(Cue violins)
Everyone has felt depressed, but not everyone is depressed. Within clinical depression, the walls close in, you can't catch your breath. You cease to find pleasure where once it flowed freely. Nothing can quench it, nothing can dull it. It's there when you wake up, like a sullen child - especially it is there at night, when you try to find sleep.
Night is a time of dark contemplation and an utter loss of agency. The things that concern you bubble up in a great swell, overwhelming you. There, pressed into your bed, there's not a thing to be done about any of it. I'm not diagnosed, but I suffer all the symptoms.
This is what keeps me up at night.
Insidious insomnia. Not as much lately, but starting in middle school I learned to operate on between two and five hours of sleep a night. Insomnia centered around a problem falling asleep - rarely a problem staying asleep. And as I mentioned, I'm not a napper. Certainly my schoolwork suffered. Certainly my sociability suffered. Most crucially, I suffered. Insomnia is a dear cousin of depression. The two swirl together like shit down the drain. Imagine Heller's man in white. One bag feeding, the other collecting waste. Once a day a nurse switches the bags. But hey, I can't complain.
Depression is a complex and misunderstood problem, testament to our overall ignorance of the human brain. We have medications that can scratch the surface, but we know so little about them, and the wrong drugs make it worse. As does mixing meds with alcohol and narcotics, both of which become sultry to sufferers of chronic depression. One thing we know for sure is that something about the neurological reaction that causes this brooding sadness can also cause habituation, even chemical addiction. Addiction to sadness. Happiness begins to feel like an ill-fitting shoe, strange and alien. Dickinson was right, it might actually be lonelier without the loneliness.
I simply wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
I feel like I'm coming out of a long tunnel. My eyes unaccustomed to the light. It's a cruel and harsh light at times, the kind of beating rays that soak your shirt with sweat. But how much can be accomplished in the dark?
I'm unused to emotional extremes - apart from rage - ecstatic happiness and true sadness had both, over the years, dulled to a thin line where everything felt much the same. It grants you a sort of imperviousness, if only because you suspect things will go wrong at any moment, but it's no way to live. The Sopranos (wise and all knowing) taught me that depression is rage turned inwards. When you learn that the evil in the world is unreceptive to your frothing anger, you begin to blame yourself. At first, perhaps, you hate yourself for not being able to stop it. Ultimately, you can develop the delusion that you might be the cause of it in the first place.
I've never tried medication - neither for sleep nor sadness. I tried talk therapy. I cried and danced the brutal-honesty dance with a few different strangers. All it taught me was that it was something I would have to come to on my own. It is a constant battle. I fight alongside a petrifying number of sufferers. Travel can feel like a cure, but it's distraction at best.
I wish moments of serene peace upon you all, moments of uproarious laughter and of shattering sadness. All of it reminds us that we are alive. That we are, after all, merely animals that have learned calculus. On a long enough timeline, we are not of importance - a genetic hiccup that appears to be self-correcting.
We are droplets in a wave. Infinitesimally small. Utterly inconsequential. To time and space we are ultimately of only passing interest. For me, this is a comfort. Because, despite our insignificance, here we are. We might as well try to get some shit done.
I think Emily was wrong at the end of her poem. When she said,
It might be easier
To fail—with Land in Sight—
Than gain—My Blue Peninsula—
To perish—of Delight—
That sounds like bullshit to me now, although I loved it when I first came across it. Maybe it's easier, Emily. You may be right. But don't miss the Blue Peninsula because it's too hard. I hear it's lovely in the summertime. It would be a damn shame to skip it.
I shot mannequin portraits today. These are my favorites.
Location:Hanoi, Vietnam
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