My Pet Demon, Part Two
Taming a demon is hard work. My personal demon was a depression that had begun scratching at the door of my consciousness when I was a teenager. The demon found opportunities in stressful and frightening situations, especially when they came in multiples. For instance, the anxiety of living in a big city (Dallas) for the first time, added to the uncertainty of pursuing a new career (ministry) after just one year in a first career (music education) I had spent half a decade studying for, was compounded by the self-doubt of never having had a romantic partner at the advanced age of 23. Put together, these stimuli plunged me into my first experience of what I almost immediately began calling my demon. It would be at least six years before I accepted that it was, in fact, the mental illness called depression. Long before my first formal therapy session--sometime in the fall of 1985--I knew that my own process for dealing with these bouts of sadness would involve meditation, ex...