Wonder and delight aren’t always easy when the boundaries appear to have looped around indefinitely and I’m walking and walking on this new path with no end in sight
Content note: Trauma and deep depression and mentions of suicidality; take care of you, ok?
In the spring of 2014, I woke up almost every day achy and exhausted, thick with all I was failing to accomplish, full of how my scattered attentions were disappointing everyone. I could not do enough, be enough, for anyone — mostly for myself. I ran from appointment to appointment, always fixing my mask before I entered the office or cafe or restaurant: “Yes, everything’s fine — how can I help you?” A mask of showing up. A mask of ensuring everyone around me was comfortable. A mask hiding this question: When will it be time for me to rest? When will it be time for me to fall apart? Haven’t I been here before? Will I ever stop feeling this way?
We who walk with depression, we expend a lot of energy trying to reassure those around us that everything is fine. We put on our pretty faces when we go out into the world. We respond to friends’ questions with simple lies: “Oh, thanks, I’m good! I’m fine, yep, things are going ok.” We hold back the rest of the words that rise to our lips: I’m disintegrating, actually, and lost and sad. I’m taking every day five minutes at a time. All I can think about today is how he used to call my sister stupid, and how we’re still living with his voice in our brains, even all these years later, and how much I hate it. We are certain that people don’t want to hear, don’t have time for, these authentic inside voices of ours.
A month prior, my sister had had a baby. I was traveling two to three hours, round trip, to visit my sister as often as I could, at least once a week, twice when I could manage it. I drove her to doctor’s visits, shopped and cleaned, and spent time with her at home. I ate meal-replacement bars in my car while cursing South Bay traffic. Certainly there was no time for exercise. What free time I had was spent catching up on the work I otherwise neglected; much correspondence went unanswered, most phone calls went unreturned. I tried to show up for my sweetheart and the struggles she was navigating, and fell short there as well. I felt like the juggler watching as all the eggs she’d worked so hard to keep aloft fell — splat, splat, splat, splat — right onto the cement.
I slid into one of the worst depressions I’ve ever experienced. It grew out of the long grief I held about my own loss of motherhood. It grew out of shame I felt around my failure to become a real writer already. It grew out of sorrow at how long it took for either my sister or I to even consider parenthood with a modicum of confidence, and all the work we’d done to survive the aftermath of our stepfather’s sexual, emotional, and psychic violences, the time it had taken for our souls to heal enough that we could imagine cradling another’s spirit with any self-assurance — and an astonished grief at how unfair what our stepfather did was.
I cried every day for two weeks. The scary voice in me that sounds like despair and loss and nihilism took over; I couldn’t self-talk or cognitively-behaviorize my way out of its arguments. What was the point of anything, anyway? What difference would it really make if my nephew didn’t have this aunt around? It’s not like he would remember me — and I didn’t have anything really to pass on to him anyway. I thought about how I wouldn’t ever be free from the impacts of my stepfather’s abuse, how it would always be with me, and how I couldn’t protect this new child from all the evils this world would offer up just as soon as it got the chance.
I didn’t tell anyone what I was experiencing, and even if writing could have helped me navigate these bleak corridors, I wasn’t writing. I just didn’t seem to have the time.
Six months later, I stood in the bathroom, looked in the mirror, then stared down at the pill in my hand. What did it mean that I was about to do this? I promptly fumbled the pill and dropped it down the drain.
By the time I found myself standing there in front of that mirror, I’d spent close to two decades trying everything, anything else, I could think of to deal with my depression. I’d gone to therapy (lots and lots and lots of therapy), I’d exercised and then stopped exercising, I’d changed my diet, I’d even tried to self-medicate with various herbs and supplements (according to lists offered on blog posts and herbalists’ websites). And I wrote. Of course I wrote.
I’d also self-medicated in plenty of other ways: eating so much that all I felt was fullness and shame (rather than despair), watching television to numb my spinning brain, and, of course, there are all the years I gave to alcohol (which, as a depressant, isn’t actually the best antidote to chronic depression — but, being drunk, it was hard for me to logic that one out).
But I didn’t take medication. I didn’t want to take drugs, for goddness’ sake. (Even though, as my sister reminded me, alcohol is a drug, and food can act like a drug, and television… but never mind all that.) Drugs weren’t natural, and anyway, why would I want to medicate my depression away? Why would I want to pretend I wasn’t depressed? I had good reason to be depressed, for christsake, given all I’d been through at the hands of my stepfather during my adolescence, given the fact that I was a queer woman living in America, given the reality of misogyny, homophobia, racism, the pervasiveness of violence against women and children, and the hostility and suspicion often cast toward those who were willing to come forward with their lived experiences of abuse. Who wouldn’t be depressed, given these and other realities of this so-called civilized society? I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t depressed, actually. I didn’t want to be numbed to my feelings by psycho-pharmaceuticals.
(I numbed, instead, with other things.)
Add to this that I didn’t want to be a part of a system that sought to individualize the problem of depression and other psychological responses to living in rape/trauma culture — we didn’t need drugs, we needed adults to stop raping children. If so many kids weren’t being raped, they wouldn’t grow up to need Prozac in order to act like everything was ok enough to take their place as cogs in the capitalist system. Everything wasn’t ok.
So I walked for years with my depression, around and around on its cycles, getting to know its contours and bearings, its triggers and nuances. I found a fairly decent way to coexist with it and function. I wrote about how, in the aftermath of trauma, depression was part and parcel of my reality. I taught friends and beloveds to understand that there would be days I simply couldn’t be available to them, days I would be sad, days I would not be able to be touched. Those were my inside days, I called them — when I was all the way inside myself, when depression had taken me in. Though it took close to ten years, I did eventually learn that these waves of depression wouldn’t last forever. I would come back out of it, and be a different self again. But all of these parts were myself. My depression was part of what made me me.
Of course, I hated how difficult depression was, how thick and disorienting, that feeling that everything is too much, that feeling that I’m pushing through oceans of gravity, that sense that even the flowers, the animals around me, the things I otherwise loved, impinged on my ability to just exist. When depressed, I walked around wearing that lead apron they cover you with at the dentist’s. Small tasks took on a great weight: Listening to a phone message — enormously taxing; getting a haircut — unimaginable; calling for a dental checkup — forget it. My skin became so thin I felt transparent: Look, you can see my heart working to feed my body, you can see my lungs aching, you can see the anxiety and panic buzzing in my throat, you can see the deep loss worrying at each and every one of my bones.
When I hit my forties, my hormones began to shift, and the depression I’d walked with for so many years looped around into a new place, too. Right around the time I was bleeding, and for a few days after, if I was lucky, I felt all right — but then my mood sunk. At least two weeks a month, I tried to function through a state of total despair. Anything I wanted to do — prep for a workshop, write a blog post or even a journal entry, have coffee with a friend, take the dog for a walk — sapped all the energy I had, and then required a long rebound period to recuperate, recharge. I dragged myself through most of my life — and writing it out wasn’t helping.
Then, in the month after my nephew was born, I hit that low plunge that left me feeling suicidal. Even though I knew, intellectually, that the awful voice in my head was my hormones talking, knew I would feel better (at least somewhat) once I bled, it turned out that knowing didn’t ameliorate the despair. I thought about folks who survive horrors like war and genocidal violence who live for years, seemingly resilient and adaptive, only to kill themselves after twenty or so years, suddenly taken down by history, or by the long and awful work of carrying on in the aftermath of what they’d survived. I thought, Is this how my life is going to be from now on, half my life crawling through a red cave of misery and shame, and the other half just trying to recover when the lights come up a little bit?
Depression isn’t just anger turned inward. Depression isn’t an attitude problem. Depression isn’t an inability or unwillingness to see the good side of things, to engage in more positive thinking. Depression isn’t simply sadness. Depression is the result of a chemical imbalance in the body, in the brain.
Someone said to me, “If you had a broken leg, wouldn’t you go get a cast on it until it healed?”
“Taking anti-depressants is like that,” they said.
But I was stubborn. I’d made it all these years. Was I really going to give in to Big Pharma now?
Still, the despair was making it difficult for me to feel much joy or positivity at all. The rebound periods weren’t that much higher than the lows, and the lows were getting lower. I spent more and more days sitting on the couch, endless repeats of crime dramas on the television as I wept about how I’d wasted my life, comparing myself to the (apparently) non-depressed and functional people around me who just got up and went to work and spent time with friends and spent time with family and somehow didn’t feel like crawling into a hole afterwards. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just power myself through this anymore?
I couldn’t power through it because I was depressed.
Finally, at an appointment I’d scheduled for completely different reasons, I talked to a nurse-practitioner about my depression. “But I don’t want to go on anti-depressants,” I said. I said I wanted to see a nutritionist, go to an herbalist, try acupuncture. She asked me about the extent of my depression, and I heard myself describing, in a flat and calm voice, how thoroughly depression had taken over my life, my (so-called) living. The nurse-practitioner wondered if, along with PTSD, I might not be dealing with pre-menstural dysphoric disorder (or PMDD — that is, really, really, really bad PMS). She described the way depression works in the brain, and reminded me that if I went on anti-depressants, I didn’t have to keep taking them forever. I could try them out — just try — while also doing these other things I wanted to try.
And as she spoke, something in me shifted, or broke, or gave up, and raised its hand, and said, Please. We need some help.
I said I’d talk to my therapist. And I did. And later that day, I called back, and my nurse-practitioner wrote me prescription for a low dose of Wellbutrin (the one anti-depression without negative sexual side effects, as it turns out), which is often prescribed for PMDD.
On a Friday morning, after dropping my first pill down the drain, I went into the bedroom and swallowed this medicine.
Though I did not expect to, I noticed an immediate impact from the anti-depressant. There was a day in that first week on the medicine that I had a writing group, then a phone call with a friend/colleague, then a coffee date with someone, and after that, I still had energy left over to write and, later, have dinner with my beloved. I was astonished. Before the medicine, just one of those things in any given day would have knocked me out. I thought, Is this how normal people experience their lives? Do non-depressed people always have energy like this?
That first weekend on the medicine, I felt as though a fat clot of heavy cloud had been pulled off of me — and underneath that weight had been my joy, my sadness, my anger, my fear, all those feelings that had been pushed aside to make way for the demands of despair. I could actually feel things again. Oh.
(I then promptly proceeded to over-schedule my life, given my sudden increase in energy — if I’ve got it, I better give it away! — apparently having to learn the lesson again, through exhaustion, that anti-depressants aren’t magic beans. They didn’t make me an extrovert; I still need to balance time with others and time to work and wander and be alone.)
Still, the PMDD faded to a more manageable PMS, and after a year, the trough of suicidal despair hasn’t again opened up beneath me. Depressions, yes. Debilitating sorrow and hopelessness, no. And also: delight, wonder, curiosity, energy. Energy. How is that possible?
Have you seen a Möbius strip? It’s one of those things adults show kids when they want to demonstrate the concepts of infinity and paradox. They take a long strip of construction paper between two hands, twist it once, and then tape the ends of the paper together so that you have a loop with a twist in it. Then they say, Now look: if you drop your pen at any point and start making a line along the length of the paper, you’ll end up drawing on both sides of the strip without lifting your pen — how is that possible?
I remember being delighted by Möbius strips when I first discovered them, and made bunches of them, amazed every time that the strip of recycled paper from my dad’s old dot matrix printer had a line that traversed the whole surface of the paper; I never had to pick up the pen to get to the other side — this two sided piece of paper had turned into a loop that appeared to only have one side. How was that possible?
Sometimes our new topologies just don’t make logical sense to our old eyes, our old ways of thinking. We have to meet the paradox with curiosity — at least, that’s what I’m trying to do right now. Wonder and delight aren’t always easy when the boundaries appear to have looped around indefinitely and I’m walking and walking on this new path with no end in sight, and those footprints next to me in the sand look an awful lot like my own.
Of course I still believe that we as a society need an overhaul — anti-depressants aren’t the cure to rape culture. But they have helped some people I love, they have helped me, to have the energy and the hope to remain engaged in the work of radical change, lifting us from the bottom of a pit of hopelessness to the place where we feel able to get out of bed and shower and get dressed and prepare for another day of the fight — another day in the aftermath of all the traumas we still carry, another day of wonderment at the capacities of these bodies of ours to feel pleasure and joy, another day in the real labor of walking through curves and twists of life with depression at our sides.
