Depression: Trying to Describe

 From Guernica magazine: On Metaphors and Snow Boots Mental illness remains shadowy and indistinct. This makes it ripe for metaphor. Maybe this will explain why my own ways of describing my depression shift besides elapsed time - and why words feel so inadequate.

Metaphor provides a scaffold to build into the spaces beyond our comprehension. When we struggle to describe a physical sensation, we use a comparison; when some scientists seek to explain the interactions between neurons, they liken the brain to a computer. By doing this, we put the unknown in terms of the known, in an act that both illuminates and obscures: after all, a brain is both like a computer and not. Metaphor rushes in to fill gaps, to make meaning, and to conceal.

***

 For me, the problem with assigning romantic metaphor to mental illness is not that it’s incorrect, exactly, but that it flattens a dynamic reality into something static. It cannot communicate that, in order to write about the leaden days, I need the days of abeyance, nor that the illness does not bequeath me poetry as some sort of recompense. But the metaphor is everywhere; the world has already drafted and consigned it. When we use metaphor to conceal the unknowable, we make symbols out of human beings and allegory out of experience. We reduce our own pain to a precursor, a line item, a weather report.

***

 ...I often think about mental health like weather because we can predict it but not precisely, because it can drown cities and raise bounties. It has a random caprice — the moment when a summer day upends into storms — and it requires preparation: stock the pantry, lock the windows, step onto the porch to gauge the wind, hunker down. We can see it coming but can’t stop it. We shake our fists at the sky.

***

 ...Like the weather, my inner squalls are meaningful for their mere existence — true beyond all explanations, beyond calculated gains and losses, beyond cures. It can be powerful to center experience over explanation, to reject ill-fitting assumptions, to stylize perspective. To write one’s way toward something different.

sch 5/28/22