Dear David -

I'm sorry to hear of your depression, it must be terribly painful. . But in acknowledging your depression, you've also addressed one of the most significant problems people with RSD face is that they can no longer do those things they most enjoyed and/defined themselves by. Specifically, you mention the pain in not being able to pursue hunting and golf as you once did. Andy our reference to golf triggered something I'll get to in a moment . . .

For me, at the time I developed RSD, I had spent the previous 20 years defining myself as a business bankruptcy attorney, something that started out with a clerkship to a judge when I was just out of law school, and was reinforced day-in-day-out over the years, not only through work, but particularly to national conferences I made every effort to attend twice a year, flying around the country, hanging out with the same professional friends, getting into arcane debate in seminars during the day and partying at night. Then the RSD hit and while I continued to practice as best I could for just over a year and a half, I was lucky if I could bill 3 of the 8 - 9 hours a day I spent in the office, as a result of which, I only made enough to cover my overhead, taking home under $500 a month and sometimes nothing at all.

A friend in my office kept asking me why I was doing this if I could no longer earn a living, where my tortured cries could occasionally be heard through the walls, and I didn't have an answer: I just needed to do it. I still remember where I was sitting one February morning when it hit me: I was clinging to being a bankruptcy attorney not only because it was something I had taken pride in and in which I had long striven to improve myself, but which I had chosen to use TO DEFINE MY OWN IDENTITY. And the truth was, I was holding onto this "sense of self" as I might a love letter from someone very special who had nevertheless dumped me along the way. And in that precise moment, I stopped my struggle and could feel great weight lifting from me, then and there.

So where does golf fit into this? In a nice vignette told by Jack Kornfield in "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry," Bantum Books (2000) at pp. 184-85, he tells the story of a public talk given by a gentlemen, crippled by a stroke and forever confined to a wheelchair, requiring assistance in completing even the most basic functions of life:

In May of 1998, at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, we hosted a large benefit for the medical care of Ram Das [fka Richard Alpert, PhD], who had suffered a major stroke the year before. After almost a year of rehabilitation Ram Das was able to talk, although haltingly, and he still groped for words. At the end of the day his wheelchair was placed on the stage so he could speak. Noting to much laughter that he had been warned it was tacky to come to one's own benefit - and that's why he came - Ram Das addressed his predicament and the question of identity:

For years I practiced as a karma yogi, the path of service. I wrote books about learning to serve, about how to help others. Now it is reversed. I need people to help me get up and wash my bottom. And I can tell you it's harder to be the one who is helped than the helper!

But this is just another stage. It feels like I have died and been reborn over and over. In the sixties I was a professor at Harvard and when that ended I went out with Tim Leary spreading psychdelics. Then in the seventies I died from that and returned from India as Baba Ram Das, the guru. Then in the eighties my life was all about service - cofounding the Seva Foundation, building hospitals, and working with refugees and prisoners. Over all these years I played cello, golf, drove my MG. Since this stroke the car is in the driveway, the cello and golf clubs in the closet. Now if I think I'm the guy who can't play cello or drive or work in India, I would feel terribly sorry for myself. But I'm not him. During the stroke I died again, and now I have a new life in a disabled body. This is where I am. You've got to be here now. You've got to take the curriculum.

(And speaking of past lives, Richard Alpert had grown up as the son of the president of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad!)

I know this sounds hard, but it really isn't. We fight only to do our best as we can with what we've got. And if there was something we used to do that's really no longer in the cards. We move on. And in so "taking the curriculum" develop maturity we never had before. And it works, so long as we are willing to finally let go of those objects of desire, however central to our lives they once were: and here I'm admitting of really "big stuff," going well beyond golf or the practice of law. But the truth is, we can only play the hand we're dealt, and if there's a new one every day, so be it.

Hope this helps. In any event, I've been working with this for a while, and it's the best I can come up with.

Mike