by Susan Moon
God said, “That’s not my fault. The fact that there’s nobody in the bed with you is the result of choices you yourself have made. Anyway, I’m right here. I’ll be glad to go down to the kitchen with you.”
I could tell that he meant it, and I was deeply touched. I tossed back the quilt with a burst of zeal, and swung my bare feet to the cold floor.
I heard God say, just under his breath this time, “You go, Sue!”
While the tea brewed, I had four minutes to think of the times when I had had a man in the morning bed, and as far as I could remember, no one had ever brought me tea on Sunday morning. Maybe I never asked.
I sat on the porch with the blue-rimmed cup in my hands. The tea slaked my thirst, and I just sat there, watching a squirrel who was eating the buds of the passionflower vine on the roof next door.
I Wasn’t My Self
I WANT TO TELL YOU about coming apart, wanting to die, and returning at last to myself, and about how my Buddhist practice both helped and hindered me in this zigzag journey.
Although I was suffering from severe depression, I didn’t call it that for most of the several years I was in and out of it. I thought depression was for lethargic people who lay around in bed all day. But my pain was as sharp as an ice pick. Restless in the extreme, I paced and paced, looking for a way out. The visible cause was the drawn-out and difficult end of a relationship. The invisible causes were old griefs and fears, and other conditions unknown to me. In my fifties, I fell down a rabbit hole in time, away from grown-uphood, into the helplessness of a two-year-old.
It’s taboo to be depressed. When I was feeling really bad, I still went to work, though I was barely functional. If I had had the flu and had been in a fraction of the pain I was in, I would have called in sick. But I didn’t call in “depressed.” One day I threw into the computer’s trash can a whole issue of the magazine I was editing, thinking I was saving it. Then I emptied the trash. I had to hire a consultant to look for it in the virtual garbage, and eventually I got most of it back. But it was myself I wanted to put in the trash.
Physical pain is hard to describe, and psychic pain is even harder. I was in intense, moment-by-moment pain, and all I wanted was to get away from it. The pain was in the thoughts, which I didn’t, and couldn’t, recognize as just my thoughts. (As Buddha said, “When, for you, in the thought is just the thought, then you shall be free . . .”) A voice in my head repeated what I took to be The Truth: that I was completely alone, that I would never again love or be loved by another person, that “I” was nothing.
I spent hours every day on the phone. Once, during the forty-five-minute drive from my boyfriend’s home back to Berkeley, I had to stop and call a friend from a pay phone by the side of the road, so that I could drive the rest of the way home, even though it was only another fifteen minutes away. Luckily she was home. “I just got off the Richmond Bridge,” I sobbed. “I’m afraid I don’t exist. My body’s here, but there’s nobody in it.”
“You exist,” she said. “How could I love you if you didn’t exist? Come over right now and we’ll take a walk on the Berkeley pier.”
I’ve gained some understanding of what it must be like to have an invisible illness, like lupus, or chronic fatigue syndrome. I wished I could wear a sign around my neck—“I might look OK, but I’m sick!”—so people wouldn’t expect me to be functional.
I couldn’t eat—a common symptom of depression. It wasn’t just loss of appetite. Chewing itself was unbearable. A blob of bread was scary because it got in the way of breathing, and breathing was already hard enough to do. Liquids were more manageable. It occurs to me now that I’d regressed to the stage before I had teeth, when the only kind of eating I could do was sucking. So now I drank hot milk with honey, and Earl Grey tea. I lost a lot of weight, something I’m always trying to do when I feel “normal,” but I was too downhearted to take any pleasure from it.
Like many other depressed people, I didn’t sleep well. I clutched my pillow and called out to the flapping curtains for help. I took sleeping pills—sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t. I couldn’t read my way through the sleepless patches of the night (or during the day, either, for that matter) because I couldn’t get past the fear to concentrate on anything.
Waking in the morning was the worst of all. The moment consciousness returned, the pain came with it. Oh no! I have to breathe my way through another day.
I didn’t like getting into the shower because I didn’t want to be alone with my skin. To feel my own skin and imagine that nobody would ever touch it again was unbearable. Better to swaddle myself in layers, no matter what the weather, so the skin didn’t have to notice it was alone. I remembered a pale young woman who had lived next door to me years before, who began to wear more and more layers of clothing—a skirt over her pants, a dress over her skirt, a long shirt over her dress, then a sweater, a long coat, a cape, a hat—in Berkeley summer weather. Finally her father came and took her away to a mental hospital.
One of the worst things about being so depressed is that one becomes totally self-absorbed. I could hear other people only when they were talking to me about me: recommending homeopathic remedies, interpreting my dreams to me, telling me they loved me.
During my depression, one of my adult sons had a serious bicycle accident, and my fear for his well-being snapped me out of my self-absorption for the five days that he was in the hospital. I sat all night in a chair beside his hospital bed, hypervigilant, watching him sleep. I put a cool cloth on his forehead. I prayed to whomever was listening, making a promise I couldn’t keep: not to be depressed if only he would be all right.
He came home to my house from the hospital, with one leg in a full cast, because he needed to be taken care of for a little while. It was summer—he sat on the back porch of the house he’d grown up in, in the sun, and I washed his back.
One day I walked into the living room where he was reading on the couch, and he said, “My God, what’s the matter? You look like a ghost!”
Dry-mouthed with panic, I told him I had to go see my boyfriend; we had to decide right then whether to break up. “Do you think I should stay with him?” I asked.
My son looked at me with an expression I’ll never forget—a mixture of despair and love. “I don’t know how to help you any more,” he said. “I don’t think you should be driving, in the state you’re in. Can’t you stay here and be my mother?”
But I couldn’t. I drove out to see the man, compelled by an irrational sense of urgency, with my son’s stricken face burning in my mind.
I had been a Zen Buddhist practitioner for many years, and I assumed that my meditation practice would steady me. What could be more comforting than forty minutes in the peaceful, familiar zendo, with the sweet smell of tatami straw matting? But it didn’t help. This is what I want to say: at times it made things worse. The demons in my mind took advantage of the silence. They weren’t real demons, but they didn’t care whether they were real or not; they tormented me anyway.
My Buddhist teachers encouraged me to keep on sitting zazen. “Just watch the painful thoughts arise,” they said, “and watch them pass away again.”
When I sat down on a zafu, the painful thoughts arose all right, but if they passed away, it was only to make room for even more painful thoughts. I’ll die alone. And, adding insult to injury: I’m the worst Zen student that ever was.
When I told one of my teachers I was disappointed that zazen didn’t make me feel better, she said, “You don’t sit zazen to get something. You sit zazen in order to sit zazen. If you want zazen to make you feel better, it won’t work.” But didn’t Buddha invent Buddhism in the first place to alleviate suffering? Did all those other people in the zendo really get up out of bed at five in the morning for no particular reason?
Still, I kept going back, hoping that if I meditated hard enough I’d have some sort of “breakthrough.” In the past, sitting in the zendo, I, too, had had the experience of watching my worri
es turn to dry powder and blow away. So I signed up to sit rohatsu sesshin, the weeklong intensive meditation retreat in early December that commemorates Buddha’s enlightenment. He sat down under the bodhi tree and vowed not to get up until he saw the truth. It took him a week. I had sat many sesshins before, but maybe this would be my week.
The first day was bad. I cried quietly, not wanting to disturb the others. The second day was worse. Tears and snot dripped off my chin onto my breast. I hated myself. Nobody else will ever love me!
“Bring your attention back to your breathing,” my teachers had advised me. This was like telling a person on the rack, whose arms are being pulled out of her shoulder sockets, to count her exhalations.
And yet I wasn’t on the rack. I was in the familiar zendo. Around me sat my dharma brothers and sisters, hands in their pretty mudras. As for my mudra, I dug the nails of my left hand deep into the palm of my right hand, feeling relief at the simple physical pain, and momentary proof of my existence.
On the third day, during a break, I snuck away to a pay phone down the street and called my sister in Philadelphia. Choking on my own words, I told her I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t exactly convinced by her reassurances, but just hearing her voice was some comfort.
The fourth day was worse yet. The distance between me and the people on either side of me was infinite, even though their half-lotus knees were only six inches away from mine. I thought of the man who wasn’t going to be taking care of me after all. I’m nobody, I thought. There’s nobody here at all. This feeling of no-self was supposedly the point of meditation, and yet I had somehow gotten onto the wrong path. While a nameless pressure mounted inside me, the people around me just kept sitting zazen. I couldn’t stay another second—I left without getting permission from the sesshin director.
Driving away from the zendo in the privacy of my car, I shouted: “This is the worst day of my life!” (There would be other days after that when I would say it again: “No, this day is worse.”)
I drove into Tilden Park and walked into the woods, where no one could see me. I screamed and pulled my hair. I lay down on the ground and rolled down the hill, letting the underbrush scratch and poke me. I liked having leaves get stuck in my hair and clothing. It made me feel real. I picked up a fallen branch from a redwood tree and began flailing myself on the back. The bodily pain was easier to bear than the mental pain it pushed aside.
But I scared myself. How could I be spending my sesshin afternoon beating myself with sticks in the woods? How had it come to this?
I picked the leaves out of my hair and went home. The next morning, the fifth day, I called the Zen center and said I wasn’t feeling well—an understatement if there ever was one—and wouldn’t be sitting the rest of the sesshin. I didn’t sit zazen for some months after that.
I thought I had failed in my practice—decades of it!—and was bitterly disappointed in myself. Only later, after the depression subsided, did I see what a growth it was. Choosing not to sit was choosing not to be ruled by dogma, to be compassionate with myself, to take my spiritual practice into my own hands.
Buddhism teaches that we have “no fixed self.” There is nothing permanent about me. During the depression, I wasn’t my “self,” as we say. I didn’t seem to have a self at all, in a way that cruelly mimicked this central point in Buddhist teaching. You’d think that it would be painless to have no self, because without a self, who was there to be in pain? And yet it was unbearable. Like a wind-up doll, I went stiffly through the motions of being Sue Moon, but there was no person present, no aliveness—only a battery that was running down.
I felt angry at Buddhism: You told me there’s no fixed self, and I believed you, and look where it got me! I knew the yang of it but not the yin—the balancing truth that there was no separation.
I couldn’t have gone on like this indefinitely; I was tearing up the fabric of my life. As I was weeping to a friend on the phone one afternoon, speaking my familiar litany, she suddenly shouted at me: “Stop it! You’ve got to save your own life! You’ve got to do it! Nobody else but you can save yourself, and you can do it! You just have to be brave. That’s all there is to it.” This was an important phone call: she startled me into finding a stick of courage, and I held onto it by reminding myself of her words.
Still, the misery continued, and I finally decided to try medication. I had a lot of resistance to overcome. I thought my unhappiness had two parts: negative circumstances in the outside world, which an antidepressant obviously couldn’t fix, and negative attitudes inside my head, which I thought my Buddhist practice should take care of. And after all, the monks of old had managed without SSRIs.
But I had to do something different to save my own life, as my friend had said, and medication was something I hadn’t tried. I consulted a psychiatrist, who prescribed a common antidepressant. I took it for about a week and felt much worse, though I wouldn’t have thought it possible to feel worse a week before. The psychiatrist had me stop that brand and try another. I felt it kick in after a couple of days. I didn’t feel drugged; rather, as though a deadly fog was lifting.
The antidepressant I was taking was supposed to be good for people who have trouble with obsessional thinking, and I seem to be one of those. The medication did what zazen didn’t do—it quieted the voices in my head: “I’m lost. I’m nothing.” It didn’t shut them up entirely, but they were no longer screaming, and I was sometimes able to tune them out.
As to the monks of old, I now wonder if some of them obsessed their lives away in misery and if others left the monastery because they couldn’t concentrate. Buddhist history doesn’t tell us about the ones who tried and failed, the ones with attention deficit disorder or clinical depression.
One day, offhandedly, I signed up for a beginning photography class, without thinking much about it. Perhaps a deeper intuition told me that this would be another door out of my misery. I’m a writer, but words failed me in the worst times. Taking pictures required me to look outside myself. It didn’t matter whether I had a self or not, the light kept right on shining, laying itself out on surfaces, like a Tibetan monk doing full prostrations. The world gave itself to me, wordlessly, through my camera. I remember my elation as my first print swam into the red glow of the darkroom at the community art center: my nieces, one big, one little, standing in the kitchen doorway in the sun, in overalls, grinning. I didn’t have to understand myself. I didn’t have to make anything. My camera led me to what was already beautiful. Learning a new skill made me feel alive.
I was also learning to trust myself. Taking an antidepressant and stopping sitting were acts of faith in myself. So, too, I learned to construct my own spiritual practice.
Every morning, as soon as I got out of bed, I lit a candle on my little altar, and offered a stick of incense. I made three full bows, then stood before the altar, my palms pressed together, and recited out loud my morning prayers, starting with a child’s prayer a Catholic friend had taught me:
Angel of God, my guardian dear,
To whom God’s love commits me here,
Ever this day be at my side
To watch and guard, to rule and guide.
It was comforting to ask somebody else, somebody who wasn’t me, to help me. Prayer was something I missed in Zen practice as I knew it, so I imported it from Christianity, and other Buddhist traditions. I prayed to Tara, the Tibetan goddess of compassion, to fly down from the sky, all green and shining, into my heart. I prayed to Prajna Paramita, the mother of all Buddhas, who, as the Prajna Paramita Sutra tells us, “brings light so that all fear and distress may be forsaken, and disperses the gloom and darkness of delusion.”
Then I took refuge in Buddha, dharma, and sangha, saying the words out loud, whether I felt anything or not.
That I had shaped this practice for myself gave me confidence. And the early morning incense smoke, though it was thin and drifting, provided a hint of continuity for my days. They seemed, after all, to be days in
the same life. One person’s life—mine.
Now I can say this: there are times in life when nothing helps, when you just have to feel terrible for a while. All you can do is go through the agony and come out the other end of it. It’s a gift, in a way, to hit the bottom, though it didn’t feel like a gift at the time. If you lie on the grass, you can’t fall down.
There’s a saying in Zen that “inquiry and response come up together.” Perhaps that’s what prayer is. To make an inquiry is already to get a response, because asking implies that there’s something else there. And there’s not even a time lag. The moment you’re asking for help, you’re already getting it, though it may not be the help you thought you wanted.
Once, when I called Zen teacher Reb Anderson in despair, he came to Berkeley to see me. We sat on a park bench in a children’s playground, and he told me, “The universe is already taking care of you.” I said this mantra to myself over and over: “The universe is already taking care of me.”
A turning moment came at the end of a hard summer while I was visiting friends on Cape Cod. One late afternoon I walked barefoot and alone down the beach and into the salty water. There were no people about, so I took off my bathing suit in the water and flung it up on the sand. I swam and swam and felt the water touching every part of me. I was in it—no dry place left. I wasn’t afraid to be alone with my skin because I wasn’t alone; there was nothing, not the width of a cell, between me and the rest of the universe. I did a somersault under the water and looked up at the shiny membrane above me. My head hatched into the light, and I breathed the air and knew that I would be all right. No, not would be, but was already. I was back in my life.
Now, many years out of the desolation, I still don’t know why I suffered so much, or why I stopped. I can neither blame myself for the suffering nor take credit for its cessation.
