After all, he never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.
—The Return of the King
Dear Theophilus,
Not being a cheerful hobbit, I have not Sam Gamgee’s happy frame of mind. My outburst the other day, which the Loyal 3.6 have read, some have remarked upon, and one has sneered at, came from the exhaustion of hope. I shall try, this time, to be less cryptic and elliptical about what is bothering me.
I have for several years now been living alone, working alone, and in general, being alone far more than is good for me. I believe that my recurrent depression stems largely from isolation. The trouble is that I have no real grounds for belief that I can do anything meaningful about it. It isn’t so much ordinary social contact that I lack; I can get a measure of that. I believe the word for what I am missing is intimacy, in either the proper dictionary definition or the euphemistic usage. And the lack of it has weighed upon my mind to the point where it seriously cripples my creative faculties. At the moment, I have not eaten anything for about twenty-four hours, and my stomach is giving me warning pangs; but those pangs are nothing to the real pain I am feeling from loneliness.
I was, perhaps, malformed for this business by my upbringing. My mother, as you know, was a difficult person, and often an embarrassing one. My father, on the other hand, was an introvert and somewhat cold. He had the strict old-fashioned Scots Presbyterian attitude towards the distinction between need and want. To him, a need was something you absolutely had to have, like food or oxygen, or heat in the bitter Canadian winter. If the body could remain alive without a thing, it was merely a want, and a mere want ought never to stop anybody from working or otherwise doing his duty. To go with this, he had been brought up with a farmer’s contempt for physical pain. He himself was not the sort of twenty-minute egg who can break half a dozen ribs and carry right on wrangling cattle or pitching hay-bales; but there is no question that that was his ideal, and he thought less of anyone (including himself) who did not live up to it. Mere emotional distress, so far as I can tell, did not even register in his mind as a form of pain.
And yet; and yet. My father’s duty (which he always discharged admirably well) was primarily to his family, to my mother and me. I have nothing equivalent to sustain me. Nobody depends upon me but myself, and I have reached such an advanced stage of indifference that I would not feel especially disappointed to die of my own neglect. In such conditions, duty is virtually a null concept; certainly I have no duties sufficient to motivate me to the difficult labour of writing, and the fearful task of publishing and exposing my work to the possible ridicule of the public. I must motivate myself in some other way.
For a long time, I tried to motivate myself using hope; but all my hopes, so far, have proved chimaerical. I am not the sort of person who likes to see his own name in print; I get very little satisfaction from putting out a book. There remains the hope of earning a living, and the hope of having a helpful influence upon others. I have not been entirely disappointed in the latter of these, to my surprise; but by itself it is not sufficient, and so far I have been baulked in the former.
I am suffering from what the engineers call ‘stiction’. When a motor applies force to turn a wheel, it takes a certain amount of energy just to overcome the resting friction or resistance of the bearings. Once the wheel is turning, it may take very little energy to keep it in motion. But if the motor cannot supply enough extra power to overcome the stiction, the wheel will never begin to turn. My own writer’s block usually works the same way. I have my own ‘stiction’ to overcome before I can break silence and begin to turn out usable words; and the longer I wait between writing sessions, or the more distress I am in from other causes, the harder it is to begin. My frustration with my own writing, at present, comes not from a sense of failure, but from a sense of futility – of being so stuck that I cannot even make a proper try. My efforts never get the wheel moving; they do not rise to the dignity of failure.
Well, when you have stiction on a wheel, there are two possible solutions: increase the power of the motor, or reduce the friction on the bearing. My own bearings are gummed up with rust and dust, and badly want cleaning and oiling. Sheer willpower can still force the wheel to turn, but there is so much resistance that it damages the axle. It is not good for the machinery.
The greater part of my own rust and dust, I believe, takes the form of fear: which means that hope is the logical motive power to oppose it with, if you have got any. But my own capacity for hope is, at least for the moment, exhausted. When I think of any state of being that I could desire for myself, I am always stymied by practicalities. I am faced with the dour old New England farmer from the story, saying, ‘You can’t get there from here.’ I do not know how to traverse the intervening territory; nor do the successful people to whom I would normally look for advice. They have arrived there, but they have never been precisely here; so that while they may be good and useful guides once I reach the highway, they cannot give me directions for setting out. And they cannot repair my broken wheel. That I must do for myself.
Since the motor cannot get the wheel moving in its present condition, the only other alternative is to reduce the friction. That means that I must do things as if I stood to gain something by them; like Sam, I have to cultivate cheerfulness. But like Sam on Mount Doom, I have reached the point, seemingly, at which despair cannot be postponed. At that point, cheer is replaced by a kind of cultivated recklessness. Sam had to get Frodo up the mountain somehow, and make no provision at all for ever getting back. He had to throw away all caution and precaution, even casting away his sword and his leather jerkin, and risk his life on the chance of making the climb unopposed. My own straits are less dire, but I have much further to go, and I do not know the way. A different kind of endurance, but a discipline no less stringent, seems to be called for.
Part of what kept Sam going was his talk, part jest and part fantasy, about what a story Frodo’s Quest would make, if only the world knew about it and had the wit to tell it. We see the same spirit at work in the Ents and the Rohirrim. Théoden struck the note perfectly: ‘At least we may make such an end, as will be worth a song!’ That wish – to be deserving of credit, even if there was nobody to give it – sustained him to his end on the Pelennor.
To translate that into the terms of my own situation is not difficult. I need to write; I need to write fearlessly, not caring whether I ever find an audience, or whether even my few loyal readers laugh and turn away. But before I can do that, I need to grease the wheel; I need a relief from the pain of isolation. Last week, I somehow blundered into a position where I met a young lady (too young for my decrepitude) for coffee, and an hour of pleasant and attractive female company lifted my spirits hugely. The pain, in fact, stopped for that time, and did not resume until it became obvious that my hope of continuing the companionship was a fool’s hope. Then the pain returned, compounded with the frustration of sudden failure, and the embarrassment of having been a fool; and it was then that I wrote my last intemperate screed.
Very well: this seems to be a need that I must address somehow, but I must do it without hope, since there is no hope to be found but in dreams and delusions. I have begun a cautious experiment to see just what minimum of this sort of contact will alleviate my distress, without luring me into such hopes and emotions that I may damage myself by the inevitable recoil. The experiment is a difficult one; such things do not come natural to me; I have deliberately suppressed all that side of myself for many years, partly for moral reasons, but chiefly because I was well aware of my own undesirability. But it seems to me that it must be tried. I have often tried to begin untying the Gordian knot from the other end, so to speak, trying to find such success in my work as would make me at least a plausible catch. It never worked. So I am going to try working the knot from both ends at once, and see if I can loosen it. And I am going to do my best to do it without hope, in a kind of devil-may-care freedom, making an uncovenanted offering of my failure. I am saying to myself, ‘This is what I would do if I had any hope; well, let us do that, and make such an end as will be worth a song.’ I do not expect anyone to sing that song; but perhaps the thought of it will help me through the worst of my obstacles, and into a place where I have other resources to draw upon.
Of your charity, Theophilus, pray for me, that I may find a way through.
Dear sir,
My prayers are small and woefully infrequent, but such as they are, you do have them. I hope (for the both of us) that they may serve you good of some kind. At the least, I am sure they can do no harm. And in any case, when you next get something salable assembled, I plan to buy it with the same alacrity with which I’ve bought your previous works.
yrs,
Brat
Dear Tom,
I didn’t know quite what to make of the previous screed – so as not to make it worse.
There’s nothing wrong with your brain: you are appraising your situation, and finding it wanting. You are examining how you got there – your parents have formed you, as well as your education and life.
You have had several recent major blows, and are entitled to be sad about them. You have to grieve things like health and parents who are no longer on this Earth.
If you’re going to do this the tough way, isn’t it also possible to do something in the volunteer side of things? It is said that helping others is the best way to take your own attention off yourself. I don’t know what opportunities there are in your community, or how isolated you are from them, but one way to meet people is to go where they are, engaged in activities you also have an interest in.
I know this is standard advice – and you have to keep doing all the other things you postponed so long, such as doctor visits, and routine maintenance – but you have prodigious gifts, and sharing them is not a bad idea. Your education and self-training has made you capable of writing the way you do. I can’t. Few can.
Now that you have choices, do you really want to live up there in the frozen north?
If you want human contact, you can have some this way – but should continue to get it in person: this kind is cold comfort when you need the other.
You have my email address: if you write, I’ll write back. But I feel a recent intruder, and don’t know if you would welcome it.
Do not despair. Not only is it a sin, but it wastes time and energy better spent on doing something – anything – that will get you moving. After you start, almost any direction will do.
And, for heaven’s sake, keep writing.
If sales are not what you’d like, may I recommend a review by competent advisors of your covers and titles and book descriptions? Often that turns out to be quite illuminating. At a very minimum, be sure you have taken a RECENT look at the books which are best-sellers in your genre; there may be something you can learn there. If your covers don’t scream “I’m a bestseller!” at potential readers, they won’t get the chance they deserve: readers won’t Look Inside! to get to the sample.
I’ve probably said too much, but I wish there is something I could do, and this is about all I can.
Alicia
I thank you for your thoughts and suggestions. Some of your advice I shall certainly take; some (I beg your pardon for having to say it) is unsuitable. For instance, I cannot really leave the Frozen North, because I would need a visa to settle in another country, and semi-employed writers are not generally viewed as desirable immigrants. Volunteer work can be difficult to find hereabouts, because we have a local culture in which wealthy and leisured people count coup by volunteering and ‘doing their alms before men’; and they do not like to rub elbows with their social inferiors while they are doing it.
I have discussed the matter of my covers, titles, &c. with persons I believe to be competent, and we have more or less concluded that the real problem is that I need to get new books out there; in particular, I need to have regular releases of new fiction. Of course, that requires me to break my writer’s block and actually get a substantial amount of work finished. Once that is done, the outcome is really in the hands of God and the marketplace – for there is a strong element of luck in getting one’s work widely noticed, and ‘ ’tis not in mortals to command success’. Hence the need for me to work on both ends of the Gordian knot.
Dear Tom,
I have been a reader and a fan of yours for many years, but too shy to comment. I never quite know what to say! Your book on Tolkien was wonderful, and serendipitously helped me solve a conundrum in my own writing. You have my prayers and support. May God bless you and keep you.
Best,
kat
Thank you very kindly for your support. I cherish the thought that my ruminations on Tolkien may have helped another writer through a difficulty. I hope you may choose to tell me about it one day.
Nobody depends upon me but myself…
You could always get some sort of smaller living thing to cohabit with you. Something between a dog and a houseplant, perhaps?
I feel as if this is a silly suggestion, but I’m not being flippant; it might actually be worthwhile.
It’s a good idea, but I want to get my living arrangements better settled before I try it. The building I live in is for sale and may be torn down to build condos. I wouldn’t like to get a pet and then find that I can’t find a place to live where I can keep it.
Tom, I understand despair quite well. The fact is, nobody knows the trouble you’ve seen but Jesus, If you want hope, help, guidance, it is to Jesus (and the Father) to whom you must turn. You cannot help yourself out of it. You are not the physician you need.
You are in the Pit, and only One can lead you out of it. The only charge is all of your Self. If you won’t make that bargain, you won’t ever climb all the way out, but succumb over and over.
How does one effectively call on God and receive an answer? By asking and submitting. He knows if you mean it or not.
Perhaps you think you’ve done it before, but if so, you withheld something or a lot of your Self. But faith is in willing to die, renounce yourself, many times, on many crosses.
You are not alone. God is with you. Call on him.
BTW, I never sneer at the miserable and suffering. Saying “you poor child, there, there” won’t help you in the least, though. Your heart is sick unto death. Turn it over to the One who knows what to do with it, a true healer.
Mark B
Tom Simon
You are wrong. You do owe a duty. You owe a duty to me.
I am part of the Loyal 3.6, and I have come to depend on your writing for entertainment, enlightenment, and elevation of my mind. You are to me my modern Chesterton.
Your writing enriched my world, and in doing so you created a condition such that the lack of your writing will impoverish it.
To fulfill your duty to me, you must write, you must post, and you must publish.
Now get to work.
I thank you for your praise and encouragement. I would point out, however, that a writer’s duty to his audience is not in the same class with a husband’s duty to his wife, or a father’s to his children; it may convince the intellect, but it does not really reach down and motivate the organism.
Deo volente, I shall be able to do some meaningful writing very soon. At present I am not. One might say that I have broken several spiritual bones in the past, and not being set correctly, they knitted crookedly; and now I have had to re-break them so that they could be set straight. It is a painful process, and impedes my ability to do other work.
I don’t know if this may be of any help to you, but I tend to think about hope in terms of Kierkegaard’s knight of resignation and knight of faith. The knight of resignation wholly accepts the impossibility of attaining the temporal goods he desires and satisfies himself with the eternal. In this “infinite resignation there is peace and rest; every man who wills it, who has not abased himself by scorning himself (which is still more dreadful than being proud), can train himself to make this movement which in its pain reconciles one with existence.” The knight of faith too makes this movement of perfect resignation, but he also goes beyond it to claim his temporal desire on the strength of the absurd. “He makes exactly the same movements as the other knight, infinitely renounces claim to the love which is the content of his life, he is reconciled in pain; but then occurs the prodigy, he makes still another movement more wonderful than all, for he says, ‘I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible.’ […] So he recognizes the impossibility, and that very instant he believes the absurd.” Like Chesterton’s white and red blazing next to one another, like the delicate balance of opposing forces in a spun top, this paradox insists upon opposite extremes: a total giving-up and a total holding-on. The paradox is the only really practical thing; naïve hope without resignation deceives itself and resignation without hope paralyzes, but the impossible combination of faith makes knowledge and action possible.
To approach it another way: faced with the unhappiness that results from a mismatch between desire and reality, the sensible, philosophic choice is to modify the desire. This is the Buddhist and the Stoic response to pain. If only we were able to content ourselves with nothing, we would never long or lack or grieve, but be at peace. But it is not the Christian answer; God asked in the garden that the cup would pass from him, praying in the strength of the absurd, total readiness to die and total desire to live united in one breath. This example, of course, does not commend hope as a comfort, for it was in the midst of that prayer that he sweat blood. To one hemmed in by impossibilities, hope torments with the sharp pains of fears and doubts and yearnings, pains which despair quells and soothes. Despair is a safe and quiet refuge, hope the wearied soldier’s sally again and again into the tumult of the fight. Hope is not indeed a comfort or a motivation but a virtue—one of the theological virtues, which are not only unattainable but not even desirable without supernatural grace.
You say there is no hope but in dreams and delusions. I agree that it would be foolish for anyone to try to deceive himself by manufacturing a feeling of confidence or expectation. But the hope that is from above does not involve massaging the facts to make a positive outcome seem more plausible. It defies reality; it exults in impossibilities. After all, the same power that raised Christ from the dead is in us now. He tells the dry bones to live, and they do, and we shall, not only the spirit but the body and all its innocent desires raised, transfigured, and glorified. Compared to the resurrection of the dead, what is a friendship for the lonely or a completed manuscript from the blocked writer? If he has given us his Son, how will he not graciously give us all things? Shall we deny his power or his love by doubting that he gives good gifts to those who ask? We may, of course, have to die before we receive them. Christ did. But whether they are fulfilled early or late, all God’s promises are YES in him.
Perhaps you mean the same thing when you say that you will strive to act as though you had hope, even having none. The will matters more than the feelings or even the intellect, and one may live in hope even when depression strips away all perception of it. What I want to point out, though, is that the hope you act on need not be a hypothetical construct or a pragmatically useful falsehood or a fantastic chimera. It may be sober truth, even if it is absurd, because the God of the universe does love you with an absurd and undying love.
It feels strange to write such things to a stranger, but I think it is impossible to see someone hurt with a pain like one that yourself have felt without loving them at least a little. And I am praying for you.
I thank you for writing that, and for your prayers.
I have trouble realizing hope in Christ, because the habit of hope has grown so foreign to me. And sometimes I have C. S. Lewis’s old fear that the good Our Lord intends for me is so unlike what I desire that I should not be able to think of it as good at all; and then I feel ashamed even of my innocent desires. I think it is John in The Pilgrim’s Regress who says that it is no help to say to a hungry man, ‘You can have anything you desire, provided there is no question of eating.’
That fear is a fear induced in good men by devils who have only a few weapons left to hand. Don’t listen. Good luck, and God bless you, Mr. Simon.
In part, though, it is induced by the particular nature of the desire I feel most ashamed of. As Lewis says somewhere or other, I am not only an immortal soul created in the image of God; I am also a breeding animal that wants its mate. Neither Scripture nor the Church promises to do anything about that; and Our Lord was quite clear that in the next life, we shall ‘neither give nor be given in marriage’. I am left quite alone and without help in this matter; and while I have tried desperately for many years to ignore it, I find that I cannot do that anymore.
I find that I do not know what to say. Forgive me for my importunity. I firmly believe that all things are made good in the end – but I know the pains you describe all too well, and I know that they do not admit of easy solutions.
Regarding your greater issues I’ve nothing to add to what wiser readers have said. Regarding writing, I have little enough; I offer it only on the supposition that the tiniest drop might still bring the tiniest help. But I’d direct your attention to the essays that Lawrence Block wrote for “Writer’s Digest” some decades back, collected in “Lying for Fun and Profit”, “Spider, Spin Me a Web”, and other collections available in ebook form.
Block was (and is; I think he’s still active) a professional writer of accomplishment, though in a genre I’m not sure you like (the crime novel). His fiction column had little in the way of practical advice, but being a pro he knew that practical advice was of little help to the writer, for each writer is different. He could only describe what he had done and been through.
Best of all–and this is what I treasure in the columns–he had a warm, wry, ruminative presence on the page. Deliberately or intuitively, he seemed to know that a writer-as-a-writer needed a particular kind of companionship, and he offered it as best he could through the prose: the sense that every problem you faced he had faced; and if he didn’t have the answer for you, he understood your question better than others probably do. He is like a presence across the table, talking in a quiet but amusing way about things of common concern, less to tell you how to do things than to fill a silence that might otherwise demoralize.
In “Spider” there is an entire section about fear, particularly fear as the root of procrastination and of writer’s block. He said what you have said said here: it is fear that stops us from writing. He went farther, and said that to overcome fear it was not enough to cultivate some contrary emotion; he said the writer must discover what precisely he or she is afraid of, and must defeat that particular fear, not the emotion in general. There was some additional stuff about affirmations that you might dismiss as “California-lite” nonsense, but his thrust, I think, is very sound.
If nothing else, there are reminders that writing is a funny business, and that we all have our problems. Evan Hunter, Block tells us, once became convinced that he had acquired as a bad habit the tendency to write too quickly, and forthwith resolved to cultivate a more contemplative word rate. He was fit to bust his buttons when, after several weeks of effort, he could boast that he had cut his output to only eight pages a day. No one had the strength of character to strangle him, as he so obviously deserved.
I’m a huge fan of Lawrence Block, actually. (Some of his fiction is outside my range of taste, but that’s true of most writers that I like.) As a wee embryonic writer back in the 80s, I learnt a great deal from his column in Writer’s Digest, and I was saddened and disappointed to see him replaced by Nancy Kress. Ms. Kress is a fine writer in her own right, but as a columnist on writing she just wasn’t in Block’s league.
A year or two ago, when I heard that Block was reissuing a couple of collections of his Writer’s Digest columns, I actually left a comment on his blog squeeing over the fact. I even asked him to say hi to Arnold and Mimi for me, wherever they are. I think that may have amused him slightly.
Perhaps it will comfort you, then, to know that I agree with your advice and have taken it before. But thanks for reminding me; I shall have to reread some of Block’s pieces.
I must squee a little myself at finding you also an LB fan. He is new to me—I only chanced to pick up one of his early novels in a used book store a few months ago—and have since been stamping my foot, exclaiming, “How long has this been going on without me?!”
Regarding advice on writing I’ll push my luck a little further. I won’t clickbait it with the headline “Break Writer’s Block with These Two Weird Tricks!” I’ll just try to imitate Block by sharing some things I did when I was defeated by stiction (an excellent metaphor for the problem, by the way).
Once, when I was feeling the words boiling inside but had no ideas in which to pour them, I happened to browse a juvenile space novella of appallingly low quality but which one contained a few interesting ideas its author had failed to completely smother. I noodled with these ideas, then got one of my own: I scribbled down—as best I could remember—a rough outline of the novella (its characters, situation, conflict, plot progression) and chucked the original away. Then I rewrote it, from scratch, in my own voice and style, using the outline. (Rather like the Stratmeyer ghostwriters worked from outlines for the Hardy Boys books, maybe.) The outline gave me a form into which to pour molten words, and once I was in motion—and inventing new characters and conflicts and situations to fit alongside the old—I was able to work up the energy to generate ideas for honest fiction.
Another time, when I felt the need to invent but couldn’t move, I wrote a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. You remember those, right? Silly little stories for 10-year-old boys (and which I loved as a 10-year-old), written in the second person and present tense, where the character and maybe some chums quickly get into a weird and threatening situation, and how they get out depends on the reader? Because each chapter (100 to 250 words) ends with a cliffhanger and a choice, e..g.: “To ring the magic bell, turn to page 25.” “To look in the other room, turn to page 8.” It didn’t have to be good; it didn’t even have to make sense. It just had to have vigor and excitement and constant, fresh invention. Again, this exercise overcame my feeling of stiction, and some of the ideas did accumulate into larger clusters, like a snowball rolling downhill and picking up speed and mass.
In neither case did the exercise directly result in a usable product; on the other hand, the knowledge that none of it signified, that I was only playing “Let’s Pretend!” upon the page, I think had some effect in freeing me up to write. Or I’m reminded of something Terry-Thomas said in an interview, talking about how he had to deal with his Parkinson’s: sometimes his body would not do what he wanted it to do, and he had to trick it, by trying to do something else and hoping he’d “accidentally” do the other thing while he wasn’t looking.
The exercises I would come up with would probably be different from yours, but the idea is a good one. In fact, a lot of the essais I post here are done to help me warm up to the point where I can tackle fiction (which is, for me, the hardest thing to write).
Sometimes, alas, I get so run down that I cannot even frame to write an essai or a silly squib. For those times, a stronger medicine will be needed, and I haven’t figured out yet what it is.
Tom,
I believe you are sincere that you want to improve your situation, your life, but resistance and willfulness peers through your responses.
First, you may not trust that God won’t take you somewhere you don’t want to go, but you ought to put that fear to rest. You will go nowhere you dislike and lose nothing you cherish in following the Healer. You will not be sent to Calcutta to minister to the dying (as a friend of mine always feared).
Second, all you have to do is remain calm, and read a chapter of the New Testament every day. Think upon it, and write about your thoughts and feelings as they occur to you (journal them) and you think are significant. (Don’t publish them any more than you would publish last night’s dream which bores everyone.) When you finish the four books, start over. They won’t read the same the second, third, or a fair number of times later.
Third, find a church and perhaps, liturgical (because the rituals are profound and rich) that is conservative (Catholic or Lutheran, a branch that has remained true to the Bible). You will not only meet some very nice, welcoming, and caring people, but you will have a space, a place where you can get on your knees and beseech or thank God. Go every Sunday.
Fourth, talk to God when you are upset, demolished, in despair. Speak to him out loud. Not just mentally. Speaking out loud makes you choose your words and take them seriously, and mean them. Thoughts are just a skein of random synapses firing until they take concrete form.
Fifth, find the kind of religious, devotional literature that appeals to you at this moment and read it.
Sixth — that’s enough for now. This is like AA, 12 steps in a way. If you aren’t willing to do these five simple tasks of self-improvement, you have no excuse for your assailing us with your miseries.
****
What you do not seem to know is how much I and others want the best for you. We appreciate your talent and struggle to be more than you are. And what you don’t know is that I have been where you are and, perhaps, much worse.
I was going to kill myself. Not as a “cry for help” or anything else. It was carefully planned, I knew how to do it, I told no one, what little help I sought from others was responded to with trite and piddling remarks. I would have left a wife and young child behind, but my despair was absolute.
I wanted to kill myself because I could not bear this world any longer, and out of the blue, God, the Father, Abba, made his presence known to me, and I was overcome with His love. Yet, it made me want to leave this world even more for the Heaven that was His. I went to a place to murder myself, and as I prepared to do so, a voice spoke to me and said “go home.”
I had to obey. It made me very unhappy, but I did it, and began the project that altered my thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs, and understanding completely.
And today? Well, I pretty much dislike this world. It is a prison to me compared to the Heaven I know that exists otherwise. I have suffered but I have also thrived in ways I never thought possible. As I occasionally tell others, “Life is disappointing, but it’s not without its satisfactions.”
I have also had two heart attacks. The first one enough to destroy me if I hadn’t gotten help soon enough. I now know what it is like to face death without any fear because I know Heaven is, and my Redeemer liveth.
My advice to you is not to just dance with your misery (”hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.”), but abandon it for a better life where you, as a man, an artist, will thrive. It may not be all you dreamed of, it may even be better, but it won’t be hopeless.
Mark, I am certain you mean well. But I feel you are judging Tom by your own experiences, and his are not quite the same as yours. I know you would not intentionally cause him distress, but I believe you are doing so, and I feel it incumbent upon me to enlighten you so that you do not cause Tom further despair.
Allow me to state my qualifications for having an opinion. Tom and I have been very close friends for over a decade: on the phone almost every day sort of friends. Tom, like you and me, had a sort of “road to Damascus” unlooked for encounter with Christ . . . in our cases not during planning a suicide (but thank you for the naked honesty of admitting that in case he was in a similar state.)
Another qualification. While I am no longer ridden by the “black dog” of depression I used to have chronic, very deep organic depression. You cannot just buck up, have faith, or shake it off – it’s a physical condition, not an attitude. Depression–the disease, not the sadness normal people sometimes feel–is caused by a neurotransmitter deficit and feels very much like having a bad flu where you cannot move. So it’s a physical disease as real as a diabetic’s lack of insulin. And Tom has tried so many medicines to alleviate it, with limited success. No lack of effort there.
Tom’s and my depression had similar root causes. We were both abused as children. I’m going to be more frank that Tom might be about this, and I hope he’ll forgive me, but his mother was emotionally ill and abusive in the extreme. She was, at times physically abusive in a way that would earn her a jail sentence nowadays, and always emotionally abusive. Toward the very end of her life the fact that three separate people were smuggling alcohol into the care facility for her led him to also realize she was also an alcoholic. (He’s adopted so he does not have her genetics, by the way.)
So Tom is recovering from a lifetime of severe emotional injuries. Now, the wretched thing about emotional injuries is that they are invisible. If he had the equivalent physical injuries, he’d have been in a hospital in traction and everyone would have been bringing him cards and such and been very careful not to jostle the healing fractures.
Telling a person with severe emotional injuries to “trust in God” (Tom does) and talk to Him (he does), read devotionals (he does, mostly things like Lewis’ Mere Christianity or his The Problem of Pain) and to look on the bright side is not helpful. Asking him “to realize that others care” when he does realize this, he just longs for intimacy, is beside the point. Emotional injuries, like broken bones, take time to heal: in fact, they take longer. And Tom is healing; at this point he’s sort of at the “out of the hospital but still walking with crutches” phase of healing from his very severe emotional injuries. He was unable to even consider the possibility of intimacy when he was in the emotional equivalent of intensive care for a nearly fatal car crash. As someone ho has been in a similar situation I can tell you he is doing very well, and has been courageous to even hope at all.
What you called Tom’s “resistance and willfulness” showing through is merely you not seeing the invisible injuries. That’s okay: the only way for a person to not be tone deaf to such injuries is to go through them him or herself and I’d not wish that on anyone. But as someone who has been severely emotionally injured, I can assure you that Tom has never been anything less than courageous in his internal battle against despair and his efforts to become well. Just tell him you care, rather than dispensing well-meaning advice. Job’s three friends were doing very well by sitting with him for a long time after his losses, but then they blew it when they opened their mouths.
Have you considered praying the Rosary — all twenty decades — every day and pouring your heart out to Jesus and Mary?
For reasons that I would rather not discuss in public, Mary is rather a closed book to me. Praying the Rosary feels like a punishment to me; I have never been able to get any good out of it at all. But I do thank you for the suggestion.
Wendy,
I have no desire to engage in an argument with you about Tom’s or your condition. I know a very good deal about depression (yes, the physical aspect, too). I know a good deal deal about traumatic emotional abuse in childhood, since it also occurred in my life. I also know further about suffering from an acute and chronic skin disease that would cripple my body and turn me into a walking, waking horror story.
I have since learned a good deal about God and prayer, about resistance and willfulness, grace and healing. Faith is much more than an initial conversion. Faith is a practice that requires a fair amount of discipline, a good deal of practice, and eventually, the right method of prayer: contemplation.
You can only know yourself as much as you know God; and emotional afflictions can only be healed insofar as one will trust God to do the work for one. Yes, healing takes time, but a man can increase the tempo by his practice, attention, and study.
God works at walking speed, as the saying goes, but there’s a lot one can do as one goes. If someone wants God to help them but doesn’t do the least to make a receptive space for God to do His will, then he is deceiving himself. Many people believe in God, take some comfort for immediate consolations and tender mercies, and then leave it at that and go no further. Why? Because most folks get just enough improvement in their time of crisis and extremity, and they are happy to leave it at that.
As someone said, most people want to get close enough to the fire to draw a little warmth from it, but will not cast themselves into it to be purged of their sin and dross. They like God, want some of God, but they want Him on their terms. They want gifts and presents from Santa Claus, but they do not want the Cross at all.
Renunciation is a full-time job. It never stops until it does stop. But you have no idea how or when that will be.
Some people also have the idea that if they can just get through this life without too much trouble or too many demands (from God), they’ll be home free after they die. They have their get out of Hell free card from their baptism, right?
But it doesn’t work like that. There are no shortcuts to God and Selflessness. You either do the work now or later on, or postpone it forever, but the work must be done or you will not see His face and enjoy his freedom, truth, and beauty.
Everything God does in Creation is through Process, and procession is up to each person. Not God. When I see people suffering grievously, yet unwilling to devote themselves to the process of Faith, it makes me doubt their protestations of wanting to be well.
Does a person go to church regularly, read the Bible, study wisdom, put time into prayer? Or does he dally and loiter in the revels of Vanity Fair and the slough of despond? (I started with daily Mass and the Rosary which led me to the highest form of contemplation. That process took about 6 – 7 years).
You protest that the biochemical conditions of severe depression can’t simply be dismissed as easily as you say I did. (I don’t. I know the condition well.) But you seem unaware that God can fix the body (biological conditions) as well as fix the soul. God probably won’t snap his fingers with an instant miracle (although it’s been known to happen and I can also attest to that), but my severe and biochemical depression was lifted and healed in a matter of a year or two. He lowers the mountains, raises the valley, to make everything smooth and even. But one must walk the faith.
Anyway, if someone wants health and won’t go to the physician, what can anybody say? The physician prescribes medicine and a regimen to follow. It works on those who submit to it as many millions across history can testify.
People set their own pace, of course. For me it was — in for a penny, in for a pound. I didn’t want a little of salvation, I wanted it All. There was nothing of my Self I wanted to preserve. I trusted that Love I knew explicitly. It took my some time to not be frustrated that the process wasn’t quicker or more as I thought it should go, but I learned not to get in His way and blindly allow Him to work His will.
Granted that neither you nor Tom is me. The process all goes a little differently for everyone because it is tailor-made for each, but doing the work remains to all. If you don’t do the work, you don’t get, and no one can make you. God is entirely impassive in the face of your miseries, pleas, abuse, and follies. If the dog won’t come, He won’t train him any further. He is patient and can outlast everyone.
Anyway, if Tom wants improvement, the path awaits him. If he is on it, good. If he is not doing the work with urgency and desire, then so be it.
Mr. Butterworth,
I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite so many platitudes in one place. And I’d really appreciate it if you would stop projecting your own “willfulness and resistance” onto Tom. Whether you realize it or not, your screeds–yes, screeds–were chock full of accusations, mostly by implication. I’m going to list them by quoting you and pointing them out.
“Faith is much more than an initial conversion. Faith is a practice that requires a fair amount of discipline,” you just accused him of a lack of discipline, ” a good deal of practice,” you just accused him of a lack of practice, “and eventually, the right method of prayer: contemplation” you just accused him of a lack of contemplation or at least not doing it properly.
“You can only know yourself as much as you know God; and emotional afflictions can only be healed insofar as one will trust God to do the work for one.” You just accused Tom of a lack of trust. ” Yes, healing takes time, but a man can increase the tempo by his practice, attention, and study.” Oh, if Tom would only try harder and be more diligent! You just accused him of laziness, of sloth.
“God works at walking speed, as the saying goes, but there’s a lot one can do as one goes. If someone wants God to help them but doesn’t do the least to make a receptive space for God to do His will, then he is deceiving himself.” You just accused Tom of not having a receptive space for God, and of lying to himself. “Many people believe in God, take some comfort for immediate consolations and tender mercies, and then leave it at that and go no further. Why? Because most folks get just enough improvement in their time of crisis and extremity, and they are happy to leave it at that.” You just accused Tom of a shallow faith, of intellectual and spiritual laziness, and using God as a means to get through a crisis.
“As someone said, most people want to get close enough to the fire to draw a little warmth from it, but will not cast themselves into it to be purged of their sin and dross.” You just accused Tom of fondness for his sins, whatever they may be, and of using the Good Lord’s grace as fire issuance against hell with no desire to really change his wicked ways (whatever they may be, you’ve not been specific). “They like God, want some of God, but they want Him on their terms. They want gifts and presents from Santa Claus, but they do not want the Cross at all.” You’ve just accused Tom of something heinous – of wanting salvation without showing it by his works, grace without repentance. Using the neutral “they” does not excuse you from the only logical implication, that you are suggesting that Tom might be–nay, IS–guilty of such things.
“Renunciation is a full-time job. It never stops until it does stop. But you have no idea how or when that will be. Some people also have the idea that if they can just get through this life without too much trouble or too many demands (from God), they’ll be home free after they die. They have their get out of Hell free card from their baptism, right? But it doesn’t work like that.” Right, you’ve just suggested that Christians need to take up their cross and follow Him. Are you merely spouting the blindingly obvious, or leading up to some further accusation? At the very least, you seem to want to cure Tom of not knowing this and are therefore accusing him of ignorance.
“There are no shortcuts to God and Selflessness. You either do the work now or later on, or postpone it forever, but the work must be done or you will not see His face and enjoy his freedom, truth, and beauty.” Why say this unless you are accusing Tom of taking shortcuts to try and not, as St. Paul calls it, work out his salvation with fear and trembling? You’re assuming that Tom is not doing the work of being a Christian. In fact, if there is a theme to your accusations, it’s that Tom is either lazy in following Christ, or rebellious, or ignorant. Or all three.
“Everything God does in Creation is through Process, and procession is up to each person. Not God.” Ah, so now we come to a potential heresy. Careful. As I understand scripture, we are brought from death to life, and all of the cooperation with grace we do after that is out of gratitude – we do NOT earn our salvation through works. St Paul is rather clear on that point.
You go on to say, “When I see people suffering grievously, yet unwilling to devote themselves to the process of Faith, it makes me doubt their protestations of wanting to be well.” Now you are accusing Tom of being unwilling to “devote himself to the process of faith”, and are suggesting that Tom does not wish to be well.
“Does a person go to church regularly, read the Bible, study wisdom, put time into prayer? Or does he dally and loiter in the revels of Vanity Fair and the slough of despond?” I am not deceived by your use of the impersonal “a person” and “he” – what you are asking is does Tom do these things? By implication, you are suggesting that Tom does not do bible study, does not “study wisdom,” does not put time into prayer, that he “dallies and loiters” in vain things and despair as if he somehow ENJOYS them. You have accused him of either intentional or unintentional worldliness and either unintentional or intentional perverse enjoyment in his predicament.
You add, “(I started with daily Mass and the Rosary which led me to the highest form of contemplation. That process took about 6 – 7 years).” So, by implication you are accusing Tom of a lack of perseverance, lack of Christian practices, and laziness or blindness again. If only he would listen to you and put forth the proper effort all of his problems would be solved!
Then you got to the topic of the biochemical aspects of depression, and I was pleased to see that you had some understanding of the matter: “You protest that the biochemical conditions of severe depression can’t simply be dismissed as easily as you say I did. (I don’t. I know the condition well.)” All well and good.
However, you then accuse ME of ignorance, when in fact I am not only aware that God can heal but have received that healing. You write, “But you seem unaware that God can fix the body (biological conditions) as well as fix the soul. God probably won’t snap his fingers with an instant miracle (although it’s been known to happen and I can also attest to that), but my severe and biochemical depression was lifted and healed in a matter of a year or two. He lowers the mountains, raises the valley, to make everything smooth and even. But one must walk the faith.” So Tom and I have no idea and you will heal us of our ignorance? And then admonishing us to “walk the faith” is nothing but another accusation. I compared you to one of Job’s false comforters, who accused Job rather than comforted him, and I see I was right.
“Anyway, if someone wants health and won’t go to the physician, what can anybody say?” You assume Tom has not gone to the Great Physician? Really? “The physician prescribes medicine and a regimen to follow. It works on those who submit to it as many millions across history can testify.” If Tom has not gone to the Great Physician you assume he will not take the cure or follow the doctor’s advice. How dare you presume. How dare you?
“People set their own pace, of course. For me it was — in for a penny, in for a pound. I didn’t want a little of salvation, I wanted it All. There was nothing of my Self I wanted to preserve. I trusted that Love I knew explicitly. It took my some time to not be frustrated that the process wasn’t quicker or more as I thought it should go, but I learned not to get in His way and blindly allow Him to work His will.” Well, good for you.
“Granted that neither you nor Tom is me. The process all goes a little differently for everyone because it is tailor-made for each, but doing the work remains to all.” So, how am I not to construe that your helpful advice is not to suggest Tom (and I) “do the work” since we are not doing it? “If you don’t do the work, you don’t get, and no one can make you. God is entirely impassive in the face of your miseries, pleas, abuse, and follies. If the dog won’t come, He won’t train him any further. He is patient and can outlast everyone.” Yep, we’re being accused of being recalcitrant, disobedient, lazy, blind and not as smart as you I suppose.
Your conclusion is nothing less than insulting. “Anyway, if Tom wants improvement,” If. IF? IF??? You obviously assume he does not. You take too much upon yourself, sir. Only the Lord knows another person’s heart. ” …the path awaits him.” I do note that you say, “If he is on it, good.” But of course you end it with “If he is not doing the work with urgency and desire, then so be it.” Yes. Even if he is not, you’ve said your piece, and I hope you’re done. Please leave Tom alone and stop your “helpful advice” because it’s not helpful. He’s following the Lord as best he can.
Your advice fluctuates between basic Christian doctrine and practice (which you think Tom seems to be either too ignorant to have learned or too stubborn to make use of) and platitudes. I was too kind in my earlier assessment of you, Mr. Butterworth. You seem to have the log of PRIDE in your own eye and I suggest you remove it as it is distorting your view of others.
Oh, and Tom? I suggest you block Mr. Butterworth. Please.
Ms. Delmater,
Contrary to the many false assertions and assumptions you make in criticism, I have no idea how Tom proceeds on his course for relief of misery. Hence, the use of “one”or “person” as the auditor may take it to apply to himself or not at all.
It seems fairly clear though, that Tom has proclaimed himself to be in great distress, says he sees no remedy, and proposes no program or purpose to ameliorate his condition.
Wisdom offers him a sure-fire method of self-improvement, not because of my singular assertion, but because many millions can testify to its efficacy. If Tom or you are not doing the least in walking the path of Faith and working the program, the consequences are obvious — further pain and suffering without much relief.
Here’s a sad fact. AA has a success rate of 3-5% in terms of recovery and attendance after a year.If you have ever read the Twelve Steps, you will find that it uncannily reflects the Christian Conversion process. And so the same stats pretty much apply to Christians. Which means that the vast majority of people who turn to Christ and then follow him, are very few.
And so, the likelihood that you and Tom are “working” the program, so to speak, is small; and thus, the exhortation for dalliers and loiterers to more seriously apply themselves if they are unhappy with their existence.
Also, the fact that you would become womanishly irrational, overly emotional, and sadly resentful regarding a discussion of the love of God and the manner in which he works upon his children does not reflect favorably upon your own temperament or of any irenicism of faith you would claim to possess.
If Tom Simon wants to silence my advice and concern, that’s up to him. That you would demand and recommend it is strange.
I am a little surprised that Tom has not replied to me other than to once complain that I have sneered, but I would otherwise gather he is holding his ammunition in reserve, is too bored to reply, or is considering my statements with some attention to their value as they may or may not apply.
The plain fact, as I stated, is that if the dog won’t come (when called, and God is always calling) then it can only be a matter of resistance and personal will.
Everything I thought to say to Tom, I have said. There’s nothing more to add. As for your ejaculations, Wendy, I recommend you buckle down, too, and get with the program. You don’t seem very happy or at any peace that surpasseth understanding. You seem rather tightly wound.
That’s enough, Mr. Butterworth. You can stop insulting my friends and pretending that it is a good Christian thing to do. It isn’t. You are eaten up with spiritual pride, and with contempt for your neighbour. Only a monster of pride would have made the offer that you made to me a few weeks ago. What you make of your soul is on your own head, and I will not presume to prescribe for a stranger as you have tried to do here. But whatever you make of it, do it elsewhere. You are no longer welcome here.
I do find it rather hilarious that Mr. Buterworth thinks that I, a person who has spent twenty-five years in 12-step programs (Adult Children of Alcoholics, to be precise) does not understand the 12 steps. Good Lord, the assumptions he makes are amazing. His mind-reading abilities are not what he thinks they are.
I hope you will feel well enough to continue writing “Where Angels Die.” I was enjoying the story and with the right promotion, I think many others will, too. If several of us could encourage Larry Correa to do one of his book bombs for it, it could help you sell a lot of copies of the book and raise your profile as an author considerably.
Also, I offer for your consideration an article, actually the last of a series of articles, all of which you might find useful in dealing with your depression. I have known several people who have suffered from it, but are managing it well now.
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/03/31/managing-depression/
Thank you! That’s very encouraging. My plan, such as it is, is to get back to Where Angels Die as soon as I am sufficiently unstuck to work on fiction again. I nearly always need to warm up with a couple of nonfiction pieces first, and while that is going on, I am (as you will have guessed) rather vulnerable to emotional turmoil.
A Correia book bomb would be a wonderful lift, but is hardly the kind of thing that I could ask for myself.
Thanks for the link. I’m getting medical help with the depression, but unfortunately, doctors can’t fix the underlying situation (which would have been enough to depress almost anybody). I can only persevere, and at the moment, that means persevering without being cognizant of hope.
Tom,
For what little it’s worth, your analysis of your situation looks correct from my perspective, distant in more than one else. (Not only do I not know you personally, it’s obvious that your emotional/spiritual situation is very very different from my own. E.g. I often have a problem thinking too well of myself, which must sound like being plagued by pixies.)
It’s generally good sense to act as if you had faith when you’re not feeling it, and act as if you had charity when you’re not feeling it, so I’d be surprised if the same thing doesn’t apply to hope. Best wishes, and I’ll keep praying for you.
Thanks, on all counts!
My suggestion: Prayer, prayer, and more prayer.
You may object that this hardly seems helpful, or that it doesn’t really solve your specific problems. Well, you have your plans, your ends of the Gordian knot. Now pray, pray, and pray some more.
However useless it might seem, however frustrating that sounds…do it. And keep doing it. And thank God for the many good things in your life to boot.
This all makes it sound as if I’m doing so much better than you in the prayer, or appreciation for God, department. I’m not; I’m just telling you about a method I’ve heard to be reliable.
(Having read the earlier reports by Miss Delmater, I think my advice stands. Mostly because it’s good advice for everybody always. Healthy or unhealthy.)