The Empty Hole

While there is lots of color and activity around my empty hole in the middle of my psyche, why do I have an empty hole?  The simple answer is the empty hole is the depression.  But what is depression?  It obviously has a biological component but could it also be a profound suppressed anger.

When I say profound I mean that it is so deep in my psyche that I have not been able to access it.  I sense it is not rational or I would have been able to access it by now.

I been wondering if it is a profound anger that I had a disrupted childhood (alcoholic family) and did not learn some basic skills that one needs as an adult, like taking honest responsibility for my own behavior.  This translated into lots of encounters with the world where my reaction was full of resentment, frustration and anger because I could not figure out why people did not see the world the way I did.

Looking back over a long term job experience I see so many moments when there was a serious disconnect between what I saw and what others saw.  At the time I just thought the people were against me or fell into the “everyone hates me” mode.  As I think of it now, maybe my side of the encounters were affected by my lack of getting the proper parenting.  As a result, I was looking at the situation as a teenager and not the seasoned adult I thought I was.  Did I simply misinterpret what was happening?

I think what made and continues to make it harder for me to deal with people honestly and rationally is that I tend to get along with people and put up a very responsible adult front.   Early in my life my adult front felt real but then over time its reality slowly disappeared and led to long term depression.  I just could not keep the charade up anymore.  My mother’s death was the tipping point.  She was my real adult.  I had merged with her.  With the adult in my life gone, I had no place to go but back to my true self, a confused teenager.

Looking at this retrospectively, my interpretation of reality at my job after my mother died was particularly suspect.  When I had negative encounters with people I was confused and tended to blame the other person while sensing I was not looking at things logically.  Overtime my depression just took over and the last four years I had a difficult time functioning at a professional level.  I became phobic about aspects of my job.

I figured out creative ways to work on projects in ways that I could handle.  When I finally felt financially able to leave the job, I told everyone I was leaving to be a full-time artist.  But in my mind that was just a camouflage for escaping because my deep depression and very negative feelings about myself had made it difficult to continue.  After all, my art is a mirror of my depression and emotional state.

It is time to become my own loving parent and start being compassionate to that scared child.