Getting found, in my case, took many, many years. At the very beginning, it also took a single instant of waking to find myself having chosen not to kill myself. I said "No" to suicide and felt some very real regret. It took a long time before I came to understand that I wanted to speak the "Yes" to life, but it came. Most of the voices I have referred to in this writing came to me much later in my life. Even the deceptively simple phrase "How do you do a don't" had to come to me on my own before I heard them from another source. I suffered from the deadening "No" and I suffered from the inchoate "Yes." For longer than I care to count, I endlessly acted against my endless fears and sometimes sheer terror of life by acting as if I wanted to enter life. Struggle served as the constant companion and leitmotif to a life that continued but always felt out of tune. Still I acted. I did something active in the world. Before I met Frankl through his work, I chose what I would do and did it. Depression wove itself into the fabric of the everyday, and I fought and struggled with it as if it had a life of its own. As if it existed as its own entity rather than forming a part of my whole being.
At some point, I moved my actions toward caring for others. I could not find a way to care for myself outside of acting as if I cared about myself. But I could do more for others. I began to act toward others as I wished others had acted toward me and would do so in the present. I had not heard of "unconditional positive regard" as a phrase, but I could feel compassion. I couldn't feel it toward myself. My self-hatred continued, but I could act toward others in a caring way.[152] Oddly, in those acts of kindness toward others, I made my attitude toward myself more tenable, and I continued in what I see and feel now as a search. At the time, I saw it not as search but ineptitude, simple and stupid stumbling and stammering. As Eugene O'Neill wrote in Long Day's Journey Into Night, "Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people." As a fog person, who produced his own fog, I could not see that I engaged in a quest of aspiration and in my search for the becoming self.
This writing serves as a product of that quest and search. As time went on, and I found the helpful voices of many others to whom I have referred here and many who get no direct reference, and all that helped to clarify the process in which I engaged and helped in how I could deal with the inner tensions of my life. When I heard Frankl tell me I could choose my response, my attitude toward whatever happened to me, I realized that I didn't need to struggle with depression. I could quietly accept its presence and choose not to dance when depression called the tune. The endless struggle ended in this choice, brightening and lightening every day. Frankl also told me that meaning comes in every moment, and a greater sense of meaning comes in retrospect.
In retrospect, I see everything that I experienced as meaningful. All of that has brought me to now. I once wrote a very short poem:
Our entire life
Is a conspiracy
To bring us
Into this moment in time
In 2011, I wrote the following after a remarkable overnight experience and revelation.
In this moment of my assuming my 64th year, I find that another gift has come to me that I would scarce have credited a very short time before. In fact, I never did. As you know, I have long taught in a way that I hoped would offer people a chance to find the transformative within them. Once they could see that they unconsciously held some meaning perspective which restricted their vision of self and the world, they would find liberation and a new way of perceiving self and life. This new perception offers not so much change of self but an opening of choices to self in a way that renews life and the world. Sometime in February and into the eternal Now, I have gone through such a transformative moment. It came softly in the sleepless night and left me with a newness of self that allowed me to transcend something that had weighed me down for all of my remembered life. Without a more intimate detail of specifics, I found that I accepted some essential part of my being, my self, my essential nature, that I had always rejected and kept locked away: repressed, oppressed, dominated. This quality of self actually informed much if not all of the best of me, but I didn't allow it into consciousness out of some deep fear. Now that fear has gone. I am free, transcendent of the weight of that entombing meaning perspective and all the endless tension and suffering that came out of it. It's only been a month or so, but in that time, for the first time in my remembered life, I don't feel any depression inside me, not even the slightest tidal pull. I remember the feeling of its being there, the endless and tireless depression that so influenced every moment of my life, even after I learned how to keep it in balance most of the time. Now that it's gone, I feel wonderful and free. At the same time, I do not feel changed at all. I have simply become who I was all along. It has made my love for Silvia and Gavin sweeter, clearer, and more intense but with even less of a sense of possession. When I achieve a greater sense of being, I transform most of my need to possess anything or anyone into acceptance and a greater sense of the I/Thou of Martin Buber. It has intensified my love and care for all others from the closest friend to the newest student.
All this is the gift of life that life has brought me. And it only took sixty-four years to find it.
What a bargain.