Healing Myself
With the Power of Work
I used to have my own law practice.
Now I deliver newspapers. The truth is, this job is
saving my life.
By Michael Norlen
Newsweek, October
25, 1999
The paper guy's here!" Every
Monday morning a cashier at Eckerd's drugstore greets me
with these words. A manager gives her a key and she
fishes $3 and change from the cash drawer and pays me
for the copies of The Kansas City Star sold the previous
week. I pick up the 10 or 12 unsold papers and throw
them in my car, next to the returns from the
supermarket, the doughnut shop and the Texaco station.
Quite a difference from a year ago.
Then, I would announce myself in response to a judge's
perfunctory order: "Counsel, state your
appearance." Instead of delivering papers from 1:30
a.m. to 6 a.m, I spent my nights sleeping and my days in
an office, a courtroom or a library.
It all changed 12 months ago. For the
second time in six years, I abandoned my solo law
practice. I stopped returning phone calls, forgot to pay
bills and ignored court dates. I began to sleep 16 hours
a day. By July of last year I stopped coming into the
office, leaving it to fill up with unopened mail and
indignant phone messages. By August I was behind on my
office rent, and by October my landlord asked me to
leave. I ate, but nothing tasted good. I slept, but woke
up tired. I felt like a stranger around my wife and two
daughters. Thoughts of suicide shadowed me. And in the
midst of all this, I knew. IT had returned.
Tracy Thompson, the journalist, calls
IT "The Beast." To Winston Churchill, IT was
his "Black Dog." To me, it is both of these; a
nameless, faceless thing that infects me with a
despondency so bleak I fear that I will never feel joy
again. IT is depression. Twice now IT has laid me low.
Trying to throw me a lifeline, a
friend offered me a job delivering newspapers. To my
great surprise, I found myself almost enjoying the job.
Contrasted to the stresses of maintaining a law
practice, this mindless work of assembling and bundling
papers in a dimly lit warehouse was a welcome
distraction. When I left the warehouse to deliver the
papers, to vending machines, gas stations and
supermarkets, I began to catch glimpses of small joys.
After months of hiding from people and
avoiding conversation, little by little I got to know
some of the night-dwellers. The clerk at the Phillip's
station who plays country music and seems to have an
obsession with Patsy Cline. The jogger I always pass at
4 a.m. With friendly greetings and idle conversation,
these people, whose names I still don't know, began to
draw me out of my darkness.
At the end of each night I look down
at my hands, stained with ink from handling 450
newspapers. I stretch and feel a tightness in my
shoulders from lifting the 40- or 50-pound bundles into
and out of my car. The grime and the pain serve as
wake-up calls for my tired body and mind. And every
Sunday morning, when my friend hands me a modest check,
I begin to feel just a bit more confident.
Depression is an insidious disease. On
one level it is about neurons and synapses, seratonin
levels and dopamine readings. On another level it is
memories of trauma stashed in dusty corners of the mind
that manifest years later in fear and anxiety. And on
yet another level it is a crippling, dispiriting
mind-set that convinces me I am worthless and helpless.
For almost five years I have been on a
steady regimen of antidepressants, from Prozac to
Serzone. When I build up a tolerance to one drug, my
doctor simply switches me to another. Except for some
inconvenient side effects, they have been my safety net,
stopping my free fall into madness.
For most of the same period I have
been in individual or group therapy. I've learned how
some of the difficult periods of my life have shaped me
and contributed to my depression. The memories of my
drunken mother and the Jim Beam and Coors bottles strewn
around our rented houses help me understand why I'm so
fearful of failure, so introverted and so reluctant to
trust others.
For all the insight and help I've
received from drug therapy and psychotherapy, I still
have feelings of worthlessness. Every bout of depression
eats away at my self-esteem, and no amount of drugs or
talking can restore it. That restoration has to come
through a different vehicle. For me, that vehicle is
physical work. Every time I look at the calluses on my
hands, I realize that this job provides me with a reason
to get out of bed.
One day soon I'll be ready to leave
this job behind, but I'll never again view work as just
a paycheck or a daily obligation. It will always be a
part of my therapy, my healing. I don't know where my
next job will be; in the courtroom, the classroom or the
office. But wherever it is, my work will be a weapon in
my arsenal against the attacks I know will come again
and again, because the Beast will not be satiated, and
the Dog will never be securely leashed.
Norlen lives in Olathe, Kans.
Newsweek, October 25, 1999
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