We’re used to hearing words like “darkness” or “suicidal” or “doom” for depression.
All good, except those words describe an emotional extremity. Events unto themselves. Almost exciting, in a horrible way, and they’re notable for the birth of art and the death of man.
The artist Edvard Munch wrote in his diary, “My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.”
King David’s Psalms follow a similar pattern.
If it weren’t for his emotional highs and extreme lows, he probably would have written two or three Psalms. And then we’d just be left with Asaph and the Sons of Korah and a couple others, who don’t do much for me.
But there’s another kind of depression that doesn’t produce anything, because it doesn’t really feel anything. It isn’t a dark spirit — because it doesn’t really have a spirit.
This isn’t Munch or Van Gogh. This is Revolutionary Road and a million other novels and movies about disillusion with life and the emptiness it brings.
It’s the depression that doesn’t lead to either immediate death or, sometimes, even the strange catharsis of flirting with death.
It’s just the depression that leads you to your bed, to lie down and play video games in the dark, because you guess you can press buttons and look at a screen.
If that means you’re lazy, well, who really cares about the fruits of work? You never wanted a minivan from CarMax, anyway.
If lying in bed means things don’t get done, well, what really needs to get done anyway? Don’t we just all need to slow down anyway? Well, I’ve slowed down and am in bed, playing video games. #BecomingUnbusy.
And you don’t feel guilty, because you don’t feel anything.
This kind of depression doesn’t necessarily feel like a threat to your life, because you feel you have no life to take.
Because that life was taken from you long ago.
Somewhere along the way, you set in motion the things that started running you, and soon, the choices you made in the past are the very things that rob you of any sense of choice in the present.
Without any feeling of control or choice, we become like robots. Except not like the useful ones Boston Robotics is making.
We are the robots that won’t take over the world, because we don’t even want to really be in the world. We just want to be in bed. So I guess you could say that we’re the robots who want to go to bed.
It is a flat, bored blanket covering the world that, nevertheless, feels like an epiphany.
Oh, I see. I finally see. Not the light. Or the dark. There is simply no color, and never was. Everything is empty. Sin, righteousness, doing good, doing evil.
This is the depression of Solomon, the thing that led to “All is vanity.”
In Ecclesiastes 1, he writes:
“Everything is wearisome beyond description…. I observed everything going on under the sun, and really, it is all meaningless – like chasing the wind.”
At some point, we might decide to make an effort to get out of bed.
We make a gratefulness journal, or a thankfulness notebook, but we stop because we aren’t genuinely grateful or thankful for anything, because if we don’t feel anything about anything, how can we appreciate a tweeting bird. It just wakes us up.
So how can you feel thankful, if you don’t feel anything?
In fact, sometimes the world and the church’s prescriptions can send us lower than before, because when they don’t work, we just grow more hopeless and depressed.
Now let me say this from a spiritual perspective.
Even though this flat emptiness doesn’t feel like pain, it is a kind of pain, and there is nothing wrong with feeling pain. It isn’t sin.
So if there’s nothing wrong with emptiness, why is there a problem?
Well, first, there’s an enormous temptation to try to fill our emptiness with sin.
The thought trail: “I’ve been righteous, Christ hasn’t filled me up, ‘In Christ Alone’ won’t even work, it’s time to try something else.”
That something else is often sin, and it will never satisfy. As God says to Israel in Hosea 14:8, “Oh Israel, stay away from idols. I am the one who answers your prayers and cares for you… all your fruit comes from me.”
There’s another problem. Your emptiness doesn’t just affect you, it affects everyone around you, and Christianity is about showing love to others, not yourself.
So even if you don’t want to get help for yourself, get help for the sake of others.
So what can you try?
Talk to your doctor, but here are a couple things you can bring to your appointment.
Your emptiness could simply be a chemical issue. It is nearly impossible to feel any measure of joy, peace, or well-being with low serotonin levels.
There’s evidence that psychotherapy or self-talk might raise serotonin levels, there’s an indirect but possible link between bright light therapy and increased serotonin, and exercise and diet could play a role, as well.
If you want to get wonky, I would suggest bookmarking this academic review to help sort out what’s fact and fiction on the web.
(For example, the internet is awash in articles claiming that bananas boost your serotonin, but the authors note that’s unlikely because it does not cross the blood-brain barrier. Curious George was just a happy monkey).
But many of us need the bigger guns, like medication, to help us through all of this.
That being said, there have been plenty of times in my life when nothing seems to make a dent against this type of depression.
For me, it’s a “wait-it-out” strategy. And while I’m waiting it out, I have to resist the temptation to yield to temptations.
Now let me say one more thing.
When I feel empty inside, it almost feels like I’m not an “I.” It’s popular to say that in this empty depression, we’re a “shell” of a person, and in fact, it does feel like we have no identity.
In that absence of felt identity, I try to remind myself that there is one identity that I can never lose, and it’s the only one that truly matters. I am not Christian Heinze. I am, like the disciple John, the one Jesus loves.
In his book Abba’s Child, Brennan Manning writes that “being the beloved” is “not merely a lofty thought, an inspiring idea, or one name among many. It is the name by which God knows us.”
How beautiful.
God doesn’t know you by the name your parents gave you. Instead, he knows you as his child – not your parents’.
Henri Nouwen writes in Life of the Beloved:
“As The Beloved, we are God’s chosen ones… you must hold onto the truth that you are the chosen one. That truth is the bedrock on which you can build a life as the Beloved.”
He urges:
“You have to celebrate your chosenness constantly…. gratitude is the most fruitful way of deepening your consciousness that you are not an ‘accident’, but a divine choice.”
You might feel empty, a shell of a person, but you, like John, are still the one Jesus loves. You are not your name. You are Christ’s Beloved.
I can’t always feel that, but Jesus always feels that for me and in my emptiness, I look to Psalm 73:
“I still belong to you. You are holding my right hand… my health my fail, and my spirit may grow weak, but God remains the strength of my heart. He is mine forever.”
[Painting: Fabio Napoleoni, Please Fill the Emptiness — he has really cool work.)
