Dear Cary,
I came across your column about a week ago and I do believe that I'm close to having read almost all of your posts there. I was simply amazed and mesmerized by your words of advice and hope. I do hope that your your words can help me deal with my current condition. My family served as attachés and thus we moved ... a lot. I grew to become a bit distant emotionally to avoid the heartbreak of losing all friends, moving into an alien environment every two to three years or so, with the threat of moving ever ominous on the horizon. I grew to crave a stable environment I could call HOME, or at the very least create a home for my family that I never had. I came close to it, but six months ago my wife filed for a divorce and it's been dragging on and on in court over child rights. I have a beautiful 5-month-old baby boy whom I adore.
During my campus years I matured to become quite social, especially as an activist, since I knew that at least campus was a more stable environment than I ever had at home. After graduation, my family coming from a very traditional Asian background with rather strict moral and religious values, arranged a marriage with the girl who would be my wife, and after months of bitter disagreements (I prefer not to use the word argue) I finally gave in.
From the start, I realized I would start in a loveless relationship and that I would have to learn to love her eventually, and I did learn to love her. Things started to take a slow but dark turn as my wife then started to control my life, especially when it came to women (she had serious abandonment issues) and rather than risk breaking up my marriage, with the obvious socio-cultural fallout it would definitely create, I chose to suck it up and simply let it slide. Eventually it progressed to the point that she became paranoid about every single person (male and female) that I knew, convinced I was having an affair with them. This got worse over the course of her pregnancy, and this to me was literally a living hell. For the sake of my child, I stood by like an idiot going along, but in the end after she gave birth, SHE said she couldn't take it anymore and packed up and left with my son when I was overseas. I tried going after her and my son, but now she's staying with her family and they refuse me access to my son. Any contact I have with them is simply via their lawyer. For weeks I couldn't sleep or concentrate. I even managed to mess up an important project that got me fired from my job.
I just don't seem to have the energy or focus to pursue anything now, and have distanced myself from everything. I started to drink rather heavily as well as smoke (I used to campaign against smoking companies). I realize that this could be classified as clinical depression but I just don't see any solution.
My few remaining friends keep telling to get back out there, but every time I do it feels awkward, especially after having such a controlling person so central to my life for the past two years. I can't seem to fight the urge to blame others for it all, especially my family, but in the end I know it was my fault. I can't help but imagine what I'm putting my young son through, imagining what kind of life he'd have growing up without a father, since I had mine all along the way. In the end even though I feel an intense anger to them, I still feel I've let them down. I'm just clueless about what to do and that frustrates me even more since I'm usually a very driven and focused person.
As incoherent as it is, please help.
Clueless and HOMEless
Dear Clueless and HOMEless,
I have felt the same way you do. The exact things that have happened to you have not happened to me, not exactly, but I have felt the confusion and sense of betrayal, of having tried to do the right thing and have it come out badly, and the sense of not having a home.
So I speak to you with tears in my eyes. That is probably not the most disciplined way to write a column, and it may seem as though I am being melodramatic or currying sympathy but it is simply the truth, and I say not so much to arouse emotions in others but because, actually, I would like to bring tears into the written discourse of elite American society, so that over time it might become acceptable for a male writer to say from time to time that as he writes there are tears in his eyes -- just as a statement of fact, not as a device. There are many traditional strictures under which a male writer writes, and for a long time I have followed most of them. I came across a line from Strunk and White the other day to the effect of, "Keep yourself out of it," and I thought, my, how far I've drifted from the true and orthodox practice of "good journalistic writing"! (It's complicated, trying to introduce things into language, as they quickly become their opposites. Yet it interests me, the notion of trying to normalize certain phenomena; it seems like on rare occasions it might be one small way to change how we talk with each other in writing. In more grandiose and hopeful moments one might think it could change how we men habitually process emotion and thus decrease the incidence of depression. But that's pretty far-fetched. All I'm really saying is that I've been very emotional lately and your letter stirred me up again.)
It was the second anniversary of my father's death last week, and I was not able to fully grieve his death at the time, so that is surely part of it. But your loss is your loss, and it's real. There is loss and pain and these things are real and that is what crying is for. I hope you are crying from time to time because it makes you feel better afterwards. It lets you know what you are feeling. In fact, it seems that certain things can only be felt by crying; we may think we are feeling something but until our body begins its desperate heaving and sobbing we are more just observing it, knowing it is there, but not immersed in it. With the crying, one feels the emotion in one's whole body; it passes through us, leaving us more alive. There is no doubt or confusion in the moment when one breaks down and cries; there is only the feeling, and the body suffused with that feeling, hot and awake to sadness and anger.
So when this feeling comes over you, do not be afraid to cry. You may cry for your boyhood, too, that lonely time of wandering, left to yourself, trying to become a good man against difficult odds, working to become a modern man in a family that practices ancient customs. It must have been hard for you growing up like that, especially since you seem to have a modern mind, the mind of an activist, the mind of a man who knows that society can change and people can change. So there must be a split between what you know intellectually and the demands of your family. To marry this girl in fact, therefore, must have required you to renounce a large part of yourself, the inquiring, socially aware, critical side. Yet you did it. You did it out of love and respect for your family. So you sacrificed a part of yourself and then this sacrifice was devalued, or annulled, by your wife's decision to leave and take the baby.
Having no outlet or solution, you have turned this anger and frustration against yourself. That is likely one source of your depression; the way out will be to undo that act, by accepting that you are not the cause of this, but simply an actor with good intentions and a good heart, caught in a powerful system beyond your control. A good therapist can help you do that.
So do not blame yourself. You have done what you could. You have tried to do the right thing. Now your job is to take care of yourself, to get help for your clinical depression.
When we are depressed, we don't think logically. Our thinking is clouded. So do not trust your thoughts on this. Trust medical science. Trust other people who are not depressed. They can see things a little more clearly than you can right now.
Now it is time to get help for your depression. You may find yourself putting it off or thinking of reasons not to do it. If so, I suggest taking certain simple, direct steps. Think of it this way: You have a new job. Your new job is to treat your depression. Call a hotline, find a psychiatrist or psychologist who can help you.
Take heart. There are a lot of us out here, and we do understand each other.
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