Transcending the black dog: Living with depression

Eddy Elmer

Psychjourney.com and Positive Living Newsletter, The International Network on Personal Meaning, July 2003

Deep dark days

In the midst of my deepest and darkest depression, the last thing I wanted to hear from anyone was that I had to "transcend" my difficulties. When I stayed awake late at night sobbing and questioning my will to live, I was in no mood to picture myself sitting alone near Walden Pond, transcending the world around me by making friends with a tall, lonely oak tree. "Transcend this," I would mutter under my breath. What on earth could anyone possibly know about the state I was in, let alone about how to get me out of it?

No matter how gently, eloquently, creatively, or forcefully anyone tried to convince me otherwise, there was no way I would ever fathom that there was something more to my life than depression. No amount of advice or reasoning could convince me that my black dog—as Winston Churchill named his own haunting depression—would ever leave me.

But it did. Or, rather, I left it. I transcended it in a way. I didn't merely cope with it—or even fully overcome it (depression will always be with me). Instead, I was actually able to move beyond it. For me, this is what transcendence means—moving beyond something, rather than merely "dealing" with it. When we merely "deal" with something, all we really do is bury it temporarily; which means that at some point, it will come back to bite us. But when we transcend something, it may still be around, but it no longer has any need to draw our attention. This can be incredibly freeing.

Strangely enough, it was the depression itself that helped lead me to this newfound freedom.

How I transcended

You see, I actually mention Churchill's name because he did the very thing that I think is the key to transcending the depths of darkness and misery—he gave darkness and misery a name. In this sense, he not only acknowledged it, but he gave it life—and in giving it life, I think he was able to integrate it into his own existence. It's this integration that I think was key in helping me transcend my own sorrow.

By giving depression a name, and a sense of its own life, it seems we set ourselves on an interesting path. We can't help but ask what we ask of all other living things: what is this thing's purpose? Does depression have a purpose? Could it possibly have any meaning?

In many ways, I realised that being depressed was the antithesis of being alive. In a way, it represented for me the absence of life. And it was that absence that got me to asking: What really is there to life? What meaning is there in my existence? When I asked myself these questions, it started dawning on me that I wasn't living my life, that I wasn't fulfilling my purpose on earth (which, in my case at least, was to support people in the process of discovering themselves, to help them fulfill their dreams and wishes, to write, and to just appreciate the world around me).

It finally looked as if there was more to my life than the black dog, and that I could transcend it—that I could live my life without being paralysed by it—precisely because I had acknowledged it and the opportunity it gave me to question my own purpose in life.

Accepting it, learning from it, and saying goodbye to it

Paradoxically, transcendence seems possible only when we accept that which we don't want to transcend. It's the totality of experience that I've described above that seems to be the key in doing this.

But of course, there's no way that anyone could have told me to embrace the very thing I had dreaded for so very long. The embrace only occurred when things got so bad that there was no choice but to transcend them. In this sense, I don't think that anyone really wanted me to literally transcend anything; rather, they wanted me to either forget my black dog or to just cope with it. But forgetting—or just merely coping—keeps us from seeing the meaning in our suffering. And unless we grasp that meaning, we can't move beyond it. Even if we successfully manage to keep it at bay, it still plagues us. The black dog beckons us until it has had its say and we've managed to pat it on the back.

In essence, it's impossible to transcend what refuses to let go of us. And almost always, the reason something refuses to let go of us is because it hasn't served its function. In my case, my black dog hadn't been heard, and so, like a persistent dog, he kept panting and barking until I finally listened. When I learned the lessons he wanted me to learn, I was able to move beyond him and start living my life.