Unraveling

The Belly of the Whale

There’s nothing particularly uncommon with little episodes of depression, especially in the winter. They come and go uneventfully, like a rainy day, but that’s usually all it is. I dry off and bounce back. I assume that’s pretty normal. 

In October of 2022, after about a week of feeling perhaps more down than was usual, something odd started to happen.  

In the space of a day or two I was surprised to find that what people said suddenly did not make sense to me. 

I don’t mean that I couldn’t understand the words, or that it was some kind of auditory dyslexia. I mean someone would say something, and I suddenly couldn’t understand how it was attached to the situation at hand, or even what they would say next.

It appeared to be a disconnected flow of murmuring, with barely a thread of sense to stitch it all together. Much more seemed to be left out than was said, and what was said seemed nonsensical to me. It didn’t mean anything. The words all skated above the reality, without touching down to earth. I couldn’t seem to attach them to something genuine in my experience. Never before had I seen so clearly the gap between the intellect and embodiment, in myself and seemingly all around me. People were speaking, but it looked like a sort of collectively agreed upon madness, where everyone dances to a different tune but insist that it’s all the same. I was astonished that it could carry on day after day with immediate disaster and destruction. 

Whatever was happening started that way, with words, but it soon spread out to everything. I found that I could not grasp the causal relationship between things, as though point A and point B had very little to do with one another. Whatever I turned my attention to, the categories of experience seemed to disconnect from each other, and float away like blocks of ice when a glacier melts on the edges. The elements of my perception that make up the flow of experience were no longer relating to each other in the usual way. The meaning that normally transcends separate points and binds them together into a coherent whole, a story to relate to, and act on, became suddenly unreliable. I felt utterly, deeply, forlornly disoriented. 

Jonah and The Big Fish, colored pencil, 2018

I hadn’t fallen catatonic or become so confused that I couldn’t basically function. Automatic behaviors were still going just fine, but internally I felt like everything had come to a standstill. I was in a sort of daze, looking out at the world in disbelief. The collapse of apparent meaning caused everything to appear incredibly absurd, like a joke or an illusion spun to keep us all occupied and blindly running around with big ideas that in reality were not attached to the pulse of life. 

Firstly, it came with a tremendous amount of negative emotion. Fear, anxiety, helplessness, and doubtful confusion. 

Secondly, there was a most peculiar sensation. It seemed as if everything presented its face to me, its appearance, but then turned and presented its back at the same time. I could not see things as cut off from the background, as separate entities. To say something was This was to deny it was also That, when clearly the only distinction was the words assigned to it in that particular moment for the sake of utility. At least, that’s how it suddenly seemed to me. The normal tearing apart of opposite qualities for the purpose of navigation had turned off. But it meant I was no longer navigating, no longer moving. I felt myself to be suspended in an endless black ocean, where there was no energy. There was only enormous pressure and a deep stillness. I felt like I had reached the bottom of everything. Somehow, inexplicably, without my doing anything consciously, I had fallen deep under the earth. Because I knew this experience was internal and subjective, that I was trapped within the space of my own psyche where it was occurring, which I had no conscious control over, I came to a terrifying realization. There was no where else to go. 

I felt like I was burning up. Or being stripped away. Pieces that I thought of as me were dismembered and examined, and discarded. Ideas I was attached to and used to orient my behavior were suddenly flimsy and ridiculous. But I had been attached to them. They were part of the story I had been telling myself about who I was and what I was doing. Suddenly, they didn’t matter, it went up like puffs of smoke, because they were not part of my real experience. They were words I repeated to myself. They didn’t mean anything anymore. They were not living. It was like standing in a hall of mirrors, or everything turning to sand when it’s supposed to be solid. There didn’t seem to be any foundation to stand on, and my previous feelings of certainty or knowing fell like a house of cards, one after another. I felt painfully naked, as built up layers of what I thought was my identity continued to dry up and strip themselves away. This carried on for weeks, and then months.

unfinished drawing, stripping of identities

I saw how often I was caught in a projection of the future, the past, a detached thought or collective fantasy and disregarding the present moment. I could barely attend to the moment in front of me before flitting away again in favor of some abstract construct. I had apparently been living in a fantasy. My own immediate world was being often rejected in favor of things that didn’t belong to me, and it was cutting me off from life. The direct experience of my sphere of consciousness was so unlike what I had thought several months before. There was hardly any substance at all, and I felt like I was starving. This was incredibly painful to realize. 

After several months of this, it seemed to me I had reached the edge of something. For every story told I could only see what was omitted in order to construct it. For every mask that presented itself, there was the darkness hidden beneath it. If I looked at the face of a coin, the backside would show itself to me. This paradoxical double vision was unraveling everything around me. It was unavoidable and jarring, but it seemed like I had finally accepted the only thing to do was surrender into it, rather than tense myself and resist. There was no escaping the experience, it surrounded me on all sides, and fed me every perception, thought, feeling, image, or desire that happened to flit through me. It was unasked for, and autonomous. My job seemed to be to pay attention, and stop getting in the way by splitting and rejecting what was happening. In early January, in the space of a week or so, something shifted over. A deep peace filled me up, and I felt like I was quietly with myself rather than cluttered with illusions and junk.

paradoxical vision

By February the external world pressed itself in and my attention was forced into more immediate action and away from this state. The whole thing passed away and life carried on. I was calmer, and seemed to have shifted my priorities and values, but life carried on nonetheless.

It didn’t completely fade, however. For the rest of the following year the feeling ebbed and flowed in smaller but noticeable doses. In September of 2023 something seemed to come over me again. Once more, it began with the feeling of depression. This time it was exaggerated. Nothing was changing in my external day to day life, so it was not clear why this was happening. I felt absolutely terrible. If it has been just a bout of feeling down, I might have thought I needed more exercise, or sun, or to change my diet. What was strange about it was that one day I was fine, the next I would feel totally overwhelmed by the horror and futility of existence. The next day, I was fine again, even quite happy. It came and went like a light switch being flipped on and off. It felt impersonal. 

It was excruciating. When I’m sitting here now, no longer in the middle of that experience, that seems like it must be an exaggeration. What was really going on? 

If I hadn’t written down how I felt at the time, I would deny it now. I would simply forget and ignore it. I would rather, it would be so much easier. That seems to be how it works. And, I don’t feel that way at the moment. I’m not in that place, although I’m certain it is an actual place and I’m not the only one whose been there.

Well. I’m not sure what was going on, but I know that suddenly everything fell apart again. Once more, things I was clinging to stopped making sense. There were very few things in my immediate experience that seemed real, and the rest was noise. Again, I was suspended in an abyss with hardly anything to reach for. Old memories cropped up from the past few years and I saw how I was being directed by urges that did not really belong to me. Great currents of culture and personality had caught my eye and I had been giving myself away into them. It’s so much easier, after all, to go along with what is collectively deemed important. I’m just one small and silly person, how can I judge for myself what is good, what is worthwhile? 

Well. I had been doing that, earnestly, and it now fell away. 

The reason these things seemed to be falling away was because of the incredible weight of a terrible sadness that I was witnessing. It’s so difficult to describe how it did not seem at all personal. I wasn’t sad about things in my life necessarily, although they did of course bleed over into this feeling. It was everything. The whole world opened up into a wail of distress. Walking down the sidewalk was like an ordeal, because all I could perceive was unconsciousness, terrible suffering crushing what little light scrabbles to gain a foothold in the world. It was so painful, but in the face of it I could distinguish what was real and what was not. There was so much that was only living on the surface as a twisted lie. It was shocking to experience the unreality of nearly everything around me, and I was a hungry void, starving for anything of substance. I could not look away. And I could no longer ignore my heart, which I realized had been stifled. The feeling was palpable, undeniable. It had been ignored because the weight of it was so immense, and its much easier to live out of your head. The fleeting thoughts were extinguished, most of them meant nothing in comparison with this aching for what was real. My heart was calling out in horror, and pulled me down into complete chaos and unraveling of meaning. I felt that this place was somewhere everyone knew in certain times, but we collectively ignore it because it is so unbearable. Maybe it’s like hell, or the underworld. Maybe it’s unconsciousness. I don’t know. I just know that it happened, and it was crushing.

Jonah in the Whale, graphite, 2023

I decided to stop trying, to stop willing. I would just let things come, and I would accept them, if I could. It was a time of terrible isolation, separation, and feeling pulled down. I dreamt of swimming to the bottom of a pool and looking up, feeling the pressure, feeling the weight above me. I dreamt of being swallowed by a whale, and becoming the whale, and being spit out by the whale again. I had to face the desire for genuine intimacy and connection, how it was being kept away out of fear, and how frightening the lack of it was, how little was offered in the world. I stopped caring about almost everything that didn’t seem to lend itself to the desire for meaning, for reality.  

I had to face my lack of control over my life. We always pretend we are in the driver’s seat. I finally had to say, no, I was not driving. Something was happening to me, I was not choosing what to do. And what was happening was a cutting, chopping, sawing, burning away. I was not who I hoped I would be, I was not who I had been telling myself, or what other people told me I was, either. The whole world, unsurprisingly, was not what I thought it was. I have to give everything away, it simply wasn’t mine to begin with. 

As I type these words I know I’m not in that place anymore. It’s a memory, and I still don’t understand what happened. It’s still rippling through my present moment, and I know it happened because of how different everything seems. I am changed, and as a consequence the world around me is changed. I’m unprepared to say how exactly. It’s something to do with my perception, my interpretive structure, my hierarchy of values. It’s how I see.

JONAH 2

Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish's belly,

² And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.

³ For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me.

⁴ Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple.

⁵ The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.

⁶ I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God.

⁷ When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.

⁸ They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.

⁹ But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord.

¹⁰ And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.

Salvation is of the Lord.

to be continued…