Pushing Boulders

I’ve been away from my little blogging world for a while now, and I’ve been missing it. November was kind of pitiful (one entry that really counted as an October entry) and December was a kind of a cheat because I pretty much just posted things I wrote last year. And now January is coming to a close, and it’s time. I haven’t been avoiding writing because I haven’t had anything to write about or because I haven’t felt like writing. Quite the opposite is true. But I have felt that I was not allowed to write about what has been dominating my life since the end of the summer and was waiting for something else to come up that I could write about instead. But the longer I wait to feel like I’m at a point where I can squeeze past this giant boulder in front of me and move on to new territory, the more I realize that I’m never going to feel that way. I can’t squeeze past it. I have to deal with it and try to push it out of my way or else I’ll stay stuck in this dark cave for another three months or more. The long and short of it is that my father has been struggling with, for lack of a better way to put it, an increasingly severe mental illness in the past five months. The roots of it began long before that, and there is a complicated history, as there probably always is, but it’s been the past five months that have been the hardest for my family.

A large part of my hesitation in writing about this has been concern for preserving my father’s privacy and dignity, and I still have doubts about writing about this in a public way. But, as I said, this has dominated my life for months now, and I feel like a liar and a fake if I don’t write about it. It feels like a kind of suffocation not to say anything. So there’s simply the selfish need for outlet and self-preservation driving me to write this. But there’s something else I’ve been thinking about in recent weeks and days that I think has a legitimate place in this decision as well. It occurred to me a few weeks ago that if it had been a matter of my father’s colon cancer recurring or if I were just writing about his Parkinson’s, I wouldn’t be suffering all these conflicted feelings and making such an effort to keep silent. I wouldn’t have to worry for a second about his dignity or the possibility of people making judgments or the possibility of him feeling shame. People are okay with physical diseases and injuries. There is no question of any kind of personal weakness or potential fault on the part of the sufferer, and people often have a tremendous amount of sympathy and even admiration for people who struggle with severe physical ailments.

But what I’ve realized in struggling with this issue myself over the past months is that as far as we’ve come in our society, there is still a tremendous amount of stigma and shame attached to mental illness—to depression and anxiety that have accelerated into psychosis, which is the demon that currently has my father in its grip. I doubt anyone has ever suggested to a cancer patient that if he took up a hobby or went out with friends a little more that he could make himself better, but this has been suggested to my father. I myself have suggested all kinds of variations of that to him, as have my siblings, especially in the earlier stages of his illness, when he was still fairly rational. Obviously, we know that there is a major chemical and physiological component to his struggle and have tried every medical and psychiatric treatment available to address this; but what makes everything so messy and difficult is that there is this murky grey area where a person with a mental illness such as depression and anxiety can potentially make choices that affect his or her recovery. It’s not just chemical—it’s emotional and psychological as well. Is that where the stigma comes from? Is that where the blame resides? Can they really make choices and will themselves to work on these areas, and our unease and accusation stems from their failure to do so, or are we simply ignorant and heartless accusers of victims no more able to control their own minds and emotions than someone with leukemia can control his or her own blood?

This has made my own emotions towards him all kinds of awful. One moment I feel deep sadness and compassion for him, the next I feel full of frustration and anger that he keeps choosing (or so it seems) to persist in his illness and be non-cooperative in doing the things that we think could help him. And, of course, the next moment I feel a flood of burning guilt for that frustration and anger. So in some ways this is about my own shame. As horrible as my mother’s illness was, at least it was more clear-cut. She had cancer. She had done nothing to bring it on or exacerbate it. It was just this terrible disease that we all did our best to fight against. But in my father's case, it’s so easy to get mixed up between fighting his disease and fighting him.

There is much much more to this, but I’ll save that for another entry. I’m tired now and need to go eat something. Pushing boulders is hard work.