“I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night
thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face
and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just
the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled
about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.”
― Ray Bradbury,
Green Shadows, White Whale
When you’re depressed, the last thing you want to do is
write. Journaling is always
prescribed, but any learned belief that you have that your immediate
environment, let alone the world, needs your voice is faint and suspect. Almost as suspect as the shinny, glossy
smiles of past photos, the songs that used to make you come alive with motion,
or the old love letters and text messages you used to let yourself pour
over. Reverently absorbing each
line as if it was a testament to a future: proof that you exist.
Now, words are mostly substance neutral. Your head is awash with them at all
hours – and even when you try the last thing you can do is discriminate among
them for reason. Instead, your gaze and concentration drift to the furnishings
and fixtures that usually maintain their place in the background of life. Caffeine proposes promise, but you lose
minutes studying the shadows cast by your options’ canisters inside the cupboard. You know you should brush your teeth
and get dressed, but you can’t bring yourself away from watching the puddles
gather from the rain coming down just outside your door. Somehow you are stirred to sympathy,
even membership, with the drooping patio umbrella, how it burdens all that
moist collected weight, and the trauma endured by each individual drop of rain
that lets go, or is shoved off, at the edge. Each one seems trapped in a cycle of abuse. Autonomous and coherent while in
flight, but undetectable upon landing, repeat.
Some will never allow themselves to realize their disposition
as something more than languidness – a character flaw that can be remedied and
rerouted with a stringent diet of prayer, stimuli, and goal setting. When assessing their odds of arriving in
life, staying the course on the man-made, disk-shaped track flooded with
millions of fellow unsuspecting travelers seems like a better bet than
navigating the shady terrain of the interior, alone.
Traveling into the woods involves comfort with ambiguity. The kind of ambiguity that can curb attempts
entirely, and threatens to, at any time, make the pilgrim do an about face into
the arms of timidity, mediocrity, and other post-childhood friends. The lobbies
of counseling centers, where you feel like another cast aside member of
society, or the pharmacy lines, where your very presence signifies dependence
and incompleteness aren’t even the most difficult. The worst moments are more intimate. The gradual glazing over of your old
friends’ eyes as you search for the words to honestly respond to “how you are
doing?” and “what you’ve been up to?” The shuffling of feet, crossing of arms, and patronizing
nodding of the head that fills the silence. And that’s from the people that know you the most.
Everyday you have to remind yourself that your brain is an
organ like any other – one that requires care and proper nutrients to perform
its tasks well. Then come the questions: If my brain is sick, what made it that
way and will it ever get better?
Where is the line between legitimate symptom and just plain laziness in my
daily attitudes and habits? How do
I talk to others about the time I’m investing in therapy and
self-reconciliation without sounding like the wounded victim or a narcissist
oblivious to the pain of others that may never have this opportunity? How does this period of time account
for itself in the eyes of my nieces and nephews, much less on my résumé? How do I trust that this illness will
receive a definite response, but will not define me?
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