It is important to be held by another, to be witnessed by another. We are social animals and need connection. Humans live longer, healthier, and happier lives when experiencing deep and reliable relationships. I have learned the most in relationships, including what I am stating here. But the lack of connection with oneself is at the core of human suffering.

I used to be plagued by a loneliness so caustic that I feared I might not survive it. At times, even while in a relationship. What changed? I learned how to meet my loneliness, and paradoxically, aloneness became necessary for the cultivation of self.

When I was 20, with a one-way ticket and $160 U.S. dollars in my pocket, I left Brazil headed to Switzerland on my first trip abroad. I come from a family of simple means, and this was the first of a few unlikely feats that I have accomplished throughout my life. The 97-day Inward Ride journey/road-trip/sabbatical was the latest.

After a couple of months working in the kitchen at a restaurant in a ski-resort town – still in the French-speaking region of Switzerland – I got a job as a kind of nurse-assistant in a place that was a blend of a hospice and a mental institution, where I ended up staying for nearly a year. There they provided all the training that I needed to perform such a job. “Residence Victoria,” as it was called, housed about thirty residents/patients with different stories and conditions, but they all shared the fact that their lives were probably going to end there. And for two of them they did, during my shifts, right before me.

Loneliness is a rich experience. There is the loneliness while in solitude, and the loneliness while in a relationship. The former I experience as the need to be in the presence of a loving and kind human, one among the closest people in my life whom I love and trust. Their presence is like a flame that warms my soul on a cold winter night. The latter – as I have noticed recently – is a movement of self-protection.

I got to the Airbnb-rented house half an hour before she did after a short ride from Twentynine Palms, the neighboring town where I had spent the previous night. I had stopped at the Joshua Tree health food market to grab groceries and flowers, but had found no flowers. And no eggs.

People at older stages in life usually confess to their concerns and resistance to entering into the “dating world”. But there is something very special about starting a relationship later in life, in one’s forties or fifties (which might get even better with time). Despite being more wounded and perhaps cynical after ended relationships, provided that both have done deep inner work, there is a joy of being authentic, vulnerable and bold that outweighs those concerns. That is what is happening to us.

Since I left in mid-August, many new friends have chosen to follow my narrative here, so I’ll explain this journey in a nutshell. With an over thirty-year-old history of depression, and of dedication to getting to the bottom of it, last March I had the most severe of breakdowns. I understood that there was nothing left in life as I had known it, in the way that I had lived it. I felt that I had been catering to an image of a man that had been culturally indoctrinated, but had nothing to do with who I really was. The rational construction of who I should be (a.k.a “the shell”) crumbled, and that man died in March.

BobbyJane Gregory walks into the saloon at Roughlock Resort in her pink robe, her short pink hair down, and backs into the antique space heater wedged into the stairs that lead to the “brothel” rooms on the second floor. “Urrr’, she grumbles, but her chills in this early Fall morning soon fade away in the comfortable temperature of the Line Camp Steakhouse Restaurant, the downstairs portion of the saloon.

No words, no picture, can hold a candle to this magnitude. Not the memory of it, either. The canyons of Utah can only be experienced first-hand, albeit with the humble understanding that the cup of my humanness can only hold a small portion of their magnitude. The landscape here takes me back in time, to a council of Gods who gathered in the region on days immemorial, and played a godly game trying to out-God one another while carving and molding the earth around them. We, humans, have built roads through this pantheon of rock formations, and as we cross them, in-between thoughts, in the gaps between our humanly concerns, we have a glimpse of true perspective. A very sophisticated animal I am; nonetheless, an animal with a perishable body that roams the vastness of what was created here as the canyon-lands of Utah. Creation that will outlive me by Millenia. 

I’ve been quiet lately, not because little has been happening, but quite the contrary. Time is moving very fast, and packing in more than I can quickly convey. As I think that I have a finished piece to publish here, new waves of events, of lessons and of new humans come into my life and topple the little square of certainty where I had been standing, sweeping the paragraphs that I had previously crafted. As I am not prone to fluff, I hold back from making tentative blog post…

Waking up to intense, bitter-tasting dreams, before, signaled an imminent bout of depression. Today, after the dream, I woke up and felt the emptiness of life, of my life. But hold, for a moment, from attributing any meaning to this statement… 

Often, at the heart of longing is a somewhat unconscious process with more or less obvious, or even apparently hidden, symptoms… In a recent conversation with a new good friend, I told him of my suspicion: that when we feel stuck for no clear reason, or can’t seem to be able to make a choice, there’s likely a secondary process taking place in our unconscious that is hijacking most of our energy.

Bouts of depression have varying degrees of self-aggression. In my twenties, prior to even knowing that I had depression–only diagnosed at 33–, there was a huge measure of insult to injury that took place. I could not recognize the suffering as suffering, and I treated it as personal failure. My response at the time was to attack and punish that perceived weakness. I scolded the suffering part of me, but there was no educational intent in that response; just the desire to exterminate the suffering.

I have written before about earthquakes… the ground shaking right now… But wait: there is a new element here. I see, with clarity, the heat-waves of conditioned response distorting perception, “impressions” rippling through my field of vision. Considering them as such seems to slow them down, and they eventually dissolve.

I was here, now, enjoying my new Oregon, the progression of my physical displacement, when images started showing up. I had just passed a barn-like building and asked myself the eternal question: “Do I go back?” Having been a photography-addict who also hid behind the camera, for a few years now wanting to enjoy the experience above recording it for future consumption (but wanting to find a balance between the two), I always ask the question.

I owe my depth, the strength of my presence, and my compassion all to depression. I am certain that without it, given my wits and talents, I would have blossomed into an utter asshole.

Something else has started, long before the physical migration: the kindness of others. As the days go by, the list of generous offerings continues to grow. Different gestures, different means, different things gifted, some not even palpable. A beautiful variety of “goods” that reminisce of times of trades in community markets of old. I am the one on the receiving end, hoping that my open heart, my sincerity and vulnerability will give them all something in return for their kindness.

Depression is a very multifaceted phenomenon that can be approached and described from so many different angles. Decades of experience with it have shown me a great deal about its intricacies, but also about its advantages.

Since my Facebook post yesterday (here) announcing Inward Ride and how it ties in with my life-long, treatment-resistant depression, I’ve received a few private messages from friends. They expressed their gratitude for the candid way with which I wrote, as well as to share the hardships that they are going through, or that their family members are.

It was lunchtime on a November day in 1977 when I took his Honda CB250–unbeknownst to him–and rode it around the neighborhood where I had grown up. I was twelve then, and my father–his father– had passed away that very morning. The ride was as aimless as it was cathartic. I circled around the block a few times as my friends from school started arriving to be with me. I didn’t understand it then, but it was on that motorcycle, on a motorcycle, that I felt the most alive.

I am wondering if making what was initially intended to be a deeply personal, inwardly investigative, open-ended motorcycle road trip across North America into an “out in the world” project is a wise idea. I see my personality wrapping itself all over it. The demand for supporters, for followers, for sponsors, for out-of-this-world content is bringing out my worst fears, the ones that have prevented me from doing so much in life.