Dealing with depression in a time of turmoil

For so many years, starting in my undergraduate days, I referred to the side of myself not plagued by depression as the Robot.

Obviously it was a way of coping, a way to succeed in school and in life, without having to confront and seek help for the part of me that increasingly hated being alive. This was all a sort of secret, and one I even thought I was keeping from myself, because the Robot didn’t know anything about rage and despair, the Robot didn’t get hung up or set back or stuck.

Losses, failures, injustices were all meaningless to the Robot because the Robot had been programmed to persist. The Robot was not going to get mired in the toxic muck of the mind or stumped by the riddle of the heart. There was work to do, there were people to please, and the Robot had no true self of its own in which to be absorbed. The Robot was decidedly low-tech but it seemed to me to work. But as with all fictions that we find necessary to our survival, this one kept breaking down until finally it could no longer be repaired.

No amount of deception could solder together the parts, no evasions or procrastination could keep the Robot from the scrap-heap of painful confession. And so I made public what I didn’t even want to address privately: that my struggle with depression was stronger than any trick of the mind I had tricked myself into believing. If all of this sounds too metaphoric or clever, forgive me.

The details of depression are rather dull to me. The excesses, such as they are, just as dull: insomnia, manic reading, anger that boils into outrage, words that roar, and an ever worse feeling of helplessness toward the culture’s derangement. There is nothing brave about admitting I need help and must change how I respond to situational stress. It’s like being weaned from poison. My mouth still puckers at times from the desire to nourish from the urges of outrage. And in a culture like ours, where outrage is an industry that has consumed most of the media and all of politics, it has not been an easy diet.

But as we have seen locally, some outrages are not only reasonable but inevitable. That people are outraged by what happened to Andrew Holland in our jail, and/or by the continued bigotry at Cal Poly toward non-white, non-straight students and faculty, is what I would consider necessary outrages.

They have certainly presented great challenges to my own equanimity because as an elected leader in the community, I am fully aware that what still pervades too many in our “establishment” is moral complacency and excuse making.

Usually I would have roared at this lack of conviction and picked fights, but now I am trying to pick my spots, and also use that energy to support the activists willing to confront indifference and inspire change. (I have also been impressed by the hard attention and continued coverage given to these issues by The Tribune and the New Times, with whom I have also on occasion picked fights.)

This is a time when all people in positions of power and influence should be made to feel uncomfortable, should be shook up. It’s a time when our thinking should be challenged, when we’re unsure how to react and have to reconsider and question not only our values and actions, but also our lack of actions and our lapses in moral strength. Testing our ideas, our knowledge, our compassion, and our ability to learn from others (otherwise known as humility) should occur more frequently here among leaders.

Otherwise we will be little more than pleasant white robots, nattering on about craft beer, local cheese, verdant hills and the latest lifestyle ratings. Not a worry in the world outside our own families, not a serious dilemma of societal complexity that might diminish the glow of the proclaimed paradise that is known as here.

I am still finding my best voice because I cannot and will not be quiet about injustices. But I also can’t let the outrage consume me and make me angry in a manner that becomes its own unfairness. The possibility of positive change remains an aid station of the mind and heart for all of us who might be tempted to give in or give up or do little more than rage against what we don’t want to change.

Adam Hill represents the 3rd District on the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors.

This story was originally published April 20, 2018 at 5:26 PM with the headline "Dealing with depression in a time of turmoil."