Rambling Thoughts About My Face

I have often given my blog over to meditations on the morose. I am no prophet, but one certainty I proclaim is death. It is the one inescapable fact. You can ignore it, you can make it taboo, but it is. One of my earliest memories, I was around five or seven, was of asking my sister if it was okay if I killed myself. I had been thinking about it for some time, but I didn’t want to ask our parents yet. I have always had, it seems, this strange hatred of myself. Even now, I do not like mirrors. When brushing my teeth, I sometimes turn away from the sink because of the reflection above it. I have always hated to see images of myself. As a child, the family photos which hung on the walls haunted me: I hated to see myself in them. I did not want to see my face.

I say all this to explain that I have suffered with the somewhat in vogue malady of depression. It comes in waves: Sometimes your head’s above water, and sometimes an ocean descends over you, burying you in its depths. It is now nearing a year: About a year ago, I suffered the worst bout of depression yet. This was not just being morose. It felt like my whole self fractured into bits. It was terrible, and I think it was the closest I ever came to what I had asked my sister about all those years ago, suicide.

She told me then that it was wrong. It was not okay. I believed her, and I still believe her. But last year I fractured, and I was an audience to the parts of me planning out my own murder. It is hard to explain what the experience was like. It was more than uncontrolled thoughts of suicide—I had had those in spades before. It was a second person, a real person, who seemed to share my being. He didn’t seem to talk with me, I don’t know if he knew I was there, but I could hear him thinking.

“We’ll have to make it look like an accident,” he said.

That still wasn’t enough to really scare me. What did scare me was when we realized the perfect plan. I don’t want to go into the details here, but it could have worked. So, I started looking for help. I was told many things. Near as the doctors can tell me, I was just born this way.

It’s been almost a year since this great wave of depression first hit, and I would say it lasted four months or so, three intense months, and the fourth a gradual release. Even so, there were many aftershocks following. It was only a few weeks ago that I realized my head was above water again, that my mind was clearing. With this realization came the question: What will the next wave be?

I honestly don’t know. When I wasn’t a virtual zombie barely able to feed and dress myself, one of the other fractures of me, an insane rage, would take over. Under its influence I would hurt myself, my things, and I was terrified I would hurt someone else.

I don’t have answers, but I think I have the right questions. The one which seems central to me is identity. Who am I? If I break again, who am I among the wreckage? It seems like if I could bring myself to look into a mirror, to see my reflection, then I could understand my brokenness.

I have a macabre outlook on life; friends have rightly called me nihilistic, and one time, someone even called me Machiavellian (I do not object to the word, though I prefer the term practical). Yet there is one thing other than death I believe in, Christ. Death, in a sense, defines reality, draws a border around everything, but it is meaningless, it is an ending without a conclusion, mad and rambling. Depression gloms on to this irrationality, the purposelessness of life, but still there is a love as strong as death. I hold onto that love, onto the God who would die for me. It is His face I long to see.