I’ve been meaning for a long time now to write about love. What having it does to us, how losing it can feed depression and how we can move on . . . but in all honesty I’ve not done a very good job with any of it.

I’ve fallen in love so very deeply that I thought I could die then and there and my life would be complete. Instead the black dog raised its head and made sure that I remained mired in self doubt unable to make a decision or to act. My life would remain incomplete.

Given that Halloween is upon us, I thought I would take a break from the black dog and scare you with a little something besides depression in today’s post. It is true. Everything happened just as described . . . believe it or not.

The Pink House

The color is what I remember. It was pink. Not salmon, corral, dusty rose or mauve, just a faded pink house with a few dark runny splotches on it. Some kids from the neighborhood had shown their displeasure by cracking a few eggs against it. I really couldn’t blame them. I have yet to see a pink house that a couple of eggs wouldn’t improve. Apologies to John Cougar Mellancamp.

“I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.”

This was a note that was discovered in the apartment of a man in his early thirties after he jumped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1970s.

What a powerful story about the importance of such a simple act. A face may launch a thousand ships but a smile can change the world.

Last February was my 50th birthday. Woo-hoo . . . right? No, not really. The black dog had simply gotten too big for me to pretend anymore. Broken relationships with people I love, friends dying, parents with Alzheimer’s who didn’t know me anymore . . . I felt like a soldier on a battlefield; so much death and destruction everywhere I turned.

I was tired of putting on the outward appearance that “everything is fine”. To quote Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, “Naw man. I’m pretty fuckin’ far from okay.” That line pretty much summed up my life at that point. Instead of celebrating a milestone birthday I decided to ignore it. Not everyone understood but they accepted it and the day passed like any other.

Fall is here and the days are growing shorter. That means less sunlight so our circadian rhythm may get off kilter which can definitely interfere with a good night’s sleep which of course affects our mood. To combat this we need to get outside more or buy a light box.

Some things to remember about light (box) therapy:

1. Light isn’t just for SAD (seasonal affective disorder) it’s helpful for non-seasonal depression too.
2. The brightness of the lightbox and the length of exposure (the time you sit in front of it each day) is your key to successful light therapy. 30 minutes per day, all at once for 5 days a week.

Charly was a movie based on the book Flowers for Algernon which was about a mentally retarded man who became involved in an experiment to increase his mental ability. The experiment works and Charly finds himself becoming a genius.

Algernon was the name of the rat who the scientist first performed the experiment on. As time goes by it becomes apparent that the results of the experiment are short lived and the rat reverts to its previous state. Charly’s awareness of his decline is very powerful and heart wrenching. I was just a kid when I saw this movie but Cliff Robertson’s portrayal of Charly and the horror of his self-awareness of going back to the way he was before has stayed with me for all these years.