Exaggeration and Confusion: Sunday Scribblings

Photo: Jim and Jan McCorison, here

Today's Sunday Scribblings prompt is "simple". To read more, go here.

As I've written before, my experience with depression has been that it's not sadness it's madness. A large portion of that madness is suffering from anxiety and the exaggeration and confusion that accompanies it. I always thought, before I knew I was ill, that my anxiety was a profound way of caring deeply about things: money, a dropped and broken plate, dinner preparation, following the right directions while driving, or the comings and goings of our kids.

I didn't realize that my worry and my exaggerated yelling or gritting my teeth or jumping up and down with agitation was out of whack, and to my wife(ves), my overwrought reactions to such everyday things could be frightening and certainly surreal.

It is much more simple not to behave this way. The help I have experienced through medication has not only helped me remain calm (I joke and call it apathetic because I thought thought these outbursts meant I cared so much), but it has made dealing with money and broken dishes and preparing food much more simple.

The picture I posted is a visual depiction of my more simple mind. Rather than turbulent, piling anxiety and worry upon anxiety and worry to create mental gale force winds and driving rain and thundering ocean waves in my mental landscape, my more simple mental landscape is like the more placid ocean. My mind and emotions feel expansive, with few swelling, sudden tides, and the picture is less dramatic and much more simple.

In the same way that storm chasers flock to the ocean to watch the irresistible power of a gale storm, these storms of anxiety had a kind of magnetic appeal. I thought they made me more alive, with adrenaline coursing through my veins, simple aspects of my life experienced at high pitches, everything, rather than seeming simple, had the excitement of crisis.

Being simple, and in clearer perspective, the events of my life lack the melodrama they once had. Being simple, these everyday events seem smaller, more trivial, easier to shrug off.

Seeing them as simple affords my mind to see the larger picture in the whole complex of time and events, rather than seeing each thing that happens as the big picture itself.

It's a relief. Experiencing things as simple has relieved me of the racing of my mind, of visions of my life caving in, of fearing that at any moment all that I have known will fall apart.

Simple is not easy. It is not shallow. It is not simplistic. It's been hard earned. It's given my life a sense of stretching out, of being spacious, not claustrophobic. It feels like standing on the Oregon Dunes and seeing the Pacific Ocean extend for miles, beyond the eye's reach.