This weekend, I celebrated the love between two of my closest friends. I’ve been to enough weddings to know what to expect — and I expected a going-through-the-motions of flower bouquets and his-and-her-drinks and salad forks with butter knives. For several, unforeseeable reasons, the weekend defied all of our collective expectations. The night after the last of the festivities, I found myself marveling at the people I met, at how connected I felt to old friends and new acquaintances. I found that I underestimate, all too often, the people in my orbit. I found that the thread that ran through so many of my most treasured conversations was, surprisingly, something dearer to me than I had previously realized: mental health — depression, or happiness, depending on your persuasion.
This is my best attempt at putting words to my experience of depression. I realize that it isn’t possible to truly capture it, and yet, as with all the stories we tell — in all our attempts to understand and be understood — there’s something valuable in the act of trying, despite an inevitably imperfect result.
Like for so many others, the pandemic hit me hard. The horrors of 2019-2020 completely upended the life that I had. Stripped of the window dressing — the studio classes and dinners and drinks and events — that I believed gave meaning to my life (but was, in reality, just a mechanism for putting one foot in front of the other), I was paralyzed by a relentless existential dread.
There are a lot of things they don’t tell you about depression — at least, that no one ever told me. The overwhelming despair that rips through you like a typhoon. The numbness, the purest apathy, the inability to feel, to think, to know anything at all, that follows. The unrecognizable stranger you become to yourself. The out-of-body experience that follows you. The intense sense of alienation, of unbelonging, anywhere you go, anywhere you look.
In the mornings, I smolder inside. It’s a hot blueish sustenance that flickers and falters but never extinguishes. And all your fortune tellers are blind. I keep a list of all the days we make each other cry. Every time I see a calla lily in the wild, I tell you that it is the fiercest of flowers, that it always finds a way, that it is a clean heart, singular in its grace, in its indignant fury. Do you understand me? I can see for the first time. No one can hold my hand again.
One refrain I always went back to in my darkest moments was, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere.” which quickly becomes, “I don’t want to exist anymore.” It was the first time that I understood suicide as something more than a sad story about somebody I didn’t know. In some of my poetry from those moments, I write about dying, and feeling like I’d died over and over again. And I wrote about the salvation that writing was for me.
When I can’t see any longer
When I only remember the despair of loving
Or the cruelty of living
The impossibility of preserving
Liminality or hope
My mother’s garden or my father’s youth
When the abyss opens suddenly onto everything
When I want to disappear without ceremony
Without preamble or protest
Without so much as a twitch of my muscles in blue flames
It’s the words that cure me
Find a way through the moonless terror and dark forest
Let me stand tall and live unbridled
I read this quote from Christian Wiman, in an essay by Ben Purkert:
Let us remember..that in the end, we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.
I’m writing this now because I recently spent a lot of my time depressed; now, I’m spending more and more time contented, if not happy. And I believe that’s worth sharing. Depression/happiness and poetry constitute, for me — and maybe for you too — a beautiful ecosystem that I hope to nurture, grow, and share with anyone who might find themselves in a similarly precarious position.
Beautiful 🤍