Depression & The Art Of Living Life In 'Low Power' Mode
In 2021 I decided to hike the Camino Santiago because I was extremely burnt out.
It wasn’t a spiritual experience. It wasn’t meant to be. On a video call with my therapist near the end of the summer, I told him I needed a very long break. He asked, “Can you afford to take one?” I said, “I think I can’t afford not to.”
And so I flew to France thee next week and started my trek across Spain. Most days I walked with headphones in. I didn’t stop at churches or make lifelong friends. I didn’t take on the identity of ‘pilgrim’ or dream of how the experience would change me. Mostly I relished in the lack of daily choices. I would wake up each morning, put my hiking shoes on and go for a walk. When I was too tired to keep walking, I would find somewhere to sleep. I repeated this for weeks on end.
Around the fourth week of my trek, something frustrating happened: I had to do a task. The University I was registered to begin a Masters Degree at the following month was getting some administrative lines crossed around my registration. There were suddenly a whole bunch of people I had to call and things I would have to sort out.
The thought of making a mere phone call exhausted me. So I made a deal with myself: Every day, I would hike for 4 - 6 hours. During that time, I would turn my phone onto airplane mode and disconnect completely from the outside world.
At the end of the hiking day, I would do exactly one task. I would call one person or make one wire transfer. Then I would turn my phone back onto airplane mode, get something for dinner, and go to sleep.
I repeated this process for a week. And the administrative mess sorted itself out.
This was a surprising discovery to me: that life could be handled meticulously yet competently, one task at a time. My regular MO when depression hit was promising myself, day after useless day, that I would turn my entire life around tomorrow. Tomorrow I would get back to everyone I had been ghosting, catch up on months worth of work (and then some), clean up any administrative messes I had let slide through negligence and of course, get my health back in order.
Every day that this would not happen was another day added to the merry-go-round of disappointment. My expectations were like a an all-you-can-eat buffet for the ravenous beast of my depression: a sequence of impossible standards perpetually laid out to go unmet, strengthening my self-hatred by the hour.
I’d had no idea there was an ‘eject’ button.
Hiking for several hours a day and dealing with one task at a time didn’t make me happy, per se. But it made my life feel manageable. And manageable, it turned out, was a beautiful interim step out of depression.
I wish this was a story about how much better things got after the year 2021, but it isn’t.
2022 was a dumpster fire. 2023 was much better. 2024 was a year I started out thinking “I’m finally getting my life in order,” only to watch most of the things I cared deeply for slip through my fingers by the time autumn rolled around. Depression has visited me many times since the year 2021 but since then, I’ve had a new tool for dealing with it.
I like to think, these days, of depression as life on ‘Low Power’ mode.
My love of hiking predisposes me to getting nerdy about which watches are best for fitness tracking and the answer is indisputably Garmin. (This is not an ad for Garmin, though if they would like to sponsor me I’m all ears). My Garmin watch lasts for approximately 9 days without charging and around the 8th day, it always asks me the same question: ‘Battery is running low. Would you like to put watch on Low Power mode?’
I wish depression were exactly like a Garmin watch. I wish that during the seasons of things falling apart, I could plug my spirit into an electrical socket, get a hefty 8 hour sleep and wake up with a freshly-charged outlook. But it doesn’t work like that. Life tends to offer us, at best, the option to switch to ‘low power’ mode. And this is sometimes the best available route forward.
On low power mode, I adjust the expectations of my life to meet the level of my capabilities, instead of the other way around. One thing must get done each day, and one thing only. This can be an important email I have to send, an administrative task I need to complete or a workout that will help me sleep at night. Once the one thing is done, I am off the hook for the rest of the day. I can turn my phone onto airplane mode and walk circles around my city if I’d like to. I can buy a fiction book and read it in the bathtub until my toes prune. I can lie in bed staring at the ceiling for twenty-three hours (or sixteen, if the one thing I had to do that day was go to work).
The ‘one thing a day’ principle is ridiculously simple advice and yet it’s the best thing I’ve found to date for crawling out of periods of depression. When I take the seemingly never-ending list of things I absolutely must do to get back on track and refuse to pretend that I will have the energy to get them all done at once, it gives me the chance to catch my breath again. When my breath is caught, I can hear the quiet whispers of my wisdom. And in the depths of depression, they usually have the most salient things to let me know.
This season, I am living life on low power mode.
Today I handed in a workshop proposal two weeks late. Yesterday I took a new headshot. Tomorrow I will probably film a Youtube video and another day soon I will edit it.
I am of course in a unique situation in that I do not have a 9 - 5 job, or children to keep alive. In a literal sense I can boil my life down to one task a day and have it mostly work out, with only minimal panic accumulating. (On the other hand, the lack of hard external commitments can be fuel for depression in and of itself. So it’s all relative.)
But this piece of writing is the consequence of only one thing getting done today. Finishing the one task on my plate by 2pm gave me time to stare out my window for the afternoon. Staring out my window for the afternoon led me to a state of deep silence within myself. From the silence, writing wanted to emerge. And so here we are.
This is the magical wisdom of depression, which I only find when I make space for it. There is always some sort of medicine, whether it is movement or connection or a tentative creative experiment, that emerges when I at last carve out the space for intentional nothingness. In this way, life on low power mode can become beautiful.
The very little charge we have left stops devoting itself to emails and phone calls and alerts. A stoic part of us knows this is not that important, that it’s never been.
In the silence, we start to hear the subtle tick-tock of our lives passing us by in the background. We keep the time. And eventually, cautiously, we learn the steps to whichever dance comes next.