Witness to Withness

The Fog

The Fog

Creeping across the landscape,
A white cloud consuming the light,
Lost and seeking for higher ground,
In a blanket of snowy white.

The depression was awful. The bigger part of the problem was how people perceived what was going on. It was as if all of a sudden a light switch was turned off inside one’s soul and there was no way to find the switch, because it was lost deep within. Other people are just as convinced that you can change your attitude and mood at will. There is a lot of finger pointing that transpires along with isolative posturing if you continue to refuse to change. “What does he/she have to be so down about? After all “I” have done for you and you act this way.” “They are nothing but lazy. They need to get off their butt and get a job.”

This is the endless rhetoric that came my way as I continued to be caught in an internal fog that was thicker than I had ever experienced before inside or outside. So as days stretched out into weeks and months, I was holed up in the basement bedroom. It was an easy place to escape to. The hope was that when is out of sight that they are out of mind. After all in truth, I deserved to be in this dungeon of sorts. No one wanted to be like me or around me when I was like this. Leave me alone to die or at least suffer considering death my only way out.

This was the winter of the big snow of 1977 in New England. It became a fitting metaphor for the walled in prison that my depressive fog was creating. I was experiencing cold on the inside and outside. When would the snow end and when would the depression end? It was a never ending process of seeing the end in sight.