constantly aching to be brought back to home port, to her mooring.  But I  never left my anchor down for long.  Then I got brought onshore and hauled about a hundred kilometres inland up North, where for years I was that little sailboat, born at sea, meant to be afloat, living on hot, dry land and surrounded by trees.  Instead of sea lavender and gulls. But I digress. Also women went topless at the local pool – that was a plus.  Eventually, after a decade, life is not that bad here and we have to hope for a buyer of our property, even with my soul moored close to an island off the coast of Holland, someplace like that could actually become home at least to part of me. If I only could afford it, I did not become rich. I even fail to make money on this blog, but who cares it is a nice hobby.

Letting go has happened without my knowing it, over the past 25 years – school, college, friends and loves, sleeping on park benches and being pissed like monkeys, sleeping in the funniest places as every corner of the country had to be seen and rolled by when we looked out the windows of our car.  Flexible careers, partner, childbirth, children, big mistakes, redemption, healing that happened when I wasn’t looking.

Here in Lippenhuizen, I’ve delighted in the springtime crocuses and daffodils, the miracle of ice coating and sparkling every branch and twig, fall colors, certain songbirds, things I left behind and yearned for that South east Friesland has in common with South west Friesland.  And I’ve discovered that there are things to love that are, for me, particular to this place.

In this neighborhood people or more orientated on their own families. And I have been married for years to a community-oriented culture where family comes before individualism. I was used to people that simply walked in for a cup of coffee or tea or a neighbor that wanted to borrow a few tools. That is not what you will find here. Yes we are living in a wonderful new house with enough room, in a beautiful neighborhood – and being able to stay here, not because we’re making a crapload of money, but because good housing here is working-class affordable. 

My parents did hardly fight at least not when I was around. When I was twentytwo and I left the country my mum was sad but hoped I would find a better life, eventhough most of my funny plans ended into faillure and since then, any happiness I’ve felt has tugged on a deeply entrenched sense of loss as old as my soul. On a deep level, for me, Home, happiness, can only be visited.  Every other weekend, and my dear father will be there, and will now belong to our kids. Eventhough he is getting more fragile he is still enjoying the kids to be around. He is getting quickly tired so we do not make it too long when we are there. But our kids love to go to grandad in Langweer and that is the best feeling you can get as a parent.

Here’s what’s going to happen. When this place gets sold, along with the grief, I’ll feel like something inside me has been set free. In fact, I’m already feeling that old barnacle-covered mooring tugging up, inch by inch, with each day that I further process the transformations that are happening in my family. Remember, about the marker buoys: Right Red Returning, and stay out of Hellgate in your small boat. Look for the phosporescent creatures that sparkle like underwater galaxies on black nights at full tide.  Maybe you’ll find a squid after a good storm.  Or a message in a bottle – maybe mine, finally come home after many years at sea.

If you gaze at the stars and your boat rocks on the waves, you will hopefully think of me being out there on the pitch black sea.

The Old Sailor,

Sorry we are closed today

Dear Bloggers,




Today I am taking a day off to celebrate another year that lies past me.

Some would call it the day of the big things that came to us. On of the first things that i remember is that we switched from normal black and white to colour television, and we could receive more channels and we had a telephone as not everyone had a phoneline yet. I got my first bicycle and later a moped. And I was able to vote and get my driving licences. I took the decession to go sailing as there was not that much work at the time. We bought our first house and got our children. I have to say that in those 15.705 days that I am on this cruel planet.

As there were also bad things that i remember Martin Luther King was killed, the Vietnam war, the hazardous fire on the Scandinavian Star, the disaster with the Herald of Free Enterprise, the fireworks explosion at Enschede, the attack on the twin towers, the tsunami in Indonesia and her surrounding countries and of course things that happened just around me that loved ones past away from us.

It left happy memories and some deep scars in my inner person.

“Maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you've had, and what you've learned from them, and less to do with how many birthdays you've celebrated.”

Here are some facts that might be seen as useful information to some of my readers but maybe it isn’t.

· You are exactly 43 years 1 week 2 days 9 hours 40 minutes 57 seconds old.

· You will receive your next birthday gift in 14 hours 19 minutes 3 seconds later.

· If your hair were never cut since 13.March.1968, it would be 6.266 m. today.

· If your nails were never cut since 13.March.1968, they would be 1.555 m. today.

· An apple tree seeded on 13.March.1968, bore 3,818.536 kg. apple till today. Its contribution to economy is €15,236.0 and it fed 6,407 people. We hope that in your life you, as a human being, achieved more than that poor apple tree.

Yes, spring is on it's way

Hang in there! Spring will be here soon.

Dear Bloggers,

Finally winter is moving out as cold and moisty weather is not my best friend I am looking forward to the Spring and Summertime again. The best part of spring is the great smells of new life in the garden. I think that this is natures best period of the yearly cyclus.

I noticed a few daffodils around town blooming this week and was happy to see two in my garden just starting to open. Another first bloom of spring is a lowly dandelion but it does look cheery after months of winter. I'll wait awhile and enjoy it before i pull it. The other sign of the season change is the longer days. Some days it's still pretty chilly but I get to spend some time each day doing some garden chores. What a great way to finish the work day. So here is the first daffodil that i saw.

It seems like a jibe in this weather. The icy blasts that hit you as soon as you leave towards the parking to grab your bus, the mornings are stone cold and the passengers are happy to see you. It is only –2 degrees celcius but the wind is biting cold. The morning dash of coffee and a loaf of bread did nothing to smash the calm blankness of sleep of my wife and kids. Mornings on the bus on Monday are a kind of zombie march. My head is not fully functioning yet, what can you expect at 06:30 in the morning. I have an automatic path that I follow on the route that I have to do as if I am trundling down a fixed railway line.

By the time the cold hands grab the steeringwheel and you drive to your starting point, you see people outside the bus doors on push bikes in that freezing cold weather and you are just partially awake, and my defrosted body enters again to go into chilling. Then into traffic, making little jokes with the passengers, most of the regulars are feeling home on the bus. After my two support rides that I need to do I unload the passengers and drive back to the garage, Sit down. Time to drink coffee.

I like to come home and write as soon as I can. It is already evening as I write this. I wonder, sometimes if the reason that I write is for the following reasons---is it Writers and the act of writing,--- or is it killing my devotional time, as some sort of way to enter aloneness and prepare for final silence? Or is it a well formed habit only designed to make products that I temporarily own and then discard? What is the purpose of weekly writing?

I’m not sure. I think that writing is a way to clarify my mind and my miserable life—as I am only here passing time, like everybody else. Today I write something down; this is true for this minute, but then the next thing I write contradicts what I said or thought about three days ago. Writing is sometimes difficult and somehow endlessly disruptive. When I consider this fact of lack of agreement in anything I write down--the fact that one day--I may be all for one position and the next --not--what this tells me is that I am mirroring my mind that is also as fluid as the writing. In other words, my mind is a thinking machine that functions on chemicals.

What do they do to store--memory--logical thinking processes--emotions--the self? And if everything is stored in neurons--how are they stored? Is memory a simple stockpile of chemicals with half lives that are reached continually and progressively until no memories are finally left? If so --this makes the act of writing down --critica But if what we write down is contradictory, emotional rather than rational, considered useless by our society--is it still worth it to be writing devotedly--as if despite these deficiencies in textual depictions of a mind--it is still a worthy practice to engage in the writing down of a mind?

I suppose this decision is based on what you value. Do you --if you have sufficient time--value working at something that will return you more goods and services--or do you in your free time prefer to do what makes you see clearly into your own small life and its attachments? It depends entirely on value and the type of life you want to live. This type of writing is not valuable if you would rather paint or draw; if you need to work on a career; if you prefer other activities. But if the main method of learning for you (and your main interest is learning) is to use words in multiple ways--then writing is a weekly practice that unknots and untangles a great many small minor problems a human being can encounter in a life. It also serves to waken up that human being to luck and good fortune.

I only think about nature sometimes when I am driving and my mind is at ease. After a few days I will sit down and write about it. I only think about the good fortune to be married to a kind, loving woman like my wife and the extreme luck of having two daughters, when others have no kids. Writing practice inevitably introduces you to the grace of your own extreme luck in being born into such a life of privilege.

Even the long winter is a lucky matter for it makes spring and summer like desserts after a long tedious meal of rubbery food. Outside the winter wheels and grinds us down to nothing. The pond that is still filled with a thin layer of ice that is close to my house.

Winter is the ultimate season. The poor trees stick out like old timers TV antennae and looking very dark on the horizon. And winter paints them with icy colours, It is all very beautiful –if you are sitting in the writing room like I am out of the battering fists of the wind, sympathetically appreciating the troubles of the ice cold conditions that nature has to go through, like the the locked in birds, the hares and deer that live right near here along in the bloody forest that gives them also shelter as well.

Usually I’m hanging on the couch together with my wife and watch some Tv at this time of the day. But today, I’m sitting behind the computer and my wife is leaving me alone without any resistance or whatsoever. The weather is a powerful incentive to writing—encouraging me by the hammering cold windy fists on the house walls. Crocusses and daffodils are showing their face that is the sign by the extended care that says—Spring is coming soon—but just not today.

The Old Sailor,