Contending with Dark Nights of the Soul

On my 24th birthday, I felt a sense of doom. Something wasn't right, and my mind started slipping into dark places. Over the next couple of weeks, this spiralled into a full-on depression where I could hardly get out of bed. I slept constantly, when I'm someone who has never wanted or needed a lot of sleep. I went days without eating. I stopped drinking coffee because I found it too painful to be so awake. Music, too, which I used to listen to all the time, stirred up too many emotions for me to handle.

Initially, I passed all of this off to others as a stomach bug, which was easy to do as I wasn't eating. I knew it was more than that, but I didn't want to tell anyone. I didn't want to drag anyone in and bring them down with the details of what I was experiencing. This was compounded by the fact that there was no good reason for it. Nothing bad had happened to me. Everyone I loved was okay. I had just finished up with university and was the freest I’d ever been in my life. I was writing full time and I was happy about that. So the idea of telling anyone that I was almost psychotically depressed felt very shameful.

The days dragged on, and I somewhat learned to function and not be in bed all the time, but I was only ever half there. I still could hardly eat. In fact, food often simply tasted horrible. I dropped a lot of weight very quickly and whenever anyone would compliment me on it I would thank them while thinking if only they knew why I looked like that. I still couldn't even look at coffee, because I worried that being even slightly more aware of the world around me would just shatter me.

I went through a cycle almost every day where I would wake up almost in a panic. I'd move slowly, get myself up, and maybe try to eat. I would often try to help myself by reading. I read a lot. It seemed to kick-start my brain and allow me to physically move again. But invariably I’d end up feeling exhausted and lie down and close my eyes. Even then, I couldn't relax, because it's like I would start dreaming right away even when not actually asleep. My brain sort of ran off on its own creating all sorts of nonsense, much of it quite sinister, until I couldn't stand it anymore and opened my eyes and forced myself to be awake.

By the end of the day, however, I was generally feeling better and went to bed more relaxed, sometimes even feeling relatively good. I always hoped that feeling would last till morning, but it rarely ever did.

There were major ups and downs for almost a year. I got a part-time job as customer service at a mall a couple of months after this all started, and that did seem to help. At the same time, several months later, I remember being in a restaurant with all of my sisters and sneaking away to the bathroom to fervently pray for my brain to stop feeling so depressed, not only so that I could enjoy my time but so that I could give everyone else the best of me as well, because it was the least they deserved.

An incident that really illustrates where I was still at an entire year later was when I was visiting some friends in British Columbia and they had put out some Bertie Bots Every Flavor Beans—but only the gross flavors. Here and there I had a few, but I didn't say anything, because while they did taste gross to me, I was going through another increased bout of depression and everything still often tasted gross to me. After a few days they finally cracked and told me about the jellybeans because they were absolutely astounded I hadn't said anything. I tried to laugh it off and say I assumed I was always getting unlucky with the gross flavors and taking my chances to find something good.

I could have explained, I guess, that my brain was filtering most things about the world as sinister, and it simply didn't faze me anymore. But I was still mostly keeping these feelings to myself, still out of a sense of shame and not wanting to bring anyone else down.

At this point, at least, I was starting to have some more good days. I'll admit that over a couple of months I tried self-medicating with a few small, almost micro-doses of MDMA. I don't necessarily condone doing this, but I do consider that it helped. I even tried growing magic mushrooms, but I managed to only grow mold. Sometime later, however, I did get my hands on some and had a nightmarish trip where I was forced to confront a headless demon that laughed at me and said, “you thought you got rid of me, but you didn't.”

Oddly enough, I started to feel better after that and considered it my turning point. This was about a year after it all started. Slowly I got my appetite back, started drinking coffee again, and even started listening to music again.

Of course, I don't think it was just the mushrooms, though they certainly did something to reset my brain. Like I said, I had also been reading. I was reading almost nonstop throughout the whole year, because I'd always feel like a little better after I did. Sometimes only for a few minutes, but to me, that was something.

A few days after my depression hit I took William James' Varieties of Religious Experience off my shelf and brought it with me on a trip around Alberta with my wife's family. The trip was a nice distraction but I was still in a state of half panic all the time, particularly when I woke up, so I would try to read it when I could. I think I was hoping to read fantastical experiences that could provide me with insight into the questions of life and the universe—some guarantee of hope and meaning. Interestingly enough, this book, while it does detail such accounts, also has a section on “The Sick Soul,” where James talks about exactly the kind of crisis I was having at the time, as well as how I ended up trying to deal with it:

When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In melancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with.

[…]

Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter, the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious solution.

It was nice to feel like what was happening to me wasn't anything inexplicable or new. While I don't think the book mentions it, I also remembered the idea of the “Dark Night of the Soul,” which is popularly known as a period of existential crisis characterized by a total collapse of meaning. However, to St. John of the Cross, who coined the term, it was specifically a spiritual phase of purification characterized by a sense of the withdrawal of God's presence, where one has to live only by faith, without consolation. It is a step between an initial awareness of God's presence and full union with God.

This seemed a fitting enough framework because, before my own “Dark Night,” I did have a kind of passive, easy faith, not so much in an articulated idea of God but in life itself. I felt sure of a fundamental goodness and meaning of the universe, something I'd felt confident in since I was a child. But that was all gone now. It was like my faith had vanished. As Tolstoy said, “I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested.”

So I embarked on reading many other books in a similar vein, the theme being, I suppose, a search for meaning. I read everything from The Tibetan Book of the Dead to books about extreme mountaineering. I also read hundreds, if not thousands, of near-death experiences, both books about them and direct reports. These provided a sense of calm to quell the panic, at least for a while. Then I would feel the fear again and have to go back and read some more.

But eventually, the panic did start to fade, and I started to feel better. In fact, there were times I felt I truly found the sense of sacredness and meaning I had been looking for. I had settled on the idea that to live well and feel happy was to love others the best way I could (not at all to say that I managed to live up to this ideal). This seemed to be the message of all the near-death experiences I had read. At some point in all my reading, I had also picked up Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, and two quotes from it kept ringing in my head:

The wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all blades of grass.

He who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.

I hoped fervently that this period of relative peace and joy would last, and that I would never have to deal with such a dark depression again, but of course that's not what happened. It came back again when I was 27 and again when I was 29, both times lingering for several months, though thankfully not as long as the first time. I always dealt with it and got out of it the same way—lots and lots of reading and a search for meaning. These times I also did a lot of walking and really prioritized being outside. I remember, the third time I was depressed, feeling so weak but forcing myself to walk even just once around the small dog park next to our place. I'd do that three times I day if I had to so that it at least amounted to something.

No, I never “talked” to anyone, like a counselor, or got on any medication. I did consider medication when it first happened just so I could function normally and not burden anyone, but to pursue it I’d have to have told at least a few people and therefore, I thought, burden them. I knew that something was very clearly wrong with my physical brain. My entire experience of the world was changed, right down to the way food tasted, and that is all modulated by the brain. But still, I considered it more of a spiritual sickness than anything. Rightly or wrongly, I thought that any kind of therapy, or medication, or help from “professionals,” or help from really anyone at all, would only be a band-aid, if anything. This was something I needed to deal with on my own.

To give some credit to my wife here, eventually I told her what was really going on and she has of course been a wonderful source of help and support for me. There were more than a couple of times I called her, panicked, while she was at work, just to hear her voice, which helped me calm down.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention how much it probably helped to take part in activism. Having a cause certainly lends itself to a sense of meaning, and my fight for women, children, and societal sanity did just that. But more than that, like I have always said, it was about the people. Through my activism, I got to meet so many amazing people. I am convinced that this has been a large part of why I have been relatively okay for such a long time now. To see so many fundamentally good people willing to stand up for what they believe in even if it's unpopular, even in the face of attacks against their character and their livelihood—it has been impossible not to find so much hope in that, and so much love of life itself.

I wish I could say I went through my dark night and came out the other end in full union with God, as St. John of the Cross envisioned, but that's clearly not what happened, since it came back again and again. Maybe that's why I'm not a big believer in life-changing epiphanies that result in full conviction. Maybe one day I'll have an experience that changes my mind, know knows? I'm certainly open to it. I chased that kind of revelatory experience for a long time. But it's not something I am actively changing anymore. I do believe in change, but of the more gradual kind. I definitely changed and grew in my outlook on life. Maybe some of that comes with time and maturity, but it did teach me a lot to go through what I did. I took away a lot from all my reading as well. I try every day to live up to the way I think life should be lived, failing, of course, but trying nonetheless.

One place where my new, somewhat cobbled-together faith after three bouts of major depression led me was into the pursuit of having a baby. This was not something I took lightly at all. In fact, I was very close to never letting it happen because of what I had gone through and feared I would again.