Sometimes I have to tell a story to get to the story I want to tell. So the first part of today’s blog isn’t the main story, it is just one of the paths to get to the story. There are certain things in life that I have long known that I shouldn’t do, but once I have done them, I’m pretty sure I won’t do them again. Take, for example, starting a brush pile with white gas. Take my word for it. It isn’t a good idea. I’m quite certain I’ll never do that again. Putting a 2-gallon jug of waste oil in the pickup without securing it is another of those bad ideas. I know better. But I did it yesterday. I was just going to a place to have the oil recycled and it was a short drive on a paved road and the container was heavy, but it is something you should never do. Two gallons of old oil is a lot in the back of a pickup. Clean up is a multi-step process. First the kitty litter and the dry clean up. Then sweep up all the kitty litter. Then power wash everything. Then scrub out with a brush and dish soap. Then power wash again. Oh, and since my pickup has a removable bed mat, you have to do all of the steps on both sides of the bed mat and on the pickup box. And I had to remove the toolbox in order to take out the bed mat. And the toolbox was to heavy for me to lift with two sets of tire chains in it, so I had to put those away. You get the picture.

I don’t even produce two gallons of waste oil in a year. I don’t change the oil in the cars or the pickup – only do the job on the lawn mower and snow blower. It takes me a couple of years to get a gallon. I had two gallons of waste oil because our next-door neighbor had to be out of his house by the last day of March. Which means he was moving during holy week and I didn’t have much time to help him. And he needed help. And he was my neighbor, so I said I’d get rid of all of the stuff he no longer needed. That turned out to be a lot. I’ve made two trips to the dump, one to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, one to Cornerstone thrift store, and one to the cardboard recycling drop off. And I still have a small amount of things that need to be recycled. So I was taking his waste oil to be recycled.

He moved because his home was repossessed. It is a long story. He and his wife went through a divorce. Then he got laid off from work. Then he got depressed. For a couple of months we never saw him outside at all. We would go and knock on the door and he wouldn’t answer. When he finally emerged from the depths of depression it was too late. He had to get moved and get out of the house in order to salvage what little bit of financial resources he had left. He is starting over from scratch at 58 years of age.

He has been on my mind since the move because I haven’t heard from him and I worry about him. I was thinking about him a few days ago because we were asking about a colleague at a meeting earlier this week. The colleague suddenly had to resign his job, take disability, and is facing an early retirement. It is because of depression. I noticed that there was an unwillingness to talk about his illness very much. It isn’t because my colleagues are unaware that depression is an illness. It isn’t because they don’t know the stresses involved in serving as a local church pastor. But there is some kind of a message in the back of our minds when a colleague suffers from a mental illness. We always wonder if the person was attentive enough to self-care. It is as if we think they might have somehow participated in the process that led up to the illness. We wouldn’t think that way if a colleague were disabled by cancer or arthritis or heart disease. But there is some old and inaccurate conditioning in our brains about mental illness. We can’t help but seeing mental illness as somehow a kind of weakness. Or worse, sometimes people think of it as a moral failure.

It is simply an illness. It is a disabling illness. It can be a fatal illness. It is a tricky illness to treat. And we pay the premiums of our disability insurance precisely because disability could happen to any one of us at any time.

My neighbor’s depression is not the cause of poor judgment on my part. I’m the one who put that jug of oil in the back of the pickup without tying it down. My colleague’s depression isn’t the cause of inappropriate attitudes about mental illness in our culture. But both left me feeling a little upset this week, for entirely different reasons. I got a little mad at our culture for its judgmental attitude. I got a little made at myself for a poor decision that left a mess to be cleaned up. There’s nothing wrong with a little anger if it is invested in working for justice or making changes. There are a lot worse things than getting a little upset. Maybe getting upset is a tiny window on a big problem. Like a small pain gives some insight into a much bigger pain. Sometimes the joints in my hands hurt after a day’s work. It is nothing, but it can help me be more sympathetic towards someone who lives with chronic pain. Maybe getting a little upset gives me an opportunity to draw closer to a friend or neighbor or family member or colleague who is suffering from a mental illness. I can’t know how that person feels, but I can show a bit of compassion.

And spending time cleaning up a mess that I made myself is a good teacher. I’ll add that one to the list of things I’m unlikely to do again. I hope that it is a similarly good teacher for the companies that spill larger amounts of oil.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.