3.19.23
There’s something about the transitional seasons — fall and spring, when the light is changing so much, the days shortening and lengthening perceptibly. Clouds of geese clatter through the sky, and the whole world just takes me by the heart and squeezes.
It took me a long time to notice depression in myself, and longer to figure out what to do. I have so much tenderness for the bewildered teenage girl I once was, feeling so crazy, feeling so much, making awkward jokes about those big emotions and how often I cried. (Weekly! Daily!!) Other people seemed to understand what I was experiencing so much better than I did — my mom, which makes sense, and my freshman year of high school biology teacher, which was totally humiliating, because he had very beefy, shiny arms and no chill at all and I didn’t like him very much.
I went through a bad depression my senior year of college. I felt so lame, and desperate, and trapped. I’ll always remember Joey telling me that it hurt his feelings when I wasn’t happy to see him or interested in what he was saying. It really helped me get it: this isn’t some dark and mysterious thing. This experience is not so unusual. It’s pretty normal, and we have a word for it. But it is damaging my life and my relationships.
When I started getting better at taking care of myself, it felt like a superpower. In my work, I learned how to help kids handle their feelings and their challenging little lives, and that helped me, too. I would say to myself, it’s okay to feel this way, and feel the weight of self-judgment just lift off me. I would take a walk or take a shower and notice my mood improve just a little, and it gave me so much confidence to be able to connect the dots in that way. The thrill of self-knowledge, of agency in my own life.
Even now, though, sometimes I get an inkling that some bad thing is coming and I am so desperate to move beyond how I actually feel, which is sad. (As an aside, it’s really burned into my memory how once a friend in college said so authoritatively, “And, you know, depression isn’t actually about being sad, it’s about feeling nothing,” which, okay, but I beg to differ. It makes me very sad, and I cry a lot. Always good to remember that we all make different meaning out of our experiences.) I want to skip past the sad part, and sometimes I can’t. It seems like I’ve been able to solve depression in the past, and I want to solve it again, but quicker this time. That’s frustrating in its own way.
It’s just that it’s hard to be in the world. It’s hard to actually contact my own experience. I went for a walk tonight, and the clouds had that look about them like they were lit from the inside, soft and golden and glowing, and the bare-branched trees sprouting from greening grass seemed so hopeful and springy, just waiting, almost ready to bud, and when I took out my headphones and listened to the birds swishing through the brush, I did feel sad. What’s the point of that? I wonder about that a lot. All these big and small human heartaches, what’s the point? I don’t mean when someone has died, I mean getting sad for no reason, just like a general tiredness and malaise sneaking over me — us — like a shroud, or being anxious all the time, or having weird food issues. Being maladapted to pretty normal and fortunate life circumstances. I mean, this is the only world we have. The life we evolved for. The primordial soup would be totally flabbergasted to see how far we’ve made it — and yet. It just seems a little silly, faintly ridiculous. I know I’m not the only one like me with good stuff going on who still struggles like this. What’s the point of all that sadness?
But I did go for the walk, even though it kind of felt like there was something sitting on my throat. I went for the walk because now at twenty-seven I know about walks, and saying gentle things inside my head. And I did see the clouds, and the trees, and I saw the pair of mallard ducks bobbing their heads repeatedly, bowing into the cold river as though in prayer. What a tender, funny little world. The best in the whole universe, and still so wonky. Me too.
