I’ll reluctantly admit it; I get depressed. I mean, I’m told everyone does at times so I’m not exactly unique. Nor is mine so deep or debilitating that it stops me from getting up in the morning and going to work. (That last line is a bit of a joke because NOT having to get up and go to work is precisely a source of great happiness these days!)
Yet, on most mornings I wake up to a malaise. My mind quickly seeks causes and in the creative genius therein can find more than enough. Usually it’s to question the notion that I’m not working and whether that’s right or not. If I walk down that path far enough I’ll encounter a sense of lost relevance to the world, uncertainty as to what I’m doing with my life, fear over finances, a sense of guilt that others are working and I’m lazy. The list goes on and it takes me, oh, about 20 seconds to spiral.
But then logic prevails, i.e. I have to pee, so I get up, get ready and go to the gym. The latter is now a 5-6 morning a week thing — The gym, I mean. The peeing is more frequent — and pretty much exhausts the early depression to say nothing of providing me permission to eat and drink more without adding weight. Maybe that’s the motivation?
I again get back to the question of my depression. I can’t find a real cause that’s different on a day to day basis. I got depressed at times when I was working, at the peak of my career. I got depressed at moments on vacations and weekends. And I got depressed during the interlude that was my work with Informa when, to my pride, I was getting more attention from the media, writing more columns for Barron’s and Bloomberg, and not exactly killing myself.
What then is behind this depression? I am leaning to chemistry. Had it not been for a friend of mine in high school, Tedeschi, I might have failed chemistry and even then barely scraped by with a C+ if I recall properly. With that class, by the way, went any interest I had in being a doctor.
My point is that I’ve never been very good with chemistry whether studying it or, in this case, attributing it as the main cause of my melancholy moods vs. a more tangible set of excuse. When I frame it that way, when I call it a mood and not overly attempt to find a cause other than my make up, it helps. It helps me compartmentalize it, know that it will fade as the day moves ahead, and does get me to the gym.
Not just the gym either. In this phase of my life I’ve taken up almost daily meditation and more recently yoga. The daily meditation is a chore, let me tell you, because my mind wanders when my body manages to stay awake and yoga is a hell of a lot harder than it looks. I’m also making a great effort to be in contact with friends and appreciate those moments vs. letting myself worry about what I’ve got to do next. The point is that I find ways around the dark mood that my cherished free existence allows now more than when I was a working.
I’ve kept a journal for over 40 years. Once in a blue moon I’ll read what I wrote and what strikes me is that it’s taken 40 years to figure out to even this modest extent how I have thought about my moods. I was fixated on those stemming from a specific cause that once I got through or escaped from things would be fine. Of course, it didn’t take long for the mood to return — the ‘black dog’ as Winston Churchill called his depression and maybe why I favor yellow labs — and the whole cycle would repeat itself.
And today so far? I got up, went to gym, bought oil for my car, got some stuff at CVS, had breakfast and am writing this. Things could be worse, but I’m not sure they could be much better.