Breakdown, Empathy, and Guilt 2: Guilt

Ecclesiastes—and then Montaigne centuries later riffing on the ancient preacher’s wisdom—delves into the terrifying possibility that human effort, all striving and toil carried out in the light of day, will ultimately become yet another gloss on the collective and never ceasing epic of earthly futility: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?” Rhetorical question implying it’s own answer in the asking: nothing. We get no return on the time and pain we invest in our vain attempts to turn a profit. All is futile, pointless, without recompense. In the opening of his essay on vanity, Montaigne applies the preacher’s notion of pan-pointlessness to his writing: “There is perhaps [no greater vanity] than to write in vain on [vanity].” And yet, he does not abandon his labor. Montaigne states that he will go on writing as long as there is ink and paper available to write with. Both he and the ancient preacher challenge a very ingrained way we tend to think about work. Work now in the present, do something here in this moment that requires pain and difficulty, and in the future, we will reap pleasures and enjoy our due rewards. Not so according to Ecclesiastes. We will work and toil, but the ir-reciprocal future mocks our simplistic ledger sheet balances and refuses us the gains we are expecting.    

Mountains of guilt form slowly through the ceaseless toil of mental repetition, returning and returning in my mind forever in vain to a mistake I made in the past, working pointlessly deluded by half-formed, inarticulate belief that if I just think hard enough and long enough, I’ll figure out my absolution. Son of a bitch of all futility! I shine rational hindsight on my errors hoping to deduce away the fault, wipe out my culpability, and undo the pain I caused for people I loved who also loved me. At times I realize there’s nothing more to explain or figure out no solace to come from reexamining one more time why I did the things I regret, and yet even while knowing it pointless, the desire to look back again rises over and over. A distorted belief that there is still some mystery to be solved locks me into a vainly repeating cycle of willful déjà vu.

 

Perhaps a concrete example will clarify these largely conceptual abstractions. Depression struck me with stunning speed. In roughly two months time, the secure mental footing of early September 2010 softened to pieces in an irrational torrent of emotion that I didn’t understand and didn’t know how to control. I was married then and living in Paris with my now ex-wife. The first decisive explosion came late in October while my ex-wife, who taught English then at a high school in Paris, was away chaperoning a school trip with some of her students in Boston. God I hate the memory of that week. Though there isn’t a whole lot that I recall. Recollections are spotty of the worst times, in part because I was drinking heavily, in part because the shock of breaking down wipes out a lot of memory. A friend has suggested that it is a blessing not to be able to remember too many specifics. Forgetting is a shield from guilt. The less you remember the fewer psychic devices for wracking yourself with remorse. Still though, there are plenty of moments I’d like to redo and things I wish I hadn’t done and said. Even when specifically searching the concrete example, it still takes me some circling and indirect approach to finally arrive at the point. Swept under by rip tides of grand significance and transcendent meaning, of which there is plenty here, I have trouble with solid objects and descriptions of simple action. I left. The week my wife was out of the country for work, I disintegrated in fear and confusion. I felt awful all the time. The initial counseling sessions I’d been going to for several weeks were not working. Wildly impatient to feel better, I fell into unclear thinking patterns about what I needed to do. Returning to the States started making sense to me. My ex-wife was the only one who really knew how bad I’d gotten. We were communicating regularly by phone and I told her I was feeling like I needed to go and considering buying a plane ticket. I don’t recall the specifics about how that discussion went, just telling her beforehand that I was considering it and then that I had done it once I bought the plane ticket. I scared the shit out of my co-workers that week when I stopped showing up without giving any notice. Instead of getting out of bed and going to work that Wednesday, I holed up all day in the apartment drinking shots of rum until I threw up. And I didn’t respond when they called and sent messages to find out if I was okay. Close friends, a couple living with their children in Lyon, were expecting me for a weekend visit. That Friday, I sent them a brief text to tell them I was having a breakdown and headed to America from the security line at CDG Terminal I.

All these steps in my breakdown return from time to time and raise questions of motive, justification, and responsibility. I wonder about proper verb choice for telling this story. I got depressed. I was overcome with depression. Depression took hold of me. I gave in. I gave up. I quit. In nearly synonymous statements, different levels of activity and passivity nuance my responsibility for the pain my wife felt that week. I do not know which is most appropriate, or even if it is possible to capture these events with a single verb conjugated in a single tense. Perhaps the truth lies in a hypotactic structure that properly combines and subordinates the light and shadow of the varying tints of blame. Or perhaps searching complexity here will only set off a confused, nightmare strobe light hell.

Theoretical writings on empathy and depression—and other mental disorders—focus largely on how supportive friends, family, and therapists need to show a suffering person that they understand, at least to some degree, what s/he is experiencing. The general thrust of most empathy writing places the burden of empathy on healthy people. With my ex-wife and me, this sort of writing would say that she needed to work to imagine what depression was like from my perspective. Monumental task that is rarely an intuitive response to the crazy shit people can say and do and think when they are depressed. Imagine. You are a woman, newly married, with a clear idea of where you and your husband are headed in the future. Your dream in life for as long as you can remember has been to have children. After the high of the wedding and the honeymoon season, your husband shows irrational signs of agitation and anger for about a month and then starts swinging between lethargy and panicked desperation. Worried about your husband and whether he will be all right while you’re out of town for a week, you leave to chaperon a school trip. And then while you are away he reaches crisis level and tells you over the phone without being able to really explain why that he’s drinking heavily, stopped going to work, and decided that what he needs to feel better is to buy a plane ticket on a whim to go back to his home town in Alabama. Through the daunting waves of fear and helplessness and confusion and frustration stacked on top of the demands of chaperoning an international field trip, empathy writing calls on you to listen to your husband’s irrational fugue plan and express a compassionate understanding of what he is feeling. Tall fucking order. Empathy in times of crisis can be overwhelmingly difficult.  


Hurt from depression fans out like flaming disease from the person directly affected to the people around who want to help. It’s commonplace to say that depression is contagious, and I’ve seen first hand how friends and family suffer the pain of what their loved ones are going through. Empathy for someone who is depressed is important, but efforts to understand what someone else is going through need to run both ways. Caregivers need to know that someone else understands their struggles and fears and frustrations. Just as we long from the inactive depths of lethargy for the kindly ear of someone who gets it, our wives, friends, husbands, mothers, and fathers need compassion for the difficulties they face living with a body-snatching invader that transforms the person they love into a ghostly stranger. It’s hard to live with depression. And it’s also hard to live with someone who is depressed. The imaginative burden of seeing the world from another’s perspective needs to be shared. If someone suffering from depression can show family and friends that the situation is hard on everyone, we stand a better chance of creating supportive relationships that foster healing.

Yet this empathy for caregivers is likewise a tall order. When I started working on this post, I thought that there was a great lack of understanding about how and why depression is hard on the people around us. Writing about my ex-wife’s experience of my breakdown however, I’ve realized that, at least for me, the major problem was not a lack of understanding. I knew my condition was hard on her. But I’m not sure I ever expressed that understanding in a productive way. Guilt slams our ability to say we know that depression hurts our families too. I could slip out of my body and float out several feet to look back at the situation from the outside or float a little farther and glimpse through my wife's eyes. But these are scorching images uncomfortable to behold and even more uncomfortable to discuss. Looking at someone else's pain can quickly push you back inside yourself behind a wall of silence meant to shield you from awareness of another's suffering. Talking about someone else's pain trains your eyes on the scalding picture you'd often rather look away from. It was hard to acknowledge my wife's pain without being swallowed up by a nauseous sense of shame for causing that pain. It was easier sometimes to say nothing than it was to confront that sense of shame. When I did talk about this with my wife during the roughest times, I’d often slip into melodramatic expressions of my own culpability that didn't communicate an understanding of her position. I’ve been a terrible husband (guilt) ≠ I see that you are frustrated by my inactivity (empathy). These statements are close in meaning, but the subtle difference in perspective is crucial. The expression of guilt focuses too heavily on what the person speaking thinks about him self. The expression of empathy (I + you) reminds the person listening that she counts too and breaks open the isolating movements of guilt. And so this becomes a rhetorical challenge of the melancholic. Show the world you see how your pain hurts them too but do it without submerging into the self-focused, isolating hyperbole of shame.

Breakdown, Empathy, and Guilt 1: Empathy

Empathy, the concept comes back again and again in my thoughts. I try to see the world as you. You try to see the world as me. Before ever really concentrating on the term “empathy” itself, I’d long thought of reading and writing fiction as two powerful ways to loosen the hold of our own self-focused perspective and get a glimpse of what it’s like to be someone else. Or at least I hoped they might be.

Empathy, though, has at times seemed an idealistic dream to me, or a gift of the uber-talented privileged few. We can’t possibly understand everything about someone else’s experiences of the world. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—where a narrating voice hovers around a summer vacation home able to slip in and out of the minds of the people gathered there—was an exception. And so was James Joyce’s “Molly” chapter at the end of Ulysses that traces in minute detail the insomniac movements of a women trying to fall asleep one early morning in turn of the century Dublin. 

Empathy writing is tricky. Having never himself experienced a sleepless night as an insomniac wife, Joyce could be way off in his “Molly” chapter. And when she created Charles Tansley, what did Virginia Woolf actually know about being a young common born philosophy student, with a chip on his shoulder about his social standing, vacationing with his famous mentor and his mentor’s upper class family? I pose skeptical questions about whether character creation tells us much about what it’s like to walk in different shoes and feel the world from a third person perspective, and yet, without any precise explanation at the moment of exactly how the process works, I do still believe that Joyce and Woolf’s imaginative ventures gave us valuable insight about living in the world with other people.

Empathy reading can also be tricky. We can easily over-generalize and arrive at erroneous conclusions about what an author has done when writing about the world from someone else’s perspective. With Joyce, I’m tempted to overreach and say he has written an account of what it’s like to be a woman from a man’s perspective. But he hasn’t. He’s written a very specific fictitious account of a small slice of time for one woman living in a very specific time and place in history. The “Molly” chapter has not captured the essential experience of womanhood. It’s simply a hypothesis, one possibility, postulating how one made up woman might feel in one limited context. And having stumbled across that term “womanhood,” my head begins to spin. So many different possibilities, so many different contexts in which to be a woman, could there possibly be a way of defining a condition that encompasses them all and conveys to us men who do not know firsthand what it’s like to be a woman? Time transforms every situation, and the possibilities for framing another person's place in the world seem nearly infinite. We can always add, expand, narrow, or remove an element and create a new and slightly altered place to understand. What is it like to be black? What is it like to be a child? What is it like to be an 8-year-old girl growing up in an advanced technological information saturated era ? How does it feel to be a young black girl living in an affluent suburb of Atlanta where 75% of the students at your school are white? Relating to others would be simple if there were a stock set of 4 or 5 different types of people to understand. But in the detailed experience of day to day living, we slip fluidly in and out of 100’s of categories, 1000’s of overlapping, concentric, and entirely separated circles in the ever shifting Venn diagrams of our identities. 

Empathy’s hard because it takes constant reassessment of the endlessly complex and rich experiences that add up to make us who we are. This post has been rather slow in developing, and along the way, I’ve done a little bit of reading about fiction and empathy. There is an expansive academic literature on the subject. In her article “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions,” Amy Coplan provides in one of her footnotes a workable solution that addresses the complexity of empathic thinking: “Rarely, if ever, would we be able to imaginatively experience everything that the other experiences since it would be virtually impossible to have awareness of all of the target’s unconscious thoughts, desires, beliefs, and so on. This does not mean, however, that we cannot imaginatively experience a close approximation of the dominant thoughts and feelings that the target experiences at a particular moment in time.” I had a strange and revealing reaction to this footnote, conflicting emotion that clarified for me some of my own expectations about how I want to relate to other people, a blend of hope and disappointment. Coplan reassures with her insistence that empathy is possible despite the complexity of other people. But her affirmation is only partial. Empathy is limited and temporary. We get only a “close approximation” at “a particular moment in time.” And something in me demands more. A low whispered taunt tells me this is not enough, that I’m settling if I accept these limits. This reaction seems a strange manifestation of perfectionist thinking, and in a leap that is not fully articulated, I wonder if my disappointment is somehow linked to possessive desire (Help! I'm an epistemophiliac!) A question for another day. No place here to delve into musings about how we know what we know. This prologue has gone on long enough, and I’ve not yet arrived at what I’ve really been wanting to address: the ways guilt obstructs empathy and prevents healing relationships between depressed people and the friends and family who support us when we’re down.

A suivre…  

Chasm

Seeping lava oozing and solidity of the surface beginning to dry and harden into place. Several billion years of earth always shifting. A life. An eye blink.  A single instant of stillness. A snap shot a mere 80 years wide. Permanent light written onto silver bromide plates objectively captures the whole picture. Ca a été. Motionless and complete. Save the blurry splotch down at the bottom. And the unnamed forms halfway jutting into the upper left corner. A half road towards virgin forests unexplored? What lies just beyond the frame? A life that could have been? A cosmic finger slipped accidentally in front of the lens? The angle of the shot, some say, makes all the difference.

A river centuries deep cuts the banks steadily migrating several feet to the left over 20 years, steady drift that never arrives. Unnoticeable change finite and constant where billions of years ago a dry colossal mass of rock and dust hover in space and time. A hot loud bang diced the rock. Jagged, two parts slipped to either side of a miniscule fissure, at first imperceptible, separating what heavens vault had originally cracked.  

Time passes. With cartoon like fluidity, the fissure yawns apart. Two sublime and daunting stones repel each other and float divided by emptiness out further and further towards opposite ends of existence. Slowly the momentum dwindles and eventually comes to a full stop. The rocks spin wildly in place, out of synch, unguided, heads flipping and rotating, pointing sometimes up or down or backwards, momentarily towards and then back away from each other. A blade of grass dwarfed by light years sprouts from nothing. Faint sounds of water trickle intermittently.

The rocks are still and nearly aligned, several inches closer to each other maybe, but on this scale, it’s hard to tell. The blade of grass lengthens and several others appear. Sounds grow louder, some indistinguishable, potential signs of animated life or simply expanded notes of the mineral stream passing. The rocks are closer—it is clear—and moving again, slowly accelerating back towards their starting place. Several drops develop scattered with large empty gaps between them. Elements on mismatched scales are converging, negotiating the steps of coherence. Drops expand into puddles their blurry edges filling up the blanks between them, and pushed by the force of approaching stone, puddles find each other and flow together. Things are moving fast now. Lush vegetation bursting open. Rocks lengthening and flattening. Distinct rustlings in the brush. A steady rush of water audible as the stream shades in a final remaining hole at its center.   

The edges of land and river are close. Water spills outward in all directions, an uneven ameba-like advance searching for a barrier. A first foot splashes aground and fills up the stone's outer contours. Then another upstream, and another and another. All along the shore where water touches rock, the flow recedes back towards the river’s center, spinning as it retreats coloring in the last remaining gaps to form unbroken contiguous banks fixed and reestablished back where we know them.