It was 2000, Advent, my favorite time of year, and I was in London, one of my favorite places. The streets were hung with fragrant evergreen swags, the tall red bus crowded with holiday shoppers. And in a seat on the bus\u2019s upper deck, I was struggling not to cry.<\/p>\n
It was a familiar pattern, this sudden plunge for no reason into a bottomless sadness. What\u2019s the matter with you? <\/em>I scolded myself. Neurotic\u2026ungrateful. <\/em>I was calling myself all the old names when the bus passed Westminster Abbey.<\/p>\n A posted schedule announced that the Rev. Robert Wright would be speaking on sin that Sunday. The subject suited my bleak mood exactly.<\/p>\n I\u2019d had such attacks as long as I could remember, and they were always as unaccountable as this one. I can still hear my father\u2019s cry of bafflement the one and only time I tried to tell him how I was feeling.<\/p>\n Not happy? With a loving family, good health, material comfort beyond anything he had dreamed of in his own childhood! He told me that as a boy he was sent each Saturday to the store, clutching the dime that was to buy Sunday\u2019s meat for the family of nine.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t forget to ask the butcher,\u201d his mother would remind him, \u201cto throw in the liver for the cat.\u201d<\/p>\n They didn\u2019t have a cat.<\/p>\n How could a child who had been as fortunate as I fail to be happy? How could I, years later as a young wife and mother, be anything but content? When in 1953 I was diagnosed with clinical depression, my father was dumbfounded.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have no right to be sad! You have a husband who loves you, two beautiful kids, a nice home. And you can have a steak anytime you want one!\u201d<\/p>\n It was all true. That\u2019s the terror of depression, the dark mystery that distinguishes it from sorrow. Depression can throw its gray pall over us when the sun is brightest.<\/p>\n You can have a steak anytime you want one. <\/em>The words have become shorthand for my husband, John, and me for all the things that ought to make a difference and don\u2019t.<\/p>\n Doctors\u2013and I\u2019ve gone to many\u2013say the roots of depression are complex: a mix of chemical imbalance, accumulated stress and early experience. The specifics are different for each individual, but one ingredient is almost always present. Self-rejection.<\/p>\n It usually starts in childhood, this sense of somehow not measuring up. Though many of us react by becoming high achievers, the belittling voice inside continues its destructive work. For me, it had become immobilizing by 1955.<\/p>\n I was in my mid-twenties, with all the good things my father had listed, my writing beginning to sell, and a much-wanted third child on the way. Still, a paralyzing sense of failure drove me to a tiny room in the partly finished attic of our home in Mount Kisco, New York.<\/p>\n And there I lay, curled on a cot, the door locked on the world, while a succession of babysitters covered the hours that John was at work.<\/p>\n And it was at this lowest point, when my own thoughts were only of suicide, that I began to discover a world waiting to offer not blame, but help.<\/p>\n It was John who at first had to drive me to the sessions with a psychiatrist. Dr. Avraam Kazan gave a name to the shapeless sadness I\u2019d carried from infancy. He called it grieving. And that was what it felt like\u2013some ancient, inconsolable bereavement. But no one close to me had died.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one had died,\u201d he agreed. \u201cBut as an infant, you didn\u2019t know that.\u201d The event we were discussing I knew about only from casual references by my parents to a European trip when I was a baby.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My father\u2019s work as a private detective sometimes took him overseas. The case he was working on in January 1929 meant a lengthy stay in Paris, a long-awaited chance to take Mother with him. Her parents agreed to come north from Florida to care for me\u2013an ideal arrangement for all concerned.<\/p>\n \u201cExcept,\u201d Dr. Kazan pointed out, \u201cfor the ten-month-old that was you.\u201d<\/p>\n My parents simply disappeared one day and never, as far as I knew, were coming back. \u201cFour months later, when they returned, they would have been strangers. Emotionally, you lost your parents as surely as if they had died in a car crash.\u201d Worse, for me, he believed, since the \u201closs\u201d went unrecognized.<\/p>\n Would this small episode really be enough, I wondered, to account for lifelong feelings of insufficiency?<\/p>\n I think of people I know who suffered actual trauma early in life\u2013whose parents really did die, or who were abused, neglected, abandoned\u2013yet emerged as self-confident adults fully in charge of their lives. Could parents\u2019 absence for a few months really cast such a long shadow?<\/p>\n Dr. Kazan, at any rate, believed it could. \u201cBabies are self-centered little creatures. To a baby, if the mother goes away, it\u2019s his fault. The message to the psyche is, \u2018I\u2019m no good.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m no good. <\/em>How many of us\u2013for reasons as apparently slight as mine\u2013tell ourselves this lie in childhood! And having told it, we latch on to every negative that comes along as proof.<\/p>\n In Paris, my mother had become pregnant again. Desperately seasick all the return trip, she could barely stand by the time the ship docked in New York.<\/p>\n Her parents had brought me to the pier to meet the ship. While she was gone I\u2019d not only started to walk, but as Mother recalled, was running up and down the dock, grandparents in pursuit.<\/p>\n \u201cI looked over the railing and saw you,\u201d she told me years later, \u201cand I just groaned at the idea of running after you.\u201d I understood that groan; at the time of this conversation I was chasing my own toddler. And I understood a little more about the melancholy that envelops some of us in childhood.<\/p>\n We\u2019re the ones who are quick to interpret every parental groan, with its cause in an adult world we know nothing about, as dissatisfaction with us. My brother, for instance, was born in November 1929, the month right after the stock market crashed.<\/p>\n To my not-yet-two-year-old mind, my parents\u2019 distress\u2013actually over financial hardship\u2013was my fault, the new baby a better replacement.<\/p>\n Children handle a low self-image in different ways. Mine was to withdraw behind an imaginary door, retreating into books and solitude. Later, my choice of writing as a profession enabled me at least part of the day to close a literal door on the world.<\/p>\n Our various coping mechanisms keep us going, often for many years, till too many ingredients of depression\u2013chemistry, personal history, outside pressures\u2013occur together. For me the crisis in 1955 was part hormonal, part grief over my father\u2019s recent death, part old feelings of worthlessness.<\/p>\n And a crisis, when it shows us our need for help, can be good news.<\/p>\n It had sent me to Dr. Kazan. By the time my daughter was born, in February 1956, he had found medication that allowed me to venture beyond the house. It was a shaky equilibrium at first, and the place of greatest threat was the supermarket. Simply stepping inside, I\u2019d feel the panic rise.<\/p>\n So many choices! In the indecision which marks depression, I would pause and consider, walk on and return, grab something, put it back, select something else.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When the pounding of my heart grew too strong I would lift the baby from the shopping cart, seize the two-year-old by the hand and flee to the closed-in safety of the car. Beside me on the seat, my little boy would regard me solemnly. \u201cWe forgot the food again, Mommy.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Kazan made a common-sense suggestion that at least kept us from starving: \u201cFind a small grocery store.\u201d I developed a repertoire of such strategies to get me through routine tasks.<\/p>\n Unable to confront the blank page on the first draft of a new story, I took to writing between the typed lines of previous work. I ran errands when the fewest people were about. I was functioning again, but it was hardly living.<\/p>\n Psychiatry had explained some of the why of my depression\u2013removed some of the frightening mystery\u2013but further help was obviously needed.<\/p>\n Others, I knew, found strength in God. Religion had played no role at all in my childhood home; now for the first time in my life I began to read the Bible. A new world opened before me! A loving God, visions of strength and joy beyond my wildest hopes.<\/p>\n And then I discovered the part in this new world that would be required of me.<\/p>\n This is my commandment, <\/em>read the words printed in red ink, that you love one another.<\/em><\/p>\n For some people such a command poses no problem. I\u2019m married to one of them. I\u2019ll leave our table at a restaurant in some town where we\u2019ve never been, be gone five minutes, and come back to find another chair pulled up, John and a \u201creally interesting guy\u201d in rapt conversation.<\/p>\n But what if, like me, your instinct is not to pull up a chair, but to close a door?<\/p>\n It was to a spiritual helper named Joe Bishop that I turned this time. To Joe I confessed my lifelong pattern of pulling away from people.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I take a break from writing,\u201d I told him, \u201cI\u2019ll head off on my own. Drive to a bird sanctuary. Go to a museum. Don\u2019t ask anyone else along, just do my own selfish thing.\u201d<\/p>\n What puzzled me, I went on, was that I had friends I enjoyed doing things with. Why did I need to be by myself when I could have a good time with others and give them pleasure too? \u201cI\u2019ve tried to change, but I can\u2019t seem to.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd why,\u201d asked Joe, \u201cdo you want to change? Do you think when God created you, he meant to make someone else?\u201d<\/p>\n I had been the editor on Joe\u2019s writing projects for years, he reminded me. \u201cI saw long ago that solitude is as necessary for you as food and drink. Why not thank God for feeding you in this way?\u201d<\/p>\n Then, the closed door that I\u2019d struggled against all my life was\u2013acceptable?<\/p>\n Not only acceptable, Joe went on, but God-given. \u201cPerhaps God made you someone who enjoys being alone because he wanted you to be a writer.\u201d My impulse to hide\u2013\u201cit\u2019s led you to help other people tell their stories.\u201d I was, Joe insisted, a profound lover of people, \u201cin your way, not John\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n Me? Whose self-image was that of a distant, standoffish person\u2013I cared deeply for others? It was one of those heaven-tinged moments when in the mirror of someone else\u2019s eyes we catch sight of a better self than we knew.<\/p>\n Joe\u2019s portrait of me, I suspect, was largely a projection of his own deeply caring nature. But perhaps that too was an insight into this God I was meeting in the Bible! Perhaps, like Joe, God saw us not in terms of our character, but his.<\/p>\n As I left Joe\u2019s study that day, I knew I was holding a key that would let me more and more often unlock that door. The key is acceptance of myself as I am, not as I wish I were. Not as I might someday become. Not in comparison to anyone else.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I can accept myself\u2013delight in myself\u2013because, the Bible tells me, God made me for himself, and can use all the particulars of my history for good. The very things I like least about myself, indeed, may be those he values most.<\/p>\n It was the beginning of true healing, not the completion. There\u2019s no quick fix, I\u2019ve discovered, for the disease of depression. Though the down cycles are less severe and come less often today, that self-destructive voice still whispers its accusations.<\/p>\n Like all of us who have struggled over the years with a poor self-image, I need to hear the message of self-acceptance again and again.<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t expecting to hear it that Sunday in London as I headed toward Westminster Abbey. I took a notebook along with me; during the sermon on sin I planned to make a list of the changes in myself I needed to make.<\/p>\n And this is what I heard: \u201cTo love myself just as I am,\u201d said Dr. Wright, \u201cis to accept God\u2019s evaluation instead of my own. I am right now as loved and worthy of esteem as I ever shall be, already infinitely loved and respected.\u201d<\/p>\n Sin the minister defined as \u201cthe condition of not knowing this.\u201d Repentance, he continued, comes when \u201cwe weep for the sin of ever having thought of ourselves as unloved, for not having loved ourselves as we are.\u201d<\/p>\n