Deconstructing My Misery

My mental health has been the defining issue of my Mississippi Teacher Corps experience. I first began this effort by recapitulating my feelings about the Teacher Corps program, because the prospect of writing retrospectively about my own two years in Mississippi seemed so dauntingly difficult. Truth be told, there is so little to feel proud of. I have not been my best in any way, and I have underachieved as a teacher. I myself have not been a teacher fit for my ideal school, and at times it has rocked my self-belief to the very core.

My story has been a simple failure to thrive. At times I blame Mississippi, as a place I find so narrow and unappealing in many ways. Perhaps in a more nurturing and stimulating environment, I would have done better. Other times I dig in and refuse to grant power to this place for my troubles. There is a significant part of me that believes there is true love and acceptance to be found in and for any place, whatever its beauties and imperfections, and I also recognize that despite my love for the novelty of traveling and moving, I am in fact exceedingly slow to adapt socially and otherwise to a new environment for the long haul. It is entirely possible I would have been just as miserable in New York City for these past two years.

One belief has persisted and grown in me throughout it all: If I could only be happier, I would be a better teacher. My lasting depression and general lack of energy, my listlessness, my isolation and loneliness have affected my professional output profoundly. There was so little of me to give. The result caused me to look upon myself with contempt and dissatisfaction, only further contributing to my depression.

The original causes of my depression are both easy to identify and difficult to describe. The most obvious cause has been simple loneliness and isolation. Personal relationships have not gone so lucky as they did in Peace Corps, which has been the deciding factor why this experience has been considerably less happy than that one. But retrospection and the wisdom of a trusted friend has provided me with the lenses to see clearly how even that relationship in Peace Corps was a product of circumstance, which necessarily crumbled when the circumstances changed and we returned.

As much as anything, my isolation has been caused by my own shyness, my impossibly high standards, my lack of social initiative, and my slowness to adapt, all familiar enough to me. Still there has been a profound change going on within me for the last year or so that speaks volumes to my depression. It is humbling yet so, so true. The thing is, I spent my whole life, for as long as I can remember, cherishing a quaint, appealing notion of a soul-mate future spouse, the ideal partner who would complete me and fulfill my every remaining need. The dream comforted me through every social disappointment; I just knew there must be someone out there who would truly get me! Despite my antagonism toward religion, I am capable of tremendous faith, and perhaps what in some people would have been a heavenly bent, for me was a fervent belief in a future, earthly happiness to be found in my ideal match. But the expected time of the Second Coming came and went. There was Great Disappointment. And then, only relatively recently did I begin to look critically at the belief of my childhood. Looking at it now, it seems a bit obvious how unrealistic my dream was, not to mention the detrimental effect such high expectations had on my actual relationships, but for so long, the faith was so strong in me that I was oblivious to all sense about it. It was everything. In my hidden, subjective experience of life, nothing mattered more.

I sometimes take comfort in the proposition, recently speculated here or there, that happiness is a U-shaped graph and our middle years are usually the most unhappy, as our youthful expectations clash with adult disappointments. Certainly I consider this latest, internal change one of my most important steps to true maturity and independence. I no longer expect any other individual, real or imagined, to complete me. I now believe I can find happiness no matter what comes to pass in my personal relationships, even regardless of marriage or fatherhood. I guess I am the all-or-nothing sort of person, but what once seemed so indispensable now seems impossible to anticipate or rely upon. I am open to anything.

The point is, this change has not come to me without cost. It has been a tremendous grieving process for me to give up on my childhood dream, held dearly for longer than I can remember. While it lacks some of the sensory power of real memories, the dream lived with me longer and influenced me more than any real person, and so the process of grief has been nearly as strong as that following an actual death. I am sadder for the change, but ultimately stronger and I think better off.

A final, subtler reason is also responsible for my depression. It is less excusable, but happened in combination so as to work its insidious contribution. It was my attitude. Somewhere along the way, I surrendered my locus of control. I allowed the experience to define me, rather than the other way around. I shut down. I simply absorbed the misery, and I did not pursue the things I could have done to make myself more happy. I did not seek out anything.

I speak of the past two years in sweeping terms that do no justice to the many aspects of my experience. But this is not the time for entertaining anecdotes; I am telling the most pertinent truth. My experience has been tainted in every way by my depression, a tendency that existed in me beforehand but reached severe proportions during the past twelve months. But the experience to me is not over. I have been getting better and better. While my structured relationship with the Mississippi Teacher Corps program is about to end, my relationship with teaching in Mississippi is not. I expect to do better next year. For the first time in at least a year, I am starting to feel energy and optimism in my daily life, even at school.

Depression is like quicksand and gravity: The deeper you are down in it, the stronger its pull on you, and it tends to compound upon itself. The last few months have been a long, slow process for me to climb out of the deep hole I was in back in October and November, and I still have some ways to go before I reach ideal mental health. But I am proud of the progress I have made, as well as the way I have pulled through without bringing utter disaster upon myself or my school. I am particularly proud of the “C” I accomplished in research writing (and in the end probably deserved a better grade, despite missing every deadline but the most important one) even as I battled through one of my deepest-ever periods of depression.

I have made a lot of progress lately on the issue of adjusting my attitude and reasserting control over my experience of living in Mississippi, particularly on the corporeal level. I recently saw a physician about the shoulder that was bothering me. He prescribed a steroid, along with regular icing and exercises to calm down and rehabilitate my rotator cuff. It seems to be working. Regular use of the inversion table recently purchased, along with a more dedicated approach to daily stretching and exercises, have allowed me to take better control of my chronic back pain, despite a severe flare-up following my spring break hiking trip. I now feel optimistic that, while I have a troublesome back that will bother me for the rest of my life, I can take control of it, instead of the other way around. It just requires dedication. Also I recently discovered the wonders of the nonadictive, nonprescription sleeping pill. What a revelation! Sleeplessness has always been a problem for me, but for whatever reason I never really took it seriously enough to consider pills. Now I find them almost indispensible. Not only do they help me fall asleep, but the sleep that I do achieve is far more restful and less interupted. That discovery alone has improved my energy levels considerably.

Finally, I bought myself a new bicycle to replace the one that was vandalized so long ago and finally broke clean through the frame while I was touring in Britain last summer. I am happy with my new bike and rediscovering the joy of the open road along with the considerable mental health benefits of exercise and fresh air. It has been too long. Until last week, I had never left sight of this town under my own power!

I have an old REI water bottle that says, among other things, “Bikes are freedom.” There is a lot of truth to that. Drivers and lawn-mowers wave to me. The sun shines, and a stiff breeze blows the earthy smells of soil, rain, and pollen across the flats. Country roads appear, disappear, and reappear, turn from pavement to gravel and back again. Wildlife preserves and bayous turn up where you never expected them. Dogs bark and chase. Turtles hop into ditches, and birds sing. The black folks sitting at store fronts in Mound Bayou shout a hearty “Mornin’!” as I glide past. And all seems so much better with the world. I am making my peace with Mississippi. Slowly but surely.