Writing Archive

INSOMNIA & DEPRESSION
Part One: Mystical Musings and Poetic Therapy

Eyeglasses crusted over with dried salt and cheeks chapped from crying, I turn to Rumi for comfort, for mystical salve in times when God plays the majestic music of sadness and despair through my mouth and draws agonies out from deep within my heart:

“God picks up the reed-flute world and blows,
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
Where the wind-breath originated,
And let your note be clear.
Don’t try to end it.
Be your note.
I’ll show you how it’s enough.”

If this is true, then God surely has played entire symphonies of desolation through me, singing busted tones of weepy, off-tune notes through these lips. God has spoken with my mouth, and Rumi tells me that this is more than enough — this pathetic crying, this sore weakness, this absolute surrender to my abject emotions, this speculative throwing of my heart into deep waters to see if it sinks or floats, to see if there is hope for surviving this flood of emotions, this well of tears.

Rumi tells me that this is more than enough to show that God is with me and that I am in touch with a divine reality. He thinks I should embrace this pain and find in it my victory:

“Here are the miracle-signs you want: that
you cry through the night and get up at dawn, asking,
that in the absence of what you ask for your day gets dark,
your neck thin as a spindle, that what you give away
is all you own, that you sacrifice belongings,
sleep, health, your head…
When acts of helplessness become habitual,
Those are the signs.”
—“Acts of Helplessness”

I turned to this exact poem at the turn of the century, when I was stuck jobless and essentially down-and-out in San Antonio. I had stayed up all night, unable to sleep; it was a particularly hard time for very objective, concrete reasons, heartbreak and financial brokenness included. And so I picked up the book that one of my poetry friends from the SanAnto puro ¡SLAM! days pressed into my hands, urging me to read it, as the book had messages specifically for me to embrace. Or so he urged.

In the morning, I asked God to help me. It was a relatively simple prayer. And then I turned to Rumi.

And what of his lessons? Turning to this one poem in particular, I felt the hair on my neck rise, as if Rumi himself had reached out from medieval Persia to find me, his eager student and mystical friend, to show me the “signs” I so badly needed to see: “Water washes over a beached fish, the water/ of those signs I just mentioned.”

From that point on, I could not put the book down, and I ripped through it looking for more signs from God and Rumi to set me on a better path. And what did he tell me? “Cry Out in Your Weakness”:

“Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning-whimper,
and she’s there.

God created the child, that is, your wanting,
so that it might cry out, so that milk might come.”

An apt metaphor, as in my life I've cried out for milk that hasn’t been there, for a mother who disappeared when I was a baby, and for comfort that was denied, missing, gone.

I still cry out. And if Rumi’s right, Creation’s wondrous music has poured gouts of bittersweet, broken melodies through me like the sniffling of tears and snot that choke my throat and sting my eyes.

I do believe this, just as surely as I believe that God sent Oliver Carey Grimball to Texas with his worn copy of Rumi to show me the signs I have badly needed to tap into in this life. This was the beginning of a spiritual turn that has helped me cope with certain realities that I have lived with nearly all of my life.

Namely: I suffer from clinical depression and insomnia. And I claim them as much a part of me as my “severe features” and dark skin, as Richard Rodriguez might say.

Of course, I’ve had to marshal every resource, call in every favor, take every opportunity available, and carve out every space possible to meet the challenges of my mental maladies. This has included therapy, medication, and recently, my regimen of exercise and my conscious decision to eradicate the last, lingering effects of depression in my life.

But I’m glad for now that Rumi tells me it’s ok to dig deep and really feel this pain as a mystical gift: “Cry out! Don’t be stolid and silent/ with your pain. Lament! And let the milk/ of loving flow into you.// The hard rain and wind/ are ways the cloud has/ to take care of us.” I take this as the most sage advice in this frigid time of hard memories and foreboding cold. Harsh winds and painfully biting frost, too, have ways to take care of us.

This all reaches back to high school, to the time I first fell in love and lost my dearest friend to the cruel fates of despair, and to when I started inhabiting a shadow world of lampshades and slowly ticking clocks in the dead of night.

I will write about all of this soon enough, to tell the full story of who I am, to claim my soul, spots and all, and hold it up to the light of day, and to be able to say at the end of it all that I triumphed over the darkness, that I cried out in pain and was answered by the echo of my own voice, a sign from God and a spiritual direction to help me along the path to reckoning with depression as my lot in life, one that I can embrace and even dance with in bleak arabesques of sorrow, hope, and maybe victory some day.

Bismillah.

For now, I embrace the gamble of life itself, to dig into one’s own soul and become oceanic when tasting the delicacies of breath, love, and drunken joy — God’s means of inebriation as powerful as the best wine and the sweetest hashish, as Rumi says.

For now, I taste these tears, gulp them down, and thank God for these signs. And I heed Rumi’s call to keep loving fiercely, to keep crying out loud, and to give my all to what gifts and dreams may come.

“Gamble everything for love,
if you’re a true human being.

If not, leave
this gathering.

Half-heartedness doesn’t reach
into majesty. You set out
to find God, but then you keep
stopping for long periods
at mean-spirited roadhouses.”

I will not leave the gathering. I will not be ashamed of my tears. I will taste in them the signs of grace. I will claim my weakness as the source of my greatest strengths, and I will not be made to feel less of a person for it.

This insomnia, this depression is me, and if no one else can appreciate it, I will be its most faithful lover.

But for now, allow me to have a few drinks in this not-so-mean-spirited roadhouse of my soul, before I tell the story of how I discovered my depression and started to meander in this garden of delights and despair.

"Every night and every morn
some to misery are born
every morn and every night
some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight
some are born to endless night."
—William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”