The Country of Depression - Evelyn Lau
It began there, in that time between childhood and adulthood. How I loathed my life, my newly adolescent self! It was the usual resume of teenage misery, unremarkable in the end. Everything around me seemed thick and woolly and static - the unwavering street outside the window of our little house, with a torturous glimpse of the downtown lights in the distance, like a mirage I would never reach. The pudgy flesh I was gaining from my secret food binges made me leaden and sluggish. The texture of my skin, the oil in my hair, my ugly, scratchy clothes - everything felt wrong, repulsive. I often prayed I would die in my sleep, so I would not have to face another day at school as an outcast. The screamed taunts in the schoolyard, the blade-sharp faces of my tormentors, popular girls with combs tucked into the back pockets of their Jordache jeans. Their hair was perm-ruffled and, in the provocative way they sashayed down the halls, it was plain they were already learning the secret language of sex. It seemed I had already lost that game, with my plastic glasses and their thick, distorting lenses, my hair that my father cut with a pair of kitchen scissors in the basement because my parents considered a professional haircut an unjustifiable expense. The clothes I wore were salvaged from my mother’s trunk of clothes from China - bright polyester pants cut with flaring legs - and underneath I had on boxy, badly stitched underwear that my mother made me from my father’s old pyjamas. Undressing for gym class was a hasty, shameful ordeal. Next to the plumage of the other eleven-and twelve-year-old girls, I felt an abomination, and wanted to die.
But when I net opened my eyes there would be the familiar grey light through the window, and the depression would descend like a blanket. If it was winter it would be dark, and I would go to the kitchen to eat breakfast next to my father before he headed out on yet another of his unsuccessful job searches. The linoleum cold beneath our feet, out silent, awkward chewing. I would look at the soft slices of bread on my plate, how they broke apart under the jab of my knife with its dab of butter no matter how carefully I tried to spread it, and the rage would course through my body. Why couldn’t I butter a piece of bread without it falling apart? Why couldn’t I be perfect? I wanted to take the enter loaf of break in my hands, smear it with butter and honey, smash it in my hands, and hurl it against the wall. Perhaps then my father would rise from the icy lake of his torment, his unhappy eyes would focus, and he would see me.
I thought of suicide constantly; what likely stopped me was the thought of the trouble I would get into from my parents if I tried and didn’t succeed. In the meantime, every day was a small eternity to be endured. The light in my memory of this time seems always to be charcoal grey, or black. The air felt thick in my nostrils and throat, and the depression expanded to the fill the days, weeks, and months with its massive, rolling fog.
I was twelve, or thirteen. Younger, even. Perhaps it went on for months, stopped for a while, then started again; perhaps it continued for years, with only days of remission in between. Why can’t I remember? Time meant something different then, and what seemed like years might only have been months, or weeks. But I remember looking at a calendar on my bedroom wall on which I had crossed out the days with big ink Xs, flipping back through the months and realizing I had been depressed for most of the year. The memory of this is murky, a swamp of mornings waking in darkness, fear throbbing in a tight knot in my chest, and then the long day ahead wrapped in grey cotton. This state was different form pain, or panic, which I had known earlier - those emotions arrived, were experienced, then left like their brighter counterparts. You survived them, and they had the acuity that depression, in its muffling weight, lacked. When I was depressed I would have given anything for a sharp, precise emotion, even if it was only sadness. Depression had no edges and therefore no borders, no discernible beginning or end.
Doctors claim that serious depressions are often triggered by loss, or by an accumulation of losses. Perhaps I was mourning the loss of the time when we had been more or less happy, as families go, before my father became unemployed and retreated to the dark basement in shame, before my mother became increasingly hysterical and stalked through the house terrifying me with her unpredictable moods and preoccupations. Before the arrival of my sister, who sat curled up in the crook of my father’s arm while I watched from a sullen distance, murdering her in my mind. Perhaps I anticipated the unrecoverable loss that lay ahead, the day when as a fourteen-year-old I would walk out the door of my parents; house and never look back.
And then it went away. Or, perhaps, the depression remained but there was little room for it. I left home and tumbled into one crisis after another - drugs, prostitution, suicide attempts, sleeping on the streets. Depression was elbowed aside by the immediacy of fear, by the cartoon nausea of bad LSD trips and drug overdoses, by struggling daily to survive. In retrospect, perhaps all that behaviour was a form of self-medication. It was still better than the cotton-packed days of depression, which I learned to quickly eradicate with a handful of pills, a cupful of methadone, several tricks turned in a row.
In my early to mid-twenties the fog thinned and then seemed to lift for good. When I woke, the clear day lay ahead. I could intellectually recall the fact that I had been depressed - I restricted it to a period in my early adolescence - but could no longer feel it viscerally. It was like recalling a migraine, a pinched nerve, the time when you were at the kitchen counter and the knife slipped and sliced your finger open. You could describe it in some detail afterwards, but the memory of the pain would be less than a shadow of itself. This is how the body heals, how the mind closes over pain like scar tissue over a wound. When people I knew complained about being depressed, I had to swallow my impatience with them. I thought that at least they should have the grace to keep it to themselves, since there was nothing so dispiriting as listening to people almost lovingly explain the topology of their depression. The relentlessness of it, the iron lid over all their days. At least if they were experiencing a particular crisis there was heightened feeling, and you could offer a shoulder to cry on, a suggestion for action that they had overlooked, even a solution to their problems. Depression was something that simply went on and on, and wore out everyone around the depressed person.
I would try to sympathize by saying that I, too, had gone through a period of depression in my early teens. But that was all it was in my memory: a bleak, sluggish period, a long time ago. I never ceased to be grateful for its departure, though. I did remember that it had seemed worse than the most piercing pain, and so even when there was turmoil in my life, and grief, I was glad that it didn’t devolve into depression. I began to think of that teenager’s changing hormones and my circumstances at home; I saw myself as safely beyond its reach.
Then something happened. The doctors say that one serious depression puts you at risk for another during the course of your lifetime; two increases the likelihood of a third, and so on. You may not even be aware of the gravity of the precipitating losses at the time; you may think you are dealing with them just fine, that indeed you’ve dealt with a lot worse in the past. But then one morning you wake and discover that the fog has crept in overnight. IT is banked out in the streets, so heavily that the outlines of the buildings in your familiar city are lost. There are no streets or mountains, no glimmer of water. It is in the room with you, pressing down over your nose and throat and almost suffocating you. You try to rise, to live your normal day, and discover that you can’t get out of bed. You are as immobilized as you had had a stroke in the middle of the night, while you slept. But this is ridiculous, you think. Nothing’s wrong with me. All I have to do is get up, the way I’ve done every other day, without thinking about it. And yet you can’t.
What happened to cause this depression? It took about a year to develop? Each loss, by itself, was not a cause for collapse. When I count them they fit on the fingers of one hand; they seem embarrassing in their slightness. Some setbacks and problems at work, several troubled relationships that ended badly. But these events occurred within a year and somehow, taken together, the impact they had was greater than the sum of their individual parts. I slid into depression, imperceptibly at first, then rapidly. I could not write for months on end, plagued instead by obsessive thoughts and memories. The depression that had been lurking - sneaking in under the closed door, around the window frames, filling my room slowly with smoke - poured in and sealed me shut inside its grey heart.
An acquaintance once described to me what it was like when her back went out and she couldn’t get out of bed without considerable pain. She would lie on her mattress visualizing herself walking to the bathroom, then down the carpeted stairs to the kitchen. As she did this in her mind, she counted the steps necessary to reach each destination; these small journeys she had once made without thought had suddenly become momentous.
I found myself wishing I had some physical explanation for the mornings when I lay in bed unable to make those same journeys. The depression, often accompanied by a racing heartbeat, was there in the room as soon as I woke. It was in the first sliver of consciousness, in that instant before I was aware of the light through the blinds, or of who I was. Some mornings, miraculously, it wasn’t there, and I got out of bed and started the day like a normal person. But most mornings its iron bars locked down my limbs. It had a weight to it, like a mattress. I lay unmoving, and even if there were stripes of baby-blue sky and sunlight through the blinds, my mind was bathed in grey. I was flooded with the same nameless, nauseating terror that a friend once complained about his depression had described - an unfocused sense of impending doom, as of your town death or dismemberment, made more unbearable because it was without cause. You could not say, Well, I’m laying here frightened to death because I have just lost my life’s savings, or I have been diagnosed with cancer, or there is a stranger in the room standing over me holding an axe. There is only your hammering heartbeat and the black curtain dropping down across your mind.
As minutes, then hours, passed, I tried to coax myself out of bed. I visualised getting up, walking to the bathroom, and washing my face. But what sounded simple was actually made up of a multitude of complex tasks. There were all the steps across the bedroom to the bathroom, first of all. Then I would have to turn on the tap, pull my hair away from my face with a hair-band, and squeeze some cleanser onto my palm. I would have to massage the cleanser into my skin and wait for it to foam. Then I’d have to wash off the residue and dry my face on a towel. Already this filled with despair. But was that the end? No, I would have to take a shower, which much, much more. I squeezed my eyes shut, thinking of the articles of clothing I would have to put on after the shower - tugging underpants up my legs, clasping a bra behind my back, getting dressed. Each of the rituals, which were usually performed mindlessly, appeared now to be insurmountable hurdles. The thought of rubbing deodorant under my arms wore me out. All of these personal-grooming details seemed pointless and torturously repetitive. I thought of the years ahead, of all the times I would have to wash my face, take a shower, put on deodorant, get dressed. My mind raced desperately around the thought, poking at it like a sore tooth. That first step towards the bathroom was only the first of thousands of small efforts that had to be made that day, and that one step bore in my mind the weight of all those other efforts, so it seemed I was not simply heading to the bathroom but doing a million impossible, meaningless things at once.
But you do rise. Unfortunately, the energy it has taken you to throw off the depression and swing your legs over the side of the bed - the result of hours of arguing with yourself, coaxing yourself, rationalizing with yourself, and visualizing yourself performing this singular action - has more or less spent your day’s allotment of drive.
What do you have left to give to the day? I thought of work, chores, and social gatherings with equal weariness. All I longed to do was sleep; the day had barely begun, and already I was anticipating the earliest possible hour when I could sneak back to bed as though to an illicit lover. The thought of sleep was creamy, voluptuous. I ached for the moment when I could settle into my queen-sized bed under its white duvet, the pillows banked around me, and drift. I would curl up into my smallest possible self, no bigger in my mind’s eye than a bean, and wait for deliverance.
Like someone who had lost a limb, the daily world had to be renavigated, discovered anew. You were no longer living in it as yourself, but as someone who was depressed. Things you had done without thinking now had to be considered with the greatest care; you had to talk yourself through every deed, you had to struggle. I held the thought of sleep in my mind like a carrot, a reward glimmering at the end of that day’s obstacle path. I vowed not to succumb to the bed’s soft white envelope before then; most days I managed, but when I lay down on the back leather sofa in my living room it felt like a coffin, which was curiously comforting, and I would want to sleep there, too. I wanted to do only the bare minimum to sustain life; I breathed shallowly, sensing the slowing of my heart, the blood sluggishly making its rounds through my body. I would lie there and look up at the popcorn ceiling, while the phone went unanswered and fax messages scrolled onto the floor.
It was important not to give in to the depression but impossible not to, by degrees. The newspaper, after months of struggle, was the first to go. I found I could hardly read any more. The Globe and Mail would take most o the day; I would start reading at breakfast and still be reading it in the middle of the afternoon. The words refused to cooperate; I stared at them perplexedly, black columns on the greyish newsprint. I would read a sentence, or a paragraph, and have no idea what had just passed before my eyes. I would read an entire article, laboriously, gritting my teeth until my jaw ached, struggling to understand. Frustrated, I would turn to The New Yorker, Harper’s, a book. I could not hold anything in my mind. The words lay on the surface, skimmed across my vision, would not sink in. My mind was seething with its own drama; compulsively, it went around and around, reliving incidents in the failed relationships, scenes from years past, my childhood. The sentences on the page veered off in all directions and demanded a superhuman attention I could not provide. It seemed as if each sentence was a new thought unrelated to the previous one or the one following, and I could not stitch them together into a coherent story. My mind was so cluttered, so close to boiling over with obsessive thoughts, that I thought I could empathize with schizophrenics who hear voices - there seemed to be a similar, thought not audible, clamour in my own head, above which the rest of the world could not be heard.
Formulating sentences of my own was similarly arduous. John Updike, in an essay about his writing life, described approaching his desk in the morning with “a religious fear.” I knew what he meant, even on the days when I was in the middle of a poem or a story and eager to work. That fear never went away, and most days it was justified - I would stare blindly at the blank page, every fifteen minutes or so typing out a clumsy line that would later find its way into the trash. I would pace the well worn track in my carpet, play music, drink glass after glass of ice water in lieu of the cigarettes I used to smoke, open and close the refrigerator door disconsolately, make unnecessary phone calls. I thought of John Cheever who, it was rumoured, tied himself to his chair with ropes while he worked so he would be unable to rise and flee, like a sane person would do. But when I forced myself to sit for long periods in front of the typewriter my thoughts would wander, I would begin to yawn, tears of boredom would leak from the corners of my eyes, and nothing more would be accomplished than if I went out into the day, the city beyond the glass walls of my solarium.
That was what writing was like, on normal days, and in a depression this scenario simply could be entertained. Instead, I barely set foot in my office. Answering the telephone or composing a fax message was challenging enough. The words that lived inside my head were scrambled. They had to be pulled out like taffy, carefully, to shape completed and fathomable sentences. It took all my concentration. I felt barely capable of speaking, let alone writing. Anything more complicated than a simple greeting was like crawling through miles of mud. I worried that I sounded strange to other people; to my own ears everything I said sounded stilted and slightly wrong, with an odd inflection, as if I had quite forgotten how to speak properly. I covered it up by laughing a lot and deflecting attention onto those I was speaking to by asking them so many questions about themselves that they haven’t much of a chance to interrogate me. The jangling telephone infused me with panic, but I knew I had to answer it, though the effort to make conversation was so great that I found myself perspiring. This was the key: once something was given up, it might be gone for good. If I didn’t answer this phone call, didn’t pay this bill, didn’t do this week’s laundry or go to next weekend’s party, I might never do any of these things again. I knew I couldn’t give in to the panic, obey that impulse. It was a haunting feeling. I thought of the agorophobe who one day obeys his fierce impulse to turn back from the errand he has set out to do, and never leaves the house again.
Before the depression - and it was like that, there was a time before and then a time after - I loved dinner parties. The conversations, the food and wine, the warm company of friends, the stimulating addition of strangers. After the depression came, dinner parties were to be endured, and I didn’t always know how. I would arrive early, hoping that would compensate for the fact that I would inevitable be the first to leave. At first I drank too much, hoping to recover some sparkle or sheen, the verbal faculty and the capacity for enjoying the company of others I had lost. For a while, alcohol presented itself as a viable cure for depression - it poured a bright gaze over my vision, improved my affect, restored some cheer. I would feel a rush of energy and bonhomie, my tongue would loosen and words would trip out as easily as they once used to. But, of course, the depression the next day would be that much worse, and eventually I began to limit myself to two or three drinks over the course of the long dinners. Thus I would be sober - in every sense of the word. Moribund, really. In a way, this was worse. Around the table people would be rocking with laughter, gesticulating, their voices rising in volume, conversations competing with each other in noise and conviction. I strained to laugh along, weakly, in order to convince the host I was having a good time even though I wasn’t adding to the conversation. I stared at the faces around me, their mouths gaping, their eyes shiny and intoxicated, their laughter louder than jackhammers. I looked blankly at the rows of exposed teeth and gum, and it seemed I could see, with a sort of detached x-ray vision, the skulls beneath the stretched skin. That was all these people were, skeletons temporarily covered with flesh and pretense. I wanted to cover my ears with my hands. Somewhere in the multiple threads of conversation there was a story, a joke, but I could not follow it, could not catch it. Their voices assailed me from all sides in a cacophony. I let myself drift, dreaming of my white bed, my soft square of sleep. In the bathroom, away from the loud guests, I would look at myself in the mirror, where my face appeared round and puffy from too much sleep, waiting a few merciful, quiet minutes before ducking back out to the party as into a hail of bullets.
Often, someone would say something that would send me into a rage. It is said that depression is rage turned inwards, rage given no other outlet. I thought of depression as they grey side of a coin that is scarlet on its reverse. The rage was always lurking; a women’s hooting laughter in a darken theatre would not simple irritate, it would touch off in me the entire store of built-up rage, completely unrelated to her. I would hunch in my seat, weaving an elaborate fantasy of torturing, raping, and murdering her. Someone would say something seemingly innocuous, and my blog would choke as it boiled. I would feel as if I were drowning in a sea of red; I would try to stay on the surface, but wave after wave would submerge me. I had not known anger like this since my adolescence, my childhood - the sort of rage that comes from when you are accused of something you haven’t done, or when a repulsive stranger is running his hands over your body. It was a child’s anger, uncontainable, overwhelming. It was all I knew. I swallowed and tried to hold it back, but my heart would be racing and it would take everything not to crush the wineglass in my hand, to feel shards of glass bristling out of my flesh, or throw it against the wall and watch the pieces rain down. I practically panted with the effort of holding back, and though I never did what I wanted to do - mostly because I would suddenly have a clear and terrifying memory of my schizophrenic aunt, who when I was a child would throw dishes against the wall during dinner in an attack of rage and paranoia - I did derail a few social occasions with the anger I couldn’t stop from spilling over. It shamed me, this impotent rage, this impatience with the people around me - their little habits, which I had previously barely noticed, now irritated me so much I wanted to claw their faces until they bled. How do you admit such monstrous thoughts, even to yourself? But that was the severity of it. Something that might once have been a minor irritation, a fly buzzing in another room of the house, was now nails running down a chalkboard next to my ear.
Mostly, though, I tried to pretend to have a good time and began yawning around eleven o’clock, telling everyone I had now much sleep lately and was sorry but I was just so tired. By then I would have been agitatedly waiting for a chance to escape for the past hour. It was a kind of a pain, waiting for that opportunity to leave, and then being thwarted by the inevitable stretch of time that lapsed between the first announcement of one’s leave-taking, everyone’s exhortations to stay, the pouring of another drink, being pulled into other conversations, the numbingly long goodbyes at the door, and the final escape. Then I would find myself running down the street, in the cold midnight air and the rain, running home.
How different is one person’s tale of depression from another’s? Is it often only the same story? Writing this essay, I was afraid to read the work of other people who had written in detail about their depressions - I worried that not only would the story be the same, but we would have somehow found the same language to describe it. The same phrases, the same words. How many ways are there to examine this litany of inertia, anxiety, anger and detachment? To describe a mental landscape from which all pleasure had drained, leaving it like, I imagine, the surface of the moon, pitted and barren? How could an affliction that feels so personal and singular, in many ways inexpressible, actually be shared by so many? Like those ads that appear from time to time in the newspaper, run by some university or research group: “Are you depressed?” and, following some of the symptoms. You recognize yourself, but it seems as generic as those pamphlets in the doctor’s office asking if you are an alcoholic, and you are because you, too, have lied about your drinking, missed work because of it, drink because you are nervous in social situations, etc.
Many of the people I know are depressed. They are on Prozac, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Paxil. Sometimes, they are also taking Xanax or Ativan, for anxiety. They drift from one antidepressant to another, trying each on for size, like shoes or suits of clothes. One will fit them, will magically transform them into other people, people better than the ones they are: happier, more confident, with sleeker profiles and more polished personalities. I watched one friend’s scowling countenance metamorphose within weeks into a round smiley face after he began taking antidepressants, as if he had taken off one mask and put on another. I did not quite know how to react; he seemed to have become someone else. Before, he was more sensitive than most people to nuances in conversations and relationships, and suffered for long periods over what he felt or didn’t feel for his girlfriends or whether he had done the right thing by his friends, family, or society. He was unhappy, and had a tendency to wear his unhappiness like a badge the way many depressed people do, but I liked his ability to question deeply his motivations, to worry over emotional issues, to feel the shock of empathy. His medicated version had such a permanent smile on its face it looked like it had been drawn on with a marker. Everything seemed to skate across his surface; words and actions and emotions directed at him bounded off like coins off a bright, reflective chunk of plastic. He could not be dented.
Sometimes the mask slipped; there were brief periods when the medication didn’t work, when he needed his dosage adjusted, and he was mired in darkness, his voice on the phone flattened, devoid of affect. But then he would be his superficial, happy self again, and I would watch him uncomprehendingly, I suppose glad for him, but it was as if the person I had known was gone, and this was a new person entirely, one with whom I had no connection. Now he was competent and did not waste time on the sort of self-examination that often leads to paralysis of action. His productivity increased, he seized fresh opportunities, and began doing very well in his profession, travelling and making more than before. He stopped worrying about whether he was capable of falling in love with anyone; he simply enjoyed his relationships and did not appear to suffer any angst over them. Now he just lived his life, and appeared to derive pleasure form it. But why did I feel, looking at his face, as if I were looking only at a surface, underneath which much of who he was had been erased?
Depression often seems to be accompanied by a certain level of narcissism. Its sufferers are always telling you how they feel, always checking the barometer of their emotional weather. They issue reports on it as they would on a matter of national significance. When I talk to my depressed acquaintances, their unhappiness becomes a claim on my attention and concern. A simple “How are you?” will elicit a detailed report on the person’s recent moods and emotional states. This is the world they have come to occupy, the one they are trapped inside, and for all they know it has taken on the dimensions of the physical world itself. There is no other news, no weather or wars in another hemisphere. When you are not depressed yourself, it is a difficult state to tolerate in another. There is no visible wound to bandage, no doctor’s pronouncement of a terminal illness with which to sympathize. There is only the unspooling of grey ribbon of their days. You want to order them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to take a good hard look at those around them who are less fortunate and yet still manage to notice the sun shining in the sky, the first tulips pushing out of the earth. I look at the people around me who are depressed and I see people who are well educated, who have interesting jobs and professions, who are attractive and healthy, who grew up in good neighbourhoods, who have pleasant homes and loving, tolerant partners. Or maybe not all of the above, but most of it. And though their suffering is real to them as a severed limb, it cannot help appearing to the observer like an affliction of the spoiled and wasteful, like the behaviour of an anorexic or bulimic would seem to the starving in Africa.
Their voices on the phone, disembodied, are instant indicators of their emotional states. When they are depressed, the usual highs and lows of inflection, of life and curiosity and enthusiasm, are drained away. Sometimes they cry, and then they sound like children, inconsolable.
They take their antidepressants and sometimes the magic does not work. One acquaintance of mine, who is compellingly beautiful, articulate, and creative, floods her small body with alcohol and weaves her car down the street and across the bridge in the early hours of the morning. Another friend of mine disappears into his job and his apartment for months on end, so unwilling to inflict his misery on his friends that he simply withdraws from all social activity. Perhaps his is the most gracious behaviour, but is also the most worrisome. With another acquaintance it is easy to see when he is taking his antidepressants and when is trying to wean himself off them - he loses or gains about fifty pounds accordingly, as his unmedicated self seeks solace in food. Other friends have adulterous sexual affairs, work obsessively, binge and throw up, take overdoses, visits therapists, or alleviate loneliness by joining one support group after another.
As a teenager, I begged my various doctors for antidepressants, when I wasn’t begging for drugs I found reliably mood-elevating or calming, such as painkillers and tranquilizers. I had no intention of taking them every day, like vitamin pills. I meant to stockpile them for a suicide attempt, and this must have been clear to those doctors, who all refused my requests. I did manage to secure a bottle of antidepressants from a john at one point, which combined with all my painkillers and sleeping pills would have done the job, but over the years life must have gotten better, because when I look they are no longer in my desk drawer.
I have never taken an antidepressant, and thus cannot describe - though the writer in me would like to - the physical and emotional changes, the sway and lift, the swirling sparkling grainy patterns of behaviour breaking apart and re-forming. I wonder what about me would change, and cannot imagine the world emerging from under the shadow of certain depressive behaviours - the sun coming out and crisp slant to the architecture, everything clearly delineated, unmuddied. What would it be like to be free of those burdens, how many more hours in the day would there suddenly be to learn something new? Would my thoughts stop rotating obsessively around the tracks and grooves worn in my mind? Would I suddenly be free of whatever it is that immobilizes me, tethers me firmly to the past? It is a short leash that extends only so far as I strain towards a defining a new life for myself, my own life, away from parental expectations and childhood experiences that redefine, over and over, all my relationships - from the most casual conversation with the grocery clerk to the most intimate sexual entanglement. - so that it sometimes seems to me that our fate is to live out our lives replaying what hurts us, what was taken away from us or denied us when we were small, watchful, easily damaged creatures.
What has stopped me from trying antidepressants at least as an experiment, is the fear, of course, that I will no longer be able to access that part of myself that writes, that is in some way fuelled by all the afflictions that otherwise make me miserable as a person. For it is in the compulsions, the obsessions, the seemingly fathomless emotional experiences, that some of that writing is born. It is that ability to go so deeply into a subject that is like dropping down a hole into the heart of the known world. When I have tentatively expressed this concern, afraid of its possible pretence - the underlying naïve belief that writers and poets have to suffer for their art, that if Prozac had existed back then there would not have been a Charles Baudelaire or a Sylvia Plath - people I know have assured me that if anything their medication has made them more productive at work, because they are no longer mired in their depressions, or at least spend less time in that state. They are no longer held back by the voices in their heads that tell they can’t succeed, they can’t try anything new, they’ll only fail or make fools of themselves, so why bother going on that holiday with your lover, or applying for that job, or joining a class and learning how to ballroom dance or kick-box? But none of these people writes creatively. So while I am convinced that I might have a happier, more well-rounded life that I would like, on in which I am not held back by my fears and old behaviours, one in which I might well write many more articles per year than I would in my depressed, worried, neurotic state, I wonder whether the poems would come. The stories? The words that I wrench from that personal, tangled place?
Would I spend as much time in the state of a friend’s father described as “circling” - all those activities with which one fills the hours before one finally sits down and writes? The wall of resistance to my work is some days so strong that by the time I do sit down to work I feel I’ve returned from a battlefield and deserve rest and consolation, not another war. My friends who work at home commiserate with me over our various forms of avoidance, while the precious minutes and then hours tick past as we talk, make coffee or tea, and talk some more. I think in frustration of the well-dressed lawyers in their firms downtown, the business people and the stockbrokers, every minute counted and billed out, the way they burn through their work, while here I am in my bathrobe, desperately holding at bay the hour when I can no longer procrastinate and must finally work. Sometimes that hour does not come until the evening, when everyone else is returning home, trudging down the street in the twilight carrying a briefcase and drycleaning, looking forward to a hot dinner and evening of television. Some days the depression is so severe that a single errand seems like a day’s work, and the smallest thing is in fact the heaviest lifting any person can be asked to do. Some days the exhaustion is such that even television seems to be too intellectually challenging, and the only programs that can be endured are reruns of the after-school shows meant for teenagers. Every planned or spontaneous event, either work-related or social, is like running a marathon for which you have never trained. Panic buzzes around the edges of your otherwise sluggish consciousness. You lie about having other things to do, other places to go, so friends won’t wonder or worry when you turned down their invitations. But all you want to do - long for it, yearn for it with a kind of passion - is to be alone, lying on the sofa, listening to the slow, subterranean thump of your own heartbeat, while the light dims in the framed window. Could a mere pill dissolve all that in an instant? Would all those barriers simply evaporate, so that I cold walk to my desk early in the morning not through a quagmire of heavy mud and quicksand, but through shining air?
“I was born depressed,” a man I went out with used to say. His pale eyes veered away from mine, focusing on his depthless inner misery; when they met my gaze again, the irises looked dull in the light from the window. It was worst in the mornings; he would wake with his forehead furrowed, his hand pressed over his eyes, as if to ward off the world encroaching on his consciousness. I came to dread these morning moods, turning towards him nervously as he delivered his emotional weather forecast. It would colour the events of the day ahead as reliably as the forecast on the radio. “I feel so depressed,” he would groan, reluctantly uncovering his eyes and staring up at the ceiling. “I woke up with my heart racing, thinking, ‘What’s the point? What does anything matter, anyway?’”
Early on in our relationship I felt a surge of sympathy; I would wrap my arms around his inert figure, trying to transfer some of my warmth to him. I thought I could rouse him from his dark place, with my attentions and the sunlight streaming in through the open blinds. I teased, cajoled, kissed and caressed. I would have stood on my head or juggled circus balls if that would have helped. As months passed, my sympathy eroded first into impatience and then into something close to anger. His depression was as formless and engulfing as a fog, and impossible to avoid. When I lay against him I could almost feel it creeping into me. I began to resent, like a jealous lover, what he held closest to his heart: his own depression. He was locked into it and I did not have the key or the combination.
When he looked at me his gaze was empty, as though I were not a person but a space. I thought about how strong you would have to be, to survive being looked at in that way without anger and resentment flooding through you, without feeling like a child who is persistently ignored and will soon burst into a tantrum. And again it seemed I felt most sorry for the people around the depressed person - the friends and relatives who watched, tried to be patient, tried to help and indulge and quietly counsel, but many of whom surely reached a point where they wanted to drag the person upright, demand that their wills return to their limp bodies and again assume control over their lives, because they were adults, not helpless, not visibly sick, not children. I have always had that uncomprehending impatience with and vague dislike of people I know who are depressed; at times I want to hit them. I felt the same way towards myself when I was depressed, but magnified - what was left of the sensate part of me shouted at me from a great distance, in contempt and loathing, in huge, swelling impatience. Pull yourself together! I’ll give you something to cry about! Depressed people are so tiresome, dispiriting. It is awful to see the life of someone you know and care for unwind in a great ribbon of waste in front of you, unappreciated, unobserved even, to see them huddled in a dingy corner of the landscape of opportunity and promise that they cannot see, let alone navigate. It is even more awful when it is your own life, and the guilt at the static pace in which you have found yourself is itself crippling, immobilizing. How greatly taxed are those whose lives revolve around the depressed person’s. How hard it is to love those who are depressed without suffering some injury to yourself, without losing yourself, dropping down into their black pit, sucked into their vortex of need.
“Life is not a worth,” my psychiatrist insisted one day when, after months of depression, I venture the opinion that life was not worth living. His light-filled office was the square of space I could fill with words I could not speak elsewhere; even here they sounded whining and weak to my own ears, a steady drone of misery and complaint. I prided myself on my refusal to share my depression with acquaintances the way so many depressed people do, seeking some fleeting relief from the unending drabness of their inner worlds in another’s brief, bright gaze of compassion and attention. This was what made it possible, to share it here, to unlatch the spring on the Pandora’s box and let he storm of winged evils swarm out. “Life is not a value, it’s not about whether it’s worth living.”
He talked, as sometimes did, about his admiration for a certain “nobility of spirit,” which I clearly saw I lacked. I felt ashamed of my constant ill humour, but once unstoppered it poured out like black bile, like the fluids that physicians in ancient times drew out of the body to alleviate melancholia. What I wanted to say, what was constantly felt, was “What’s the point?” This was what I had come to feel about every endeavour, yet I disliked my depressed friends when they said it themselves. I could hear their voices - by turns angry and childish and demanding. It was their motto, their tiresome refrain: “What’s the point?” As though it were owed to them that someone, somewhere, should be held accountable, should be made to stand up and explain to them the point of life and of activity inside of that life, the point of getting up in the morning, going to work, eating three meals, and not committing suicide before sundown. What if there was no point, no right to demand one? What if nobility of the spirit was simply to go on, one day after the next, without losing hope, without falling into despair?
I don’t know if there is any way of describing one’s experience with depression that isn’t inherently self-involved. Now that depression has been recognised as an illness, now that some of the shame cloaking it has fallen way, do we instead err on the side of indulging it, coddling it, always bending a sympathetic ear to the tiresome song of its sufferers for fear of appearing insensitive? I still want to believe it can be conquered by mind over matter, even on those days when I feel a palpable sickening of the spirit, when I can feel my own mind turning again towards the darkness. I want to believe that depression is not more concrete than a shadow, a ghost in the attic. A mirage that can be blinked away, when the sun shines hard upon it and it vanishes like a veil of dust, and there is nothing left but all else that remains - the room, the light, the objects in the world.