And there they were, names on my cellphone and email and facebook which hadn’t appeared there in months. I’m sorry that I answered barely a single one of them, but even before I opened the messages, I knew exactly what was coming... ‘are you ok?’ ‘what happened?’ ‘why didn’t you tell me?!?’ ‘so that’s why you’ve been such a prick!’
I wanted to relax today. It’s one of those odd facts of depression that by the time everybody gets concerned, the worst is usually over. It’s like carpet beetles; light might not help and there’s no guarantee that light would cause them to go away, but if the beetles are already there, they’re almost guaranteed to thrive in the dark. Ridiculous as it is, it’s nevertheless tempting in the heat of delusion to point fingers at friends and wonder where they were when things were really bad. But where could they have been yesterday? I didn’t have use of a phone or a computer, and even if I wanted to find someone to talk to face to face, the first unbreakable wave of it happened when I was in the shower, from which I didn’t emerge well for over an hour. When things were truly terrible, I was at my parents’ house and had no use of any communication outlet except facebook. The only people who were available calm me down were my family, who are generally not well known for having a calming influence on me. But all the feuding and grudges become trivial when life gets dire enough. You’d think we’d all remember this when problems are not so urgent, but for reasons passing understanding, many people rarely do. But nearly three weeks after I wouldn't come to Pikesville at any point before 11 at night, there were Mom and Dad at my side, each of us on the phone with a different specialist, trying to recover my life’s last eight years.
It’s only recently that I understood that far-too-often repeated Nietzsche quote: “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.” I’m no Nietzsche scholar, but I often feel like he’s a writer which you have to burrow through a hundred pages to find a single golden nugget - even the aphorisms can be pretty jumbled. But this phrase beautifully captures how impossible it is to convey the experience of depression to others. 99% of the time, the horror if it is so elusive that you’re no longer able to articulate that horror by the time you have the opportunity to express it. Few word combinations could ever convey the urgency or the immediacy of its emptiness. And if someone is around you to whom you feel comfortable enough around that you can precisely convey its emptiness, you’d no longer be nearly so depressed and any description of it would be a description of a memory. Furthermore, were you around someone who made you more depressed, it’s usually because this person is incapable of understanding what makes a person depressed. So regardless of how well you explained depression to this person who is tone-deaf to the experience, he would be incapable of understanding it - which would therefore make you more depressed. Just as the position of atoms are affected by light, the experience of depression is affected by the presence of human company. If you have people around you who lack empathy, they would not be able to understand why you feel bad, and that misunderstanding would be yet another reason to feel more depressed. But if you have empathetic people around with whom your emotional state could be understood, then you will almost always feel less lonely, less empty, less immaterial, and therefore, less depressed - and thus the need to explain depression becomes that much less urgent.
It’s just like a depressive to assume that all chalices are poisoned, but with the experience of trying to explain depression to friends, even sympathetic ones, comes all sorts of tradeoffs. Knowing that a friend or family member is depressed is as much a “Get out of jail free” card as having depression, and the card is far more useful to those people who don’t have depression, who can therefore use it to feel better about themselves. Ever since I’ve started posting about depression, I’ve experienced a number of moments when friends, sometimes not even particularly close ones, are remembering me feeling worse than I was about things which happened. One remembered when she accidentally came up with an insulting nickname for me when tripping up on her speech while we were on a long trip, which she claimed made me depressed, but she remembered wrongly: in fact I laughed uproariously at that nickname and wore it as a badge of honor for the trip’s duration. Another friend claimed that I was disappointed with the outcome of a party I threw a few months ago and felt depressed at the end of it (which was undeniably true). She claimed that not only was I clearly looking depressed, but that I was basically in tears. That’s total bull. I was certainly intoxicated, and far too melancholy at that point in the night to be a good party host, but tears? Are you joking? The last time I cried at a party was when I watched John Belushi pour a giant vat of mustard on his toga. Furthermore, I recently had an uncomfortable situation with a very good friend in which it would be all too easy for him (and for me) to blame the whole thing on the fact that I’m completely nuts. And true as that clearly is, to explain our fracas purely by that would absolve him (and me) of arriving at the truth about why things happened as they did.
Are they all remembering these moments wrongly because they’ve read me speak more openly about depression than I have in years? Am I remembering these moments wrongly because I unconsciously don’t want to acknowledge just how ruled I am by this malady? Or am I just so paranoid that every exchange is potentially colored by my worry that people will judge me differently for talking about this problem out loud? I admit, the last scenario seems the most likely. But even if people don’t view me differently once they learn this about me (which I doubt), the price for talking about depression aloud is sky high, and not one that ever should be trafficked in unless a person is convinced that they have more to lose by staying silent. There have been years of my life, quite a few at this point, in which I’ve been extremely guarded about my experience with this illness. I have far too memories of being looked down upon for these experiences to talk about it unhesitantly. And there are many wolves who wear the clothing of snake-oil salesman (mixed-metaphor intentional) who would tell you all sorts of things about this illness that are plainly not true. Yet I also find myself unable to stop myself from keeping these feelings private - they’re simply too intense to handle alone, and I’m inevitably drawn toward talking about it like a bug drawn to light.
Last night was rock bottom in a sense definitive beyond perhaps any I’ve ever experienced in my life. If emotions have a state of absolute zero/black, it was last night. But fortunately, it was over in about two hours, and I can’t help thinking that I was far too shocked to experience anything like the true extent of the awfulness that was about to descend over me. Had this problem been solved after an entire 24 hours, how much exponentially worse would I have felt when it was over? I can’t help thinking of Henry Fonda’s wife in The Wrong Man, who goes into a permanent state of depressive delusion when her husband is wrongfully suspected of murder and does not come out on the other side when his name is cleared.
For the most part, today has been rather relaxing. A full day in Pikesville with family, a sleeping pill to bring me down off the oddity of last night, and a choral rehearsal in which my 50% self could put its focus on music - the one true inevitable in my life when I need reviving. It was a decent day - a truly amazing one compared to yesterday. Yet there was one thing, really only one, which disturbed its idyll - a brief facebook update from an acquaintance which seemed like it was riffing off one of the more ridiculous things I said in yesterday’s post. No doubt there’s plenty in that post which was ridiculous, but purely the paranoia and worry that some people might be having a private laugh at all this (which someone probably is, even if it’s not him) was enough to rob me of more than an hour’s worth of relaxation.
The road ahead remains as long and turbulent as ever before. Last night was as close as I ever want to get to an absolute black, but life resumes now with its infinite greynesses. After I got the major things fixed last night, the first thing I said was ‘Well... now I go back to my normal depression.’ Depression sneaks up on those who possess its capacity without warning or mercy, and no matter how good I feel on any given day, there is always that chance that it will all come crashing down more quickly than I can ever know. I still believe, perhaps against all evidence, that a vigilant watchfulness over my emotional state can only benefit me. I have no idea if constant circumspection will lead to greater understanding of this illness, or even if greater understanding will lead to any lessening of its impact on my life. But one day, the world will either be a better place, in which case there will be a cure for depression because sufferers like me were able to give their own small but informed speculations into precisely what this nebulous illness is, or the world will descend into another dark age, in which case there will be bigger things to worry about than depression.
...Only a depressive would make that analogy.
0 comments:
Post a Comment