Talking About Depression

There will be a lot more talking about depression if you stick with me here. Today's comes from a Literary Hub newsletter. I have been trying to describe the feelings of depression for quite some time. Matt Haig's  On Depression, Self-Sabotage, and Emotional Resilience does  what I have failed to do.

I used to struggle with understanding this. I used to think I was the pain. I didn’t always think of depression as an experience....

The trouble was that I had a very binary view of things. I thought you were either well or ill, sane or insane, and once I was diagnosed with depression I felt I had been exiled to a new land, like Napoleon, and that there would be no escape back to the world I had known.

And in one sense I was right. I never really went back. I went forward. Because that is what happens, whether we try for it or not, we move forward, through time, simply by staying alive. And slowly our experiences change. I, for instance, discovered little moments of happiness or humor within despair. I realized things weren’t always one thing or another thing. They were sometimes both.

He got off better than I did. Thing is depression alters thoroughly one's thinking. One can think they are making sense when it is despondency talking and they have been sucked down into the whirlpool. Which Emily Austin's What the Dead Leave Behind: On the Way a Life Can Inhabit a House (Also thanks to Literary Hub for sending my way) gets:

Depression and grief are sometimes described as dark clouds that hang over us and distort how we see things. When you are a depressed, grief-stricken person, however, it does not feel like your perspective has been distorted. It feels like you see things more clearly than other people do. It is true that we will all die. It is true that the objects we touch and the garbage we create will exist in landfills long after our own bodies decompose. It is true that our family and friends will all die. They will leave behind clothing, half-used shampoo bottles, and used toothbrushes.

And she gives her solution:

The novel I wrote is about a morbidly anxious young woman named Gilda who stumbles into a job as a receptionist at a catholic church. There she hides her atheist lesbian identity and becomes obsessed with the previous receptionist’s death. Gilda is fixated on death and is hyperaware of how simultaneously insignificant and important everyone is. Writing her provided me with a healthy way to lean into my own morbid anxiety, and she and my new house helped me arrive at a sort of enlightenment.

Writing has been a help to me, too. many of my stories I call my therapy stories.