Dark Clay

This is a story I’ve told before. I’ve told this story hundreds of times, in fact. I used to tell it every time I got on stage, because I needed to tell it. But I don’t think I’ve told it since I stopped playing music, and I need to tell it again, for reasons which will become apparent.

In 2014, I was living in an RV with my wife and two kids. I had finally taken the dive and brought my family on the road with me. It was the hardest and best experience; one of the (many) things we didn’t really think about ahead of time was that we would need to find ways to enrich / entertain kids who were, at the time, four years and nine months old. It was for this reason that we found ourselves at a Natural Science museum in Alabama. And it was at that museum that I finally made sense of my depression and my fight against it.

I had been diagnosed a year or two before. I would go through long stretches where I couldn’t get off the couch. I would stare at the ceiling or (fitfully) sleep, but the thought of getting up, even to eat, seemed too large to wrap my body around. I couldn’t feel any emotion but anger. I would watch my child play and feel nothing. I would get texts or messages from friends, and I couldn’t respond. How do you say “I’m disappearing and I can’t stop”? I didn’t want to weigh them down with a problem they couldn’t solve.

With only one emotion at my disposal, it’s easy to guess how I responded when the diagnosis came in: I was angry, with a side serving of shame. I was supposed to be stronger than this. I was supposed to be the salt of the earth, a city on a hill, this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.

For awhile, the anger was enough. Instead of an infinitely vast Nothing with no end and no definition, I had an enemy to fight, and my enemy had a name: Depression. When I couldn’t get off the couch, it wasn’t an undefined (and maybe limitless?) weight, it was my old nemesis. Where I hadn’t been able to motivate myself to eat, I now had just enough spite left to eat because I knew that’s just what Depression would hate.

It worked for awhile.

Until it didn’t.

It came and went, with no real rhyme or reason. I would be fine for months and then Bam! I would disappear into the Nothing again, spite-surviving, but still not returning messages or smiling or feeling happiness. Then—just as soon as it had arrived—it would silently slip out the back door, leaving me to slowly realize that I felt okay again, save for the dread of knowing it could (and would) return.

So here we were, in this Science Museum in Alabama, looking at a display about Black Holes. They’re fascinating and terrifying.

Humans (and most animals) have a superpower that we take for granted: Sight.

Sight is a miracle. Light screams into our world from the sun and bounces off of everything in every direction, to varying levels (which account for color). Some of that light bounces into our eyes, which translate that light into brain waves, and our brain goes “oh, I’ve seen that set of code before; that’s a flower” or “that’s food” or “I’m not sure what that is, but I can make a decent guess”. It’s amazing.

I started to cry as I read about how black holes work. They’re hard to analyze, because their gravitational pull is so strong that it sucks in all the light and doesn’t let any bounce out. With no light coming back, our eyes (or telescopes) don’t have anything to work with. Black Holes could look like rainbows or stars or Will Ferrell’s face, for all I know. They don’t reflect light, so we can’t see them. We see what looks like their absence.

“That’s me,” I thought. 

The next night as I stood on stage, I told the audience about black holes and how I was battling depression. I didn’t do it as a confession, nor as a problem that I was asking the audience to solve.

I did it because the act of saying it out loud was be my reflection of light: as long as there was information coming out, that meant the light was still stronger than the darkness trying to swallow it.

The next night, I told a different audience the same story. And again the night after that. For the rest of my music career, every show I ever played included a story about black holes and depression and sight and how in this moment, I was just asking them to see, because if they could see, that meant this little light of mine was still strong enough to beat the darkness.

And then I sang this song:

I’m not trying to revive my music career by sharing this. I’m sharing it because I need to share it again; the Nothing is back, and it has spent the last month trying to disappear me again.

I’m not telling you to burden you with a problem you can’t solve. I’m not asking for sympathy.

I just need the light to be stronger than the darkness today.