Somehow, Here: On Academia, Depression, Failure, and Hope

[Warning: A lot of navel-gazing and links to pop-culture ahead. This was hard to write so I'm linking a lot of stuff that has kept me company over the years.]

With a lot of deliberation, heartache, and self-reflection I have decided to defer my entrance and full-ride to a Ph.D. program for a year. In part it was because I couldn't finish my book and other writing obligations in time. But the real, major reason? My mental health.

I hate this. I absolutely hate talking about this. A few people in the past have said they found it really helpful when I have spoken about struggles through seminary and after. And since people have recently been asking about when I'm moving to start the program, I thought I would write this. So if this helps even one person other than myself, I'm happy. It doesn't make it any less embarrassing.

In part this was the hardest decision I have had to make for a while; in part it was the easiest. I have been on a road of intensive study and academia for over the last decade, one that I set for myself when I was in the midst of a deep, crippling depression from a bunch of overlapping circumstances, some of which I have spoken of here. I was, and have been, utterly broken. But, of course, the harder I studied while working full time, the less time I had to think on my brokenness. In fact for every class I would literally double, in some cases triple the reading load just so I wouldn't have to pause. In physics one of the most intriguing notions is that, as the cosmic speed limit, if one were to imagine what a beam of light "sees" as it travels it would in fact see nothing. The whole universe would appear to it as a point, for at that uppermost speed everything has collapsed. And God was that point. So I fancied myself in my studies as on the road to awe. And so I tried to be like light, and let the world vanish into the infinite singularity of endless books. Ragged, I ran then like light through a forest of words, hoping to claim some as my own. It was a good deal, or so I thought. But of course, there is a price for everything. My light was not a glory, but a whisp, luring me deeper down dark, swampy paths. 80 books a year. 100. 120. 150. 200. Run. Run. Run.

I have been made fun of--both in seriousness and good humor--about the amount of citations I use while writing. To be sure, there is an enjoyable element of competition, of showmanship. I don't brag about myself very often (or, at least I hope I don't), but I am, if nothing else, good at what I do. But, in a deeper sense what I do was often also an inept, elliptical cry of pain: my citations are not just "be impressed!" but "Behold my despair!" My soul lies ragged, impaled over and over again over a field of pointless notes and uncountable time. And time, that stream that devours all its daughters and sons, kept moving. I thought, in my foolishness, I could outrun it, achieve some quixotic transcendence. But the faster I moved, the more I was simply letting it devour me, too.

It worked for a long while. The thing that no one tells you about depression is how it can escape the confines of any event that may have triggered it, and how addicting it can be. To be sure, it is crippling, a wanton nightmare in which on many days for years I could hardly even get out of bed, or would have to do my best to not to break down into a fetal position in the grocery aisle while trying to buy soup. After a decade, even grocery stores look like terrors. I should have gone to counseling, you say? Yep. But as Christian Wiman puts it in his incredible book My Bright Abyss: "It became easy to rekindle the flame of lonely anguish, it part because it never went wholly out. The lie in my life was not the flame but the ease with which I turned to it. Pain has its pleasures, not least of which are its reliability, immediacy, and even in a strange way, companionability." He then quotes the poet Marianne Moore: "Without loneliness I should be more lonely, so I keep it."

For some time in the midst of this marathon, I thought I was better. And in fact, in many ways I was. I did what few could, I had outrun my sadness, or so I thought. But God, of course, eluded me. He was--no matter how fast I ran--a shadow that had just turned the corner, as in a dream. I officially graduated with my two master's degrees back in 2014. For someone who wanted to get a Ph.D. young(ish), the fact that five years have passed since then, is mortifying. It chokes me. I have failed. 

I have failed.

The real tragedy was that, when I got better, the entire orienting narrative of my tragic quest evaporated with it. This bag of flesh and bone and water that I am was stripped of all myth and exposed under daylight. At one point--at least it was this way with me--you just wake up, as if from a dream. And like Rip Van Winkle the world around you has changed, and you do not recognize where you are. I had been asleep for so long, And so I stalled. The wide world appeared again, and I could only fall to my knees paralyzed before it. People saw I was better, cheerier; I had told people I was better. But in truth I had been so sad for so long that I did not know what to do with the freedom that came with being mostly alright again. To be honest, one of the most terrifying thoughts that occurred to me was that I literally did not know how to be happy anymore. This still roams at the edges of my thought. But the shock of my own failure was so intense that I could almost project it outward, like a moment in the movie The Thin Red Line in which the main character, looking upon horror that he himself is participating in, reels back and asks: "Who's doing this? Who's killing us?"

It's only me. It's only me. I thought I was the hero in my own tragic story.

No.

Turns out, I'm the bad guy.

In my saddest moments I picked this path to travel down. This was all my design. I sowed the seeds, and watched them grow. I cultivated it, this long chain of events leading to this sorrow of mine. I tried to live what I thought was a normal life while still keeping my adamantine research schedule. Working. Hanging out with friends when I could pull my head out of my own ass. But in my sadness I had set myself upon a very hard road of being a theologian, with little possibility. So I tried to conjure again that chimerical purpose depression had tricked me into believing. That great frame of sky I could use to place my life. I wanted another puzzle to solve. Another tragic quest to look for. I had nothing, saw myself as nothing. So I wanted at least to be a tragic hero in my own story again. Do I lie to myself to be happy? Yes. I do.

In the end, you just get tired. Little cracks began to appear in my quixotic strategy of reading, running. I would constantly wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweat with an almost audible voice telling me that I was already a failure. Already worthless. Not a man, but the memory of one. Wicked dreams abuse the curtain sleep. I have lived such a blessed life; great family, wonderful friends, wanting for nothing. It takes a spectacular talent for failure, that voice would say dripping in its midnight, to still end up where you are. I would immediately grab a book in those dark watches, or head the to gym to meet with those grim segments of humanity like myself who felt the metal and the neon lights at such an hour were somehow a reprieve. Just to make the voice stop. So, I couldn't stop researching enough to even start applying to Ph.D. programs. No breath. No interval. I couldn't stop. Because then I would appear again. That loathsome, fearful little wretch that I thought was so artfully imprisoned. In that simple little space of stopping would swell a horror. And so I continued to read my demons to sleep. I would work my job at Multnomah University for 40 hours a week (well, 50 a week if you count a terrible commute). And when I would get home I would research, take the odd editing or writing job, and occupy myself until 2 or 3 in the morning. And then wake up the next day and start all over. I was a delusional tyrant over myself.

And for a while, whether I thought myself a tragic hero, or whether I accepted that I was the villain in my own life, I continued unabated. But then, finally, at the beginning of this last year I tried to pull the brake, tried to stop. When I was then accepted into a Ph.D. in the Humanities, I was initially ecstatic. When I received the offer of full ride and stipend, elated. Even though I still felt like a failure because I was 35 and hadn't achieved some arbitrary goal of already having a Ph.D. by now. This feeling has grown especially intense in the light of the fact that all my wonderful friends have well paying jobs (especially in relation to what I have made), are married, in love, some with kids, some buying houses. What am I?

I grew up in my own little Eden. In high school my family became wealthy beyond anything I could imagine. I was popular in high school if for no other reason than the fact that I was tall, athletic, and had a good-looking family members. I had the best friends anyone could ever ask for in the group of guys I hung out with in church group. They are still my best friends. But then my family lost almost everything. And since 2004 I have been back on my heels. Eden expelled me, and time was its ever burning sword hanging like a veil between me and what came before. I've been trying to claw my way back ever since. I am not a success story. I have not overcome the odds. I am the awkward counterexample.

So, when I received the offer of a full-ride Ph.D., it was everything I ever wanted. I thought. Finally success. Finally, I have worth. Finally something to show those I love. Having been living a deeply spartan life-style to save up money, I was already planning to leave my current job to finish the book contract I was fortunate enough to land. This was just further confirmation to do just that. And when I did, unfortunately, the real nightmare began.

The month after I left my job, that voice that would rudely bark and interrupt my sleep grew bold. Every minute of every hour, it would rake my thoughts. Tremble, I would tremble, it would tremble in my bones and flesh. Look at your dream. It would mock. You get to leave your friends and family for four to five years. For what? There are no jobs waiting for you on the other end. And if there are, you have to move to the middle of nowhere, to work for a depressing adjunct job. Look at what you have done. 

"Look at where you are." The voice would pull me from sleep in the night. Look at what you have done. There is a moment in movies that dabble in time-travel, where we can frivolously participate in the the thrill, the horror of a false, distorted future. A protagonist we know and love, distorted and bent by time. But of course this will all be undone in the end, and things reset to normal. But I am that thing undone by time; I am that felt horror. Here I am at that far, false end of time. But there is no reset. I am here. I am, somehow, here.

What should have been a time of joy, was one of nothing but terror. All the things I had sacrificed--would sacrifice--became a joke. There is an incredibly poignant moment in HBO's The Young Pope when the Pope, played by Jude Law, is approached by a beautiful woman longing for his secret affection. As she is coming on to him, he rebuffs her gently, and says "I love God, because it is so painful to love human beings. God, the absence of God, always reassuring and definitive. ... I am a priest ... because I do not want to suffer. Because I am incapable of withstanding the heartbreak of love, because I'm unhappy. Like all priests. It would be wonderful to love you the way you want to be loved. But it is not possible. Because I am not a man. I am a coward, like all priests." I was alone. I felt alone, because I hunted this ever absent, ever present God. This God of my imagination. This God of ghosts. Have I suffered being alone because I dwell in the heights of some fictive god, too afraid, too incapable of withstanding the heartbreak of love?

Every moment in time and space burned with this voice. Repeatedly. Incessantly. I was somehow, here, in this nightmare of my own making. God, at least that haunting God of my making, was gone. But I was somehow here.

The truth was I had such abandonment issues that I was afraid even my friends and family would be distant from me when I returned. Would they remember me at all? A stupid thought, of course. But the adage that warns to be careful what you wish for was here quite apt: it revealed to me, well, myself. On top of this, I--along with everyone else along the same path--has watched academia begin to implode on itself. What are these sacrifices for, I wondered? As embarrassing as it may be to admit, as hard as it is to say after all this time: I wasn't ready. I am still broken.

The worse part of deferring for a year to figure things out, to get healthy, is the fear that I am letting everyone else down. I had already announced the full ride--and worse, that I was excited for it (which I was. And am, in my own weird way). Perhaps I truly am a disappointment. And so I tried to keep the motions of my own excitement going when people asked me, when are you moving, and said, how wonderful that you have gotten everything you have wanted.

But, no. 

I will, come hell or high-water, get the Ph.D. for myself--if not necessarily for a job waiting on the other side. But, as hard as the decision was to defer--as much as I felt disappointment in myself and was woried about the same reaction in others--God is good. All the time. What a joy it is, and what hope has been given to me, to know that I have been given a period of time in my life to try and truly heal. And I get to work on a book to boot.

What I have to accept--what is in my mind but still, after all this time, not in my heart--is that I am saved by grace, not works. I am not my works. You are not your works. You are not your achievements, your status. You are not what others think of you. Everything is in God's time; everything must be in the time that calls you to complete it.

As they say, next year in Jerusalem; next year the Ph.D program? 

Or so I hope.

Pray for me.