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EPILOGUE: My Misery, My Cure and My Joy

cont.

That ends the description of my life written just before and soon after my release from depression. Here are a few reports on my progress later on, as they were written at the time:

March 26, l976
It is almost a year from the time my new life began. Inscribing the date makes me think with pleasure that tomorrow is my youngest son's birthday, and that gives me a joyful apprehension of life such as I never had before April of 1975. I am able to smile, close my eyes, feel melting tears and inner pleasure when I think--as I did just now--of one of the children's birthdays.

I am, by now, less often ecstatic with my new joy of living than I was at the beginning of this new life. Partly that may be due to getting used to my new life without depression, and accepting it as permanent. It may also be partly because I'm no longer in Jerusalem. But still I have these ecstatically-joyful skipping-and-leaping feelings probably more often than most people who have never been severely depressed for a long time. One has to have experienced pain for a long time to be able to be wildly joyful just from noticing the absence of pain.

January 16, l977
Soon it will be two years since I decided to get rid of depression, and did so. There still is a constant running skirmish between me and the wolf that I know still waits for me outside the door. But aside from a two-week period that followed an accumulation of professional problems, when my spirits were sufficiently low that I worried I was relapsing into permanent depression, I have been undepressed. Life is worth living, for my own sake as well as for my family's sake. That's a lot.

June 18, l978
No news is often good news. I've hit some bumps in the past three years, but I've recovered each time. Now I think of myself like a buoyant swimmer. A wave can force me below the surface, but my specific gravity is less than that of water, and eventually I'll float back up after each ducking.

I remember the years when, except for stretches during hours when I was writing, not fifteen minutes of a day would pass without my reminding myself how worthless I am--how useless, unsuccessful, ridiculous, presumptuous, incompetent, immoral, I am in my work, family life and community life. I used to make an excellent argument for my worthlessness, drawing on a wide variety of evidence, and constructing a watertight case.

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One important reason that I castigated myself so often and so well was that I believed that I ought to keep telling myself how worthless I am. That is, I made sure that I escaped no punishment for my many sins. I functioned as an ever-diligent avenging angel. Then I would finish off the job by being depressed because I felt so depressed in response to all these reminders of my worthlessness. (Being depressed because of being depressed is a common routine with depressives.)

The only force inside me that opposed the gloom was my sense of the ridiculousness of it all--the vision of myself as avenging angel, perhaps, or the jest of carrying the process to absurdity with jokes like titles for an autobiography, "Ten Thousand Leagues Up the Creek Without an Ego." That humor did help a bit, though, by giving me some perspective on how silly it was for me to take myself and my worthlessness so seriously.

Now that I am undepressed I still acknowledge myself to be less than a success with respect to the goals I struggle to attain. But now I only infrequently tell myself how worthless and failing I am. I can sometimes go through an entire day with only occasional remembrances of my worthlessness. I avoid these thoughts by banishing them at first appearance with repression, humor, and misdirection (depression-fighting devices I tell you about in the book) and by reminding myself that my family is well, I am suffering no pain, and the world is mostly at peace. I also try to keep in mind that I'm not a bad father, in my family's eyes as in my own.

One important reason that I now act as I do is that I now believe that I ought not let myself dwell on my being of little worth, and that I ought not to be depressed by it. And that "ought" comes from the Values Treatment that was an essential part of my salvation.

October 18, l981
I have hit the jackpot. The world has now made it easy for me to remain undepressed. I no longer must deflect my mind from my professional difficulties in order to stay happy, but instead I can now dwell on my worldly "success" and take pleasure from it.

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