depression & its fragments
— and a voice, drifting from far away, across walls and rooms and fog, helpless— “Baby, we need to fix you.”
Singapore: The psychiatrist with degrees in psychiatry and psychotherapy and a subspecialty in suicidology had a wall of framed medical certifications. Displayed under these accolades was an assortment of potted plants under blinding grow lights. The words that slid from his mouth were plagiarized from a textbook. He also didn’t know how to differentiate between pronouns and articles— instead of “grief for your mother,” he said “grief for the mother, yes, yes.” He asked me if I would like to see him for therapy too, not just medicine, since he is not just a psychiatrist, but also has— a humble flourish of his hand to the wall behind him— a degree in psychotherapy. I said no. Highly do not recommend.
Rx lullaby.
Wellbutrin. Lexapro. Mirtazapine. Adderall. Vyvanse. Xanax. Lorazepam.
10mg. 15mg. 20mg. 25mg.
100mg. 150mg. 300mg.
450mg.
Dear x, your escapes become you, in the open for all to see. I hide in the bedroom, in bed, fingers always on something. Scrolling, my life draining away, inert. Hiding. Yours, k.
H texted, “kathleen! you are too brilliant to waste your mind! try to use that pain and suffering to fuel your work and passions.”
Passion? Work?
It's my mind to waste, though.
I screenshot her message and left her on read.
Sleeping uses up all my hours. The mental abyss when I don’t write. When my days are fogged, untethered to deliberation and structure, my thoughts undisciplined and I am enslaved to passive consumption, easy mindlessness, my thumbs yoked to a device, my fingers unconsciously typing the same urls, again and again— what did I sign up for? How has life turned out this way? What happened to me? Where has my life gone? Where have I been?
New York: The Upper West Side psychoanalyst had a dimly-lit office with Renoir prints on the walls. She looked like a faded TV star, tired and sad. Or maybe I was projecting. Transference? I wanted to know about her life but she tried to turn the subject back to me instead. I knew she was depressed too, I just did! I worried about her and she worried about me worrying about her. Counter-transference? My concern for her Signified Something. My silences Meant Something. I never knew what. I wasn’t sure what was happening half the time.
“—your Pokemón name is Snorlax because you sleep so much!”
Our baby is four weeks old. We are in one of the hundreds of rooms in Massachusetts General Hospital. We are sitting in front of a child psychiatrist who also specializes in postpartum depression. My meds are upped to the highest possible dosage—“may have trace amounts in your breast milk…”
The doctor is young. She looks like she loves her job. She is the most awake-looking doctor I've ever seen. Or maybe everyone looks awake when I am so tired.
Hospital rooms are always too bright.
She says something that cuts through the smog.
“...if both parents have a history of depression, it is almost certain that the child will also be depressive.”
We stare at her. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Just keep an eye out. When she becomes a teenager, watch out for it. You know the signs.”
We look at our tiny wrinkled infant, crumpled and asleep in her portable car seat.
What have we done?
it never really ends, sadness. sometimes we crave it in order to be interesting, to feel interesting, worthy of a story that can be told: she was sad about ____/ her sadness was ____.
there have been so many days. even now: not wanting to feel, not wanting to think. i play comedy in the background without watching so i know there is laughter nearby. the apartment hears them and not me, the sounds of the play-acting of others drowning out the silences of my everyday. this is sadness i think. being okay drowned. passivity is a kind of death too.
this isn’t sadness, it’s pain. pain: sadness, muted, while the actors on screen laugh and laugh and laugh. i don’t think about thinking about sadness. i am not sad about ____. my sadness is not ____.
there is no story here.
Cambridge: The couples therapist had an office on the top floor of an old Greek Revival building. The windows from the ceiling cast dreamy panels of light upon the abstract art on her wall. She had a lovely French-sounding name and the first time we met I blurted out, I'm afraid you'll find Beng more interesting than I am. I stared at the art while Beng spoke. I wanted to tell her everything. Everything except actually, studies have shown that abstract art in healthcare settings cause stress, have you considered art about nature instead?
Blank, intense eyes. Lack of output. Non-commital statements. Empty husk. Sleep. Sleep. Unfocused. Expressions of muted bewilderment— what are we doing here? What does it matter? We quietly eat our food, we quietly play with Quinn. Conversations stall. Lack of interest, the wish to become inorganic. Muted, dull bewilderment— why is the world so bright? Why are we—
& yet again.
& yet again i try for quiet, & yet again i search in the gloom and dull for that truth-telling voice. how soft, how far away you seem, you who are so much of me, your voice a subterranean murmur i coax myself to receive. in a rare moment, i once listened closely, and three voices made themselves known in my head; the babbling of depression and anxiety, cogito, or some kind of reasoning reflex; and the last, the rare animal i had been searching for, with all the dying fullness of heart: the self beyond the sleep and smoke, weight and fog.
& yet again i hear her, & yet again i can't.
Harvard: The Harvard school therapist enjoyed giving me print-outs she printed from a Harvard printer. She operated from an office in Harvard University Health Services with a view of Harvard Square and got me to talk about imposter syndrome and other Harvard-related conditions. She also had abstract art on her walls and I felt sorry for the researchers who published that paper about wall art in healthcare settings, because no one else seems to have read it, and all these healthcare settings I inhabit still have abstract art hanging on their walls, and are stressing everyone out.
We have moved back to Singapore.
I am constantly feeling out of place in conversations with people. I seem to be sticking out, not fitting in. My concerns and fixations are too odd, too out of sync with the zeitgeist. Or something. I don’t know.
Things that I agonize over and brood about, seem to come so easily and naturally to others. I spend hours fretting over something, and hours researching for some event for a group of friends, and Y says one line and everyone agrees to drop it, and all my catastrophizing bears no fruit.
And yet, feeling a little stronger. There seem to be fewer opportunities to fall into the unending well of mute pain. The urge to journal again. Slowly, getting things done. Less resistance. Still, an uphill battle. Taking it day by day. Small challenges, small victories. Organizing Quinn’s room, sweeping the deck, trying a new route home, taking myself to the library, to the beach. 250 words a day.
Quinn is painting what she claims is a picture of me sitting on a butterfly. What more do I need? What can compare?
The sky is a gradual white to grey-blue. Rain?
“怎么了? 你爱上我了?”
The Vietnamese therapist at the nail salon asks me if I have fallen in love with her. Sorry, she sniffs in Mandarin, turning up her chin. I have a boyfriend. Nooo, I reply, clutching my chest. Beng is next to me, choosing nail colors from a palette.
She tells me that ten years ago, Singaporean women would go up to her in coffeeshops and tell her to stay away from their husbands, simply because she is Vietnamese. I am affronted on her behalf but am also unsure where to place my useless outrage because she is kneeling before me, washing my feet. Beng hands back the palette— his nails will be black.
Later, she says that Beng “没有笑容” (has no smiles), observed that “你一直跟他开玩笑,可是他没有笑” (you keep joking with him, but he doesn't laugh), and grimly concluded that “你厉害” (you're incredible). I want to tell her, he’s depressed, but don’t. She tallies up the cost of our mani-padi.
It is his birthday. He had suggested doing our nails because I had been too depressed to plan anything special. We wander around Plaza Singapura, holding hands but worlds apart, our nails beautifully painted, and I struggle to remember who told me that depression is “a privileged, bourgeoise illness.”
Sorry, we tell ourselves. Sorry, we tell those around us. Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better.
“Aren’t there lots of famous artists and writers who were also depressed?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, if they could do it, so can you.”
...okay?
Singapore: The clinical psychologist in the public hospital is an older man with a white-noise machine that makes my brain feel like peach fuzz. He sits up very straight and takes pains to use analogies since “you like books and reading right?” Here's one: Kathleen, I imagine you lost in a misty woods. You are wandering around not knowing where to go. But I want to tell you it is the morning mist and it will clear by afternoon and then you'll be able to see the path before you. I carefully nod, and try not to smile too broadly behind my face mask. He cheers me on and gets excited about my slowly improving life. He does not have abstract art in his office. Highly recommend.
The world hurts. It glares. Quinn is too loud. She wants my attention, my love, my smiles. I wince and shy away. I am not here not here not here—
“Mama,” says my solemn, intuitive girl. “Sometimes I think you are missing.”
I don’t understand how people write through depression.
My depression takes the comely form of definitely-not-writing and it does not in any way make me a better writer for the simple reason that there is nothing to write about.
V has made a literary career out of depression— her writing is so beautiful— she has given form to this stupid disorder and receives well-deserved royalties from it.
and yet, how to get rid of the ugliness that arises when her language stirs me?
the shamefacedness, the silver whisper i wish i could have written that, trying to forget the graceless void day in day out, staying in bed, contorting my body into something ever smaller, trying not to compare my inert body to an absent ‘body of work’, the grief-howl of time lost, how they are so young translates into i am so old— Mr. Ramsay, stumbling in the dark after his wife passed, muttering to himself, “Perished! Alone!”— the impatience fueling my writing now, fueled by the low thrum of anxiety: will it come back? i know healing follows its own ebb and flow, i know. but when i am staring at the open document in front of me and the words are swirling and running away and i am breathless trying to catch the thoughts that will turn the words into something true, it is so easy (almost like grace) to yield— here you go my darkest friend, my somber solace, take me away i literally can’t.
It is so strange to share my writing about depression because for the first time, it seems like I have something to hold.
I look at the time I have lost. Gaping voids. Lack of Google docs. Absence of journal entries. I am looking at Nothing, fattened with each passing day, month, year. Nothing— because depression makes me less a person and more a swallowed thing.
Poet Robert Hass shares, “misery is the absence of form— probably a pretty good definition of depression, the inability to tell yourself your story.”
In her prose-poem “Not Writing”, poet Ann Boyer declares, “I am not writing Facebook status updates. I am not writing thank-you notes or apologies. I am not writing conference papers. I am not writing book reviews. I am not writing blurbs.” She goes on for pages, describing all the memos and projects and lists that she is definitely not-writing, a stunning artifact of mourning and rage at all the time and effort and energy that she has lost to cancer. Boyer took the enduringness of not-writing, and turned it into writing. The form it ended up in is, she knows, a paltry substitute for what she had hoped they would be.
But still, it is something to hold onto.
In Michael Cunningham's masterful The Hours, the troubled and suicidal character Virginia Woolf sits at her desk, meets her meagre word count, and
“decides, with misgivings, that she is finished for today. Always, there are these doubts. Should she try another hour? Is she being judicious, or slothful? Judicious, she tells herself, and almost believes it. She has her two hundred and fifty words, more or less. Let it be enough. Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow.”
I love these lines. I quietly repeat them to myself, before I slip to sleep.
But Woolf put stones in her pocket and drowned herself in the Thames. This is an unescapable fact. Always, there are these doubts.
After living with it so long, depression doesn't frighten me anymore. Instead, I regard it with a kind of exasperated awe. Inevitably, it arrives once again, all smoke and mirrors and shadows. I brace myself and suck a breath in. It departs and I breathe out, and look around, resigned, at the ruins it has once again left behind.
Still, I decide that I am finished for today. Should I have tried harder? No, I did my best, and almost believe it.
I have my little scraps of writing, my family, the garden, more or less. Let them be enough. I hope—precarious, skinny thing— I will be here, recognizable to myself, again tomorrow.