Managing the Black Dog

Notice I said managing, not taming. There is a difference. My own Black Dog has never allowed himself to be tamed. Perhaps one day he will, but that day is not today.

People often look at me sideways when I use a term like the Black Dog. They wonder why I don't use a proper medical term, like clinical depression. I understand that psychology can help me to grasp what is actually happening to me, but I am also convinced that only philosophy can give me the deepest awareness of its meaning.

Yes, there may be chemicals messing with my feelings and my perceptions. Yes, my neurons may not be firing in the right way. Yes, my genes may have disposed me to it. Yes, there may be all sorts of circumstances I have lived through to make me feel how I do. Still, there is something, dare I say it, existential about the darkest melancholy. Like all things in life, it can only really make sense within a picture of the whole.

There is the question of what is happening, and then there is the question of how it is happening, and then there is the most important question of all: why is it happening?

I never chose to feel the way I do. These emotions came to me, and they were never invited. I have learned that it is within my power to make something of them, but it has not been within my power to turn them off and on. If I were to become a Stoic sage, perhaps I would have complete mastery of my passions, but if you were to know me, you would also know I am hardly a Stoic sage. I am a postulant.

I started calling him the Black Dog when I read about the personal struggles Winston Churchill went through. I later found Samuel Johnson using the very same term. I don't know where the label came from, but it perfectly fits what ails me.

The Black Dog was probably always there in the background, but I remember that he showed himself on a very specific day. Something quite painful had happened, and there he was, late one night as I was trying to go to sleep.

I remember one time, quite recently, when I got up in the morning, only to find that he was completely gone. I spent a whole day totally liberated, out of his shadow. Everything smelled fresh, everything tasted wonderful, and everything felt worthwhile. The next morning, however, he was back. He had only gone on a brief vacation. Who knows why it happened, but I was completely myself once again, for only a few hours.

I speak of the Black Dog as a he, not in a literal sense of another person, but in a figurative sense of something within me that is not myself. I make sense of him only by recognizing that how he asks me to feel is not who I am, and that I do not need to let him enter into the realm of my own judgment. Give me pills, or lie me on a couch, but I need to decide for myself that I will not be swept away by what he tells me to do.

He has become like a familiar, and he shows up, quite vividly, in my dreams. He sits quietly at some times, growls and nips at others, and every so often he bites a big chunk out of me. Still, as the say, he ain't the boss of me. When I remember that, I can manage him.

I suspect more of us suffer from him than we know, and those who are fortunate enough not to walk with him may have difficulty understanding.

"Why can't you just get over it?" Oh, trust me, I would if I could. What you say once made me angry, but now I am quite happy that you do not understand. It means you don't know him, and that is a blessing for you.

We show the deepest pity for a man dying of cancer, but we cast aside the poor loser dying of a broken heart.

Nevertheless, I would not be who I am today without the Black Dog, and in an odd sort of way he has also become a sort of blessing, not in himself, because he brings me only gloom. but in how I may choose to respond to him. There is the key for me. He comes and goes as he pleases, even as I am still the one choosing how I face him, and how I will live with him from day to day.

Is that really any different from any other circumstance in life? It is a burden if I make it one, a blessing if I make it one.

The despair that he he always suggests, so slow and dull, can inspire me to new hope. The sharp pain he sometimes offers, so sudden and severe, can move me to compassion. The doubt he casts over me, so deep and nagging, can steer me right back to a love of the truth. Does he insist that I should not care? He is mistaken. Let me care all the more, knowing exactly what it means to feel like no one else cares.

Stoicism is not just a fancy theory for me. It is a way of thinking and living that lets me walk with the Black Dog. I determine who I will be, not him.

Written in 7/2016