In 2013, walking a Winnipeg labyrinth helped Corey Bialek consider a contemplative question: what would it mean to not be depressed? The labyrinth was not curative, but it was therapeutic.
“There’s no real magic to it, but the idea is you sort of like sift the central thought as you walk through, opine on what you’ve learned, and then sort of walk back out and take away with you those lessons,” he said.
Bialek says the first time he was at the Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth, in Winnipeg’s King’s Park, he was a little bit skeptical.
“I’m not really a self-help guy. But, I did it, and, it sort of like was the first moment, where I experienced sort of like a crack in my head, where like I found some small space to start thinking about a potential other than hopelessness, if you will.”
He says he started going back on a daily basis.
“Every day I went back I sort of like bought into it a little bit more. I discovered a little bit more about myself and how I thought about my depression and how much it controls me and how much I can control it,” he said. “It kind of offered this like very therapeutic space to be in nature, which is really important to me.”
Bialek deals with persistent depressive disorder and major depressive disorder. In the essay Minding the City he shared how navigating public space can have both a positive and negative impact on him. He spoke with People First Radio on the subject.
The essay appears in the book Living Disability. Bialek says when he was first approached about contributing, he was hesitant.
“ I have, really bad imposter syndrome. So I couldn’t really imagine why my voice should be in a book. But what I ultimately came around to, I have a personal vested interest in normalizing discussions around mental health in a real way, where the language of depression and the experience of depression can be humanized in some way,” he said.
“I just kind of thought, if I can be that familiar voice, I have to use it, and that’s what ultimately got me to overcome my fear and anxiety about participating in this book.”
Bialek spoke about the value of talking about mental health in an authentic way.
I tend to hold myself prisoner in a way. Like, there’s shame in being depressed. Despite all the self work I’ve done, all the therapy I’ve done, at the end of the day, I still carry with me embarrassment. Or that if I talk about it or if someone knows that I deal with depression, that I’m somehow deficient or weak or that it’s a character issue.
And I think it’s really easy to let the voice inside my head keep me in that prison. But it’s through exercises like writing this book, talking to you. I mean, I came out to, to my work. Like, I told them I was in therapy, I was dealing with depression, that going into the office was causing a lot of anguish.
And just putting that out there and outing myself, it disarmed that voice inside of my head and took some of the power that depression has over me away. And so when I talk about humanizing mental health or normalizing it, it’s not just, like, for other people to understand what I’m going through, it’s also just for myself to understand what I’m going through and to give myself a bit more space just to maneuver through this world, in a way where I’m not so shackled by the various pain points that depression creates.
Photo credit: George Penner
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