Depression Hates a Moving Target. Nita Sweeney
with it. Once in high school. Once in college. Once during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and for a few short weeks in 2008. In high school, I ran to lose weight. None of my high school pictures show me even slightly overweight, but I thought of myself as enormous. I pounded down the road thinking, This sucks. Band practice and daydreaming about boys were more important.
In college, I ran with my friend Priscilla up and down the brick streets of Athens, Ohio. The Appalachian hills were daunting. I gasped for air and didn’t love it. I hated my body for not being able to travel along the ground swiftly. When a bout of suffocating depression struck, I abandoned everything not related to academics. I graduated and went on to law school, but stopped running.
In the late 1980s, while practicing law for a small firm, I sat at a desk all day, feeling fat and disillusioned. I decided to run up the hill near my house. I made it halfway before I needed to walk, but when I reached the top, I ran again. This time, I felt the joy and kept running for a few years. I ran on the track at the health club and, with our two dogs, through our suburban neighborhood, dodging neighbors’ golden retrievers and small children.
When Ed and I got together, we moved closer to my office, and I ran around a nearby park. I lost weight and felt fit. I also lifted weights and, for a time, thought of myself as healthy. But some internal switch flipped. I was not yet diagnosed as bipolar but was likely hypomanic. When I grew dangerously thin, a therapist suggested treatment for eating disorders. I continued running, but with no joy, and I dieted compulsively. Running swung from something I enjoyed to a dangerous obsession. Eventually, the flat, numb, hollowed-out emptiness of depression took over. I had never expected to run again, and I doubt Ed thought I would either.
I turned to face him. His bright blue eyes were soft and hopeful. Too hopeful.
“Not far and not fast!” I added.
I told him about Kim and Fiona, then explained the kitchen timer and how the dog and I alternated jogging and walking.
He set down his fork and clasped a handful of his more-salt-than-pepper hair the way he does when he’s thinking. This tilted his head and made his jaw look even more square.
“Do you have a goal?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It just feels good to be moving.”
He released the handful of hair, picked up his fork, and continued eating.
“Don’t be a runner,” he said between bites. “Be an interval trainer.”
Ed’s humor tends to be dry, so I waited to make sure he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t. He’d recently read several articles about the effectiveness of interval training and the importance of starting slowly.
I smiled and nodded. He hadn’t said I was too old or fat or that running would ruin my knees. In the past, when asked why I quit running, I’d say “I blew out my knees.” In truth, I gave up from exhaustion. What I was doing now—easing into it, using intervals, running slower than I thought a human being could—bore little resemblance to my running days of the past. Ed sensed that.
He’d seen me try so many diet and exercise regimens that he probably had to guard against hoping that jogging might help my weight and depression. He may have thought it was another phase, like that of the mini-trampoline gathering dust in the basement. My mother had given it to us after it had become a clothes rack at her house. I’d bounced on it religiously for six weeks before the activity grew so boring, I gave up.
I took his lack of questions not as a failure of interest, but a silence caused by his reserved nature. No comment was akin to approval. Plus, he knows how even praise can spin my mind, morphing it into pressure. His stoic encouragement gave me the propulsion to continue.
But the morning I was to attempt week three, I woke thinking, “I can’t.” In this third week, the training plan doubled the time I jogged. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep.
My first few seconds of actual consciousness had been fraught with terrifying projections: me in a black dress at Ed’s funeral or a veterinarian plunging the fatal needle into Morgan’s forepaw. Next came a litany of unpleasant memories: my niece struggling with crutches after her leg was amputated, my mother begging for water before her final surgery, the grip of my father’s hand as a nurse installed a catheter.
In my half-conscious state, I barely noticed Ed opening the bedroom door and leaning down to kiss me goodbye before he left for work. I only half felt Morgan jump onto the bed and curl behind my knees. I snuggled around him, careful not to move too much so he wouldn’t jump down.
Five years before, when Mom met Morgan, she’d said, “You’d pay a hairdresser good money for those highlights,” referring to the beige and rust “angel wings” pattern on his back. Animal Control had found the one-year-old yellow Lab near a freeway interchange. His good looks, combined with kennel cough and excellent behavior, kept him out of the pound and possibly saved his life. They sent him to a veterinarian who fostered dogs. Enough time had passed since our golden retriever, Bodhi, had died that Ed and I were ready for another canine family member. Ed contacted the vet, who brought Morgan to our house for a test visit. While I feared someone was ugly-crying about losing him, after watching the handsome young dog chase a tennis ball in our fenced backyard for half an hour, Ed called the veterinarian and told her not to bother coming back. Mom believed Morgan had escaped when his owners were traveling. She might have been right. Unlike our previous dogs, Morgan whined and cried in the car. In every other respect, he was the consummate gentleman, even so young. He was housebroken, knew all his commands, only destroyed the occasional sofa pillow, and wove himself seamlessly into our lives and hearts.
The warmth and pressure of Morgan’s body pushed away the unpleasant images that had haunted me when I’d first awakened. I peeked out from under the covers at the 1950s mirrored closet doors to see his brown eyes staring back. He stretched out to his full length and thwacked his tail against me, reminding me that some of us are still alive. I am loved and cared for by a good dog, a great man, loving family members, and friends. I rolled over and lifted the covers from my head.
***
I headed to the bathroom. As I sat on the toilet, Mr. Dawg brushed his whiskers against my face. Some people insist that dogs smell your breath from times when wolf mothers returned to the den to throw up a bellyful of food for the puppies to eat. Not my Morgan. He put his snout just close enough to my mouth that I could feel his whiskers graze my lips in the softest gesture. No sloppy kisses or wet jowls from him. His touch was like being tickled for an instant. He may or may not have sniffed, but I doubt he expected me to vomit.
With the snuffling complete, he rubbed against my knees then wiggled beneath my legs against the toilet. Once wedged there, he waited for me to scratch him. He preferred that I scratch between his shoulder blades, as if the identification microchip was working its way out. I worried about these things. My job was to scratch up and down his back with both hands, fingernails digging into his flat, stiff fur. When satisfied, he walked away and curled into a donut shape on the bathroom rug. That was my signal to get off the toilet. Since he had become my trainer and cheerleader, I needed to keep him happy, so I obeyed.
Our “dog therapy” complete, I was ready to face week three. I dressed, picked up the timer, leashed the dog, and went outside.
His comforting presence gave me enough courage to start on our street. I hit the timer. When it was time for double the amount of jogging (three full minutes!), I bent my knees, began slowly, and paced myself. After what I was sure was three minutes, winded, but not exhausted, I checked the timer. Two minutes and thirty seconds. I could do thirty more seconds.
The intervals passed quickly. During the walking periods, I wished I were jogging. During the jogging, I wondered when it would be time to walk again. When we finished, I was sweatier and more tired than the week before. I needed a nap.
We repeated this combination two more times to complete week three.
Each day I grew stronger. I’d needed a nap after day one, but after day two, I thought about a nap, but didn’t take one. By day three, napping didn’t come to mind. The haranguing