Saudade
Depression is a driver in the dark.
Depression is swimming to the surface of unbreakable waters.
Depression is the mourner’s black veil.
Depression, despite these and many more over starched metaphors, lives a vivid life in the minds of its those who have that odd affliction. When nothing else will, it provides the comfort of knowing it, like nothing else, will always remain a constant companion, forever willing to let you feel or not feel as you may want. Despite several years of treatment, a far more mature outlook on mental health than most of my life, the topic continues to be a hobgoblin eating away at the grey matter of my brain. People ache for the comfort of the familiar: it is seen in love, in politics, in the choice of hometowns; it is no different in giving to the aether that only companion I have traveled with since I can remember anything.
In composing this remembrance of sadnesses past, I could not shake the comical notion of it all: why would anyone miss such a destructive disease? One cannot imagine a cancer patient missing their cancer. They ring the cancer-free bell and clap on the way out of the hospital, bright in the sun at the chance at a longer life. The brilliant advances of medicine every day make it ever more likely those devilish afflictions will become rarer. Down here in the substrates of the under-earth where the mentally afflicted presume they live out their days, the office of their cures, which in truth is called managing, has no bells or celebrations from the staff. It is good enough you have not dived into the nearest river with weighted feet.
It is not that I miss, ache, long for, or whatever romanticist notions of hopeless desire one can assign to haywired chemicals run amok in the avenues of the brain, Depression: it is that the alternative is difficult. Each day is work. Each day is a reminder there are more days ahead. I can never say today was rough, and it means something as simple as it was a long one, and I am tired. It requires thought and analysis; it beckons the worried looks of family, the concern of a spouse who must intuit whether I had a long day in the way many have long days that wear them down for that day or whether my long day and tiredness was some existential wraith warning me against leaving the bed. For anyone with Depression, for anyone with a mental health disease, the unyielding melancholy is a chore enough without adding in need to self-analyze, call the psychiatrist, worry if you are insincere to your confession of balance to those who show concern for you. Depression, I wonder, may not itself be so heavy on the spirit; becoming its business manager to the world is the real Sisyphean task.
That notion, among all others known to the depressive mind, is part of the Lie. In the encouraging shoulder-bump culture that mental health advocates have thankfully dragged the world and the sufferers, the marketing for telling Depression to get bit is Depression Lies. It does. It lies about everything. Emily Dickinson, in one of the most beautiful artistic portrayals of Depression ever committed to paper, wrote
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading — treading — till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating — beating — till I thought
My mind was going numb -
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space — began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing — then –
and the poet-matriarch of New England observed in sharp, jittering detail the essence of the
whole problem. Depression is the environment of a funeral. You live there, in the precipice of letting go of the dead, a heart continuously feeling as if you have just lost the most significant source of joy in your life. Depressives have as many metaphors and personifications for their companion, even calling it such is mine, as there are stars in the sky. Still, the metaphor Dickinson employs is one that no person will escape. To borrow the universal cliché, no one can beat the reaper. Imagine, in vivid and bright color, the blackest, most despairing, pleading, bargaining, angry moments you have felt in losing the person closest to you: this is the daily joust of the carrier of Depression. When a loved one has passed, most move past sorrow to joy, to some equity of tears of loss and tears of the joy of times had; in my brain, the equity does not exist. I live only in the spaces between clarity and terror.
“Shirts in the closet, shoes in the hall/Mama’s in the kitchen, baby and all/Everything is everything/Everything is everything/But you’re missing/Coffee cups on the counter, jackets on the chair/Papers on the doorstep, but you’re not there/Everything is everything/Everything is everything/But you’re missing/Pictures on the nightstand, TV’s on in the den/Your house is waiting, your house is waiting/For you to walk in, for you to walk in/But you’re missing, you’re missing/You’re missing when I shut out the lights/You’re missing when I close my eyes/You’re missing when I see the sun rise/You’re missing/Children are asking if it’s alright/Will you be in our arms tonight?/Morning is morning, the evening falls I have/Too much room in my bed, too many phone calls/How’s everything, everything?/Everything, everything
But you’re missing, you’re missing/God’s drifting in heaven, devil’s in the mailbox
I got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops”
The above lyrics, to the song You’re Missing by Bruce Springsteen, were written to reflect the perspective of a 9/11 widow, but when I listen to it, as I do with Springsteen most every day, I frame it as me seeking the embrace of Depression. While it is an imperfect replacement for a dead spouse compelling the grief of the song’s protagonist, so many of the song’s lines spoke the truth of the sincerity of hoping for the return of spouse of your mental state. Where are you when I am sleeping so soundly now? Where are you when I can sit and enjoy the view from my deck without eating myself with anxiety maggots? Before treatment, before drugs took you away, the gulf between the person lying next to me and me was as wide as the distance from the Earth and the Sun. Returning to the Boss for but a moment, from another tune called Trapped, “I’ll teach my eyes to see beyond these walls in front of me, someday I’ll walk out of here again,” let not these pleadings for a disease so insidious as to convince many that life has no value and take it, robbing themselves and others of the life yet lived be construed as a reality: it is no such thing because as the piety of treatment tells us: Depression Lies. In composing this memorial to a lost friend, it is asking me, in its address at the back of my mind, to return to the forefront of my fears. Those are the walls I must struggle to look beyond.
To the miracle of Prozac, I must give much credit. That august drug, still mysterious to chemists and neurologists in its soothing of the mind on fire, has gifted me with a way to cut a Gordian knot. It is that potent a tool to fight Depression. It was for me, anyway. It took a long time to consider the surrender to such an obvious course of action, but I am not renowned for taking easy paths. I was an openly hostile jester of the efficacy of the psychiatric sciences and the therapeutic concomitants that allow the thorny bramble of emotions to become unfurled. Others tried a medley of negotiation tactics to get me to do something about that stubborn dirt of Depression. Assured of my ability to scrub the stain out without a cleaner, water, or even a tool to do the work, I was not convinced my moods and wild rides between everything being horrible always and everything being horrible just most of the time was not a function of the economic realities of life, the deep strain of midwestern fatalism that is its ache in the soul of generations of my bloodline, or the mistaken views of others about the quality of life I was thinking of as my accepted optimal quality of life. It was natural, to be apocalyptically angry, stressed, thoughts racing around a track of wildfire, brain akimbo, smirking with self-assured arrogance at any notion this may not be the norm.
Drugs do not take the disease away. Remember, we the afflicted, to title ourselves so loftily, manage but do not cure. They take away endless days of grey-that much-maligned color-and sleepless nights shaking and spending what seems like hours counting the loud beats of your heart. My nightly sleep routine before Prozac was Hamburger Hill in the bedroom. Uphill and under friendly fire. Convinced I was moments from a heart attack every night, I would sweat, with a hand over heart, laying on my stomach, feeling the beat of my heart pump blood, and the anxiety of assuming death was imminent. It is a buzzing that comes with every beat, a feeling for which words escape me. And I took so long to fall asleep. Riding sidecar to that, and perhaps worse for the nights flooded with devil and demon stained recall of slights and hurts past, was the vivid and never-ending realization of my mortality. I know, as we all do, that one day of no choice to me, that heart will stop. However, every night I would shiver and tremble, close my eyes, plead and beg, whisper no no no to myself, to stop feeling so viscerally this realization. It ate at my bones, my flesh. I would imagine repeatedly, like a film, the moment of my own demise. When was my last breath going to be? It was a horror I cannot explain to people. I would pull the cover over my face hoping cotton and thread had some magical power to aid. It did not. Only exhaustion setting in would relent the death obsession. When I went on a journey to normal, reading and watching other sufferers as I do, Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon, observed in a talk that depressives are acutely aware of mortality in a way very few other people are. He was right. I am. Any time I would sit in a group of people, my thoughts almost always drifted to the fact of their demise. I carried a soul-sick stomach around with me every waking hour. And the anger. The Endless frustration. I have always called it the paralysis of anger. Anger, I had ever thought, was an emotion of action. It laid in my veins and muscles, making everything tight, coursing in my body like necromantic energy. My anger was not an anger that could be acted upon. It made me stand still, scream in silence in the dark when the light was all around me.
From all these things, like the release valve on the pressure cooker, the Prozac gave me the space to move, to breathe, to sort, to think clearly for the first time. At the small price of the sundering of my first marriage and nearly failing out of college when I left the career at retail that supported my family for the passion of History I wanted so much to study. In my early thirties, I became a human. Everything before that was a vaporous wraith, pulled apart and reforming in some amorphous cloud of getting by. In those years, I lost a spouse, which for a time felt like I was losing the whole world until clarity allowed me to see it as an event of life that gives way to calmer, more sane realities, I shed toxic friendships, made friendships that allowed me to be my goofy, geeky self without judgment or need to siphon from me the emotional plasma to sustain their own inner self-loathing. In its way, it was the high school or college friends I never had, for reasons not germane to this essay, due to life decisions that prevented access to such things. When I finally went to college, I was often offered and felt fine with taking the faculty discount. It is not with a small bit of pride I assumed I looked professorial enough to pass without ID that sweet ten percent off the buffet line lunch of the academic nourishments of America. It was no doubt the balding and long already set in greying of beard and hair that did the deed, but we make our assumptions for that which comforts the spirit. Still, as with everyone else in the sphere of my disease, those new and amazing friends suffered the fallout of days in the dark. Plans made enthusiastically only to be canceled at the last moment. I never cited and do not to this day as perhaps the last remnant of embarrassment for the failing of having been born without proper neurochemical receptor balance, Depression or moodiness as the reason to thwart a get together. It was always a blistering headache. Or an ill spouse. Sometimes in despicable moments, I would claim my daughter was sick when clearly, she was not. All this to have more time to stare longingly out windows and doors but never cross those glass thresholds. Since medicine started, thankfully, these incidents are rare enough I cannot remember the last time it even happened.
This all seems so foolish, does it not? How can anyone miss being shot or stabbed? But people find comfort in familiarity. Even if that familiarity is crushing death and does you no good. Change and the altering of perception are hard. Empathy is a skill most must learn; few have innate in their bones. Self-empathy even more so. Depression does not feel like the rush of the high at the end of a heroin injection, a feeling often described as the purest form of joy one can feel, a rush that has sent countless to their doom. That, at least, is euphoria, however adverse the reality is. Depression is a suffocating embrace where your face is buried, and it is hard to breathe. It is terrifying, but in fighting for air, you know at least you are alive. Finding that feeling after years in the dark is the Mount Everest of Depression. It was for me, anyway. Breathing is the fundamental act of living, fighting for it mentally gives something to strive for when all seems unobtainable, or you do not want to obtain anything. What in life replaces fighting for the air? I do not have the answer; I know that it is a hard road, and often it leaves me wondering where that old friend is. But, plod down the path I will, pushing aside the fondness for familiarity as I build a new world where the familiar is joy and vitality and sorrow that is not weight but experience like any other. Along the way, I’ll take what I can carry, and I’ll leave the rest.