Writing About Depression

I have not taken my Zoloft today. It may be that it has only a placebo effect. I am physically healthier than I was 14 years ago, and I think that also makes a difference. But it was close yesterday, cruised right up to the line I have not wanted to cross for over a decade. I can say that I was tired, and I was. That I was unhappy with the job from which I was fired should have left me happier when I was let go. Maybe if taking that job had not caused me serious financial embarrassment. I had a friend send me money that I needed and hated myself for needing, for having to ask for the help. I should not have even been considering the idea of suicide. That it passed quickly enough, that it did not amount to more than a flirtation, I put down to my being stronger physically and mentally and to the help of the Zoloft. And to one more thing: my writing.

Which is why I recommend to you James Davis May's A Pathless Wood: Navigating the Poetic Border Between Health and Harm:

“Account,” the first poem I wrote directly about my depression, describes the time my wife, who is also a poet and my first and best reader, asked me if I was a danger to myself. In that poem, I compare the situation to being taken to a bank by man who’s holding me up surreptitiously at gunpoint. The bank teller gestures with her eyes at the silent alarm, essentially asking if I need help. In the poem, though, saying, “Yes, I need help” either directly or indirectly seems far more dangerous than not saying anything. I held onto this poem for a long time before showing it to my wife—which, again, felt like I was avoiding articulation. Once a poem finds an audience, even if that audience is just one person, it truly becomes a poem. It’s been written and read.

But there’s another half that doesn’t agree with the anthology at all and thinks that the “high personal cost” of not writing would be far greater than the price of writing. After finishing “Account,” something opened in me and the poems started pouring out. I wrote a poem about suicidal ideation. I wrote a poem about suffering a major depressive episode at Disney World, then another about how, during the worst of the depression, I would spend long periods of time in our darkened bedroom wishing for nothingness.

Writing these poems felt both healthy and unhealthy, like I was indulging my depression but also controlling it by describing it. If nothing else, writing them was a way of staying active. It hurt to say what I say in them. It hurt even worse to see my wife read them. But it also felt like a necessary if risky act, like running through the dark.

And from which I learned something new:

In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich describes creativity as “a form of movement…around [the] impasse” of depression, and repeatedly depicts depression itself as a state of “being stuck, both literal and metaphorical, that requires new ways of living or, more concretely, moving.” She’s not alone in advocating movement, creative or physical. Andrew Solomon does so in The Noonday Demon, and a casual Google search for nonmedical treatment for depression pulls up countless sites that recommend exercise.

I recognize that being stuck. Would that I had known that 14 years ago, I might not be in the fix I am in now. Read the whole essay, please. Pay attention to its lessons.

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