The Books: Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey; ‘A Delicious Placebo’, by Virginia Heffernen

On the essays shelf:

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey.

Moving on from Orwell, into this wonderful collection of essays by different writers who have all struggled with depression. It is ironic, and perhaps perfect, that this book would come up next on the shelf (I have been doing Book Excerpts since 2005 – I can’t believe it – my first entry is here – and I’m still nowhere near done.) And of course I have added books to the library since 2005. Doing a “daily” book excerpt (more or less) is one of my ongoing projects on my site, something that has kept me writing in dark days when I don’t feel like writing. It’s also fun to just go back and SEE all the books that I have. I go in order, I don’t skip around. I bought Unholy Ghost in August of 2002 (I always write my name and the date bought on the first page. It’s a good record.) From April to August of 2002 was a terrible time for me, and I started my blog – the first version of it anyway – in October of 2002. It was one of the ways I climbed myself out of the pit. The fact that I would buy a book on depression in August of 2002 is eloquent and reminds me of what whole time. I had gone into a deep trough. I wrote a bit about it here. I was in therapy at the time, and had been for a couple of years, but she basically threw her hands up in defeat and sent me a psychiatrist to get me on some drugs. (I do not look back on that therapist kindly.) August was the nadir. So I see my scrawled signature and “August 2002” in the first pages of this book, and remember that frightening time.

The collection is superb. Everyone’s experience of depression is different. If you struggle, you will probably find some version of yourself on these pages, or maybe an amalgamation of different people’s experiences. I would read it and think, “Oh, yes, that’s me”, and then 2 sentences later, “Okay, that’s not me.” There are various degrees. Some people are diagnosed, have been hospitalized numerous times. Others have it strike them from out of the blue (Larry McMurtry’s essay is fascinating and fantastic: he found himself depressed after having heart surgery). Women and men are equally represented.

These essays did not help me out of the trough, but they helped me verbalize to myself what was happening. It is so difficult to describe it to people who may love you but do not understand. They think you’re having a bad day. They can’t understand why you have a hard time with simple tasks like washing the dishes. They think you should fake it til you make it. Now. There is a huge value in faking it till you make it, if you can manage to do so. I recently read a fantastic Captain Awkward column, about how to “tighten up your game at work”, even though you are depressed. There is some really good advice there. There are things you must do: you must clean yourself, you must pay your bills, you must feed yourself. Anyone who knows true depression knows how difficult these things can be. Captain Awkward provides some strategies. Again, if you do not struggle with serious depression, if your only context is having a “bad day”, or being “upset” when something bad goes down in your life – it may be very difficult to understand the actual disease. I think Unholy Ghost would also be an excellent book to give to someone who loves you and doesn’t understand (but wants to understand). If there’s an essay in here that resonates, that expresses FOR you what it feels like, it may be helpful to your loved one to read it.

I’m not here to give advice, my only qualification being knowing this stuff from the inside. I write personally, I realize, but the majority of stuff I do not share. It certainly helps me, though, to actually write openly and honestly about these things, and be frank about my struggles. Being honest often draws trolls out of the woodwork, and has attracted the attention of crazies who enjoy harassing someone when she is down. There are others who cannot bear someone being so honest and so think it’s appropriate to give advice. I only take advice from those I know and trust. Random people on the Internet do not get space in my brain. If you want an example of what I mean, check out this comments thread. Depression sure brought out a mansplainer! It was impossible to even describe how obnoxious he was being, and how condescending, although I think I did a pretty job there. There are those, too, who see all of this stuff as “whining”, but these people should just count themselves fortunate that they have never struggled with depression, and obviously have no idea what I am talking about. Seriously: y’all are lucky. On the flip side, I get the best emails sometimes, from others who struggle, who feel recognized. So I am writing for THOSE people.

But it is a risk. I have serious boundaries, despite the fact that I write openly. I know this stuff pushes people’s buttons.

The first essay in the collection is by Virginia Heffernen, who founded Talk magazine. I am sure I have read more of her stuff (her resume is vast, she writes for all the big magazines and sites), but this is the piece I will always associate her with. It’s the first essay in the collection, and reading it was a blessing to me. Out of all of them, I “saw myself” the most in her essay. I recognized the pattern. I understood exactly what she went through. She talks about crying so deeply that she felt “blood-poisoned with tears” (a great line). Her depression was activated by a breakup, but on closer reflection she sees that she had other serious episodes, earlier in her life. Depression often goes undiagnosed, let alone something like bipolar. Bipolar is often misdiagnosed as either depression or anxiety, when it is neither.

Her descriptions have stayed in my mind for over 10 years now. She talks about how her field of vision narrowed, as a survival technique to deal with the depression. She came up with a concept called The Pillars: things she had to do, routines she had to follow, in order to stave off the depression. I remember the Pillars so well. And, more than anything else, I am just thankful that she had the guts to write it all down. Because it helped me. It didn’t change anything, but it put into words my own experience. I didn’t call my routines The Pillars (although since I read her essay, I have certainly thought from time to time that this or that was a Pillar for me), but I had them, and I had the same relationship to them.

She’s a fantastic writer. I just re-read the essay this morning, and felt, yet again, thankful, and grateful, for her talent and openness. Stuff like this helps. In the same way that reading The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, helps. You’re not alone. Melancholy has been around since man began.

If you find this topic confronting, and many people do, then I would ask that you find your self-awareness, that you say to yourself, “Wow. I am confronted by this topic”, and instead of racing in to give advice, to dismiss, to explain away, you sit with how confronted you are, you acknowledge that you are confronted (and who knows, there may be a deeper understanding or meaning behind that confrontation), and you just listen.

Here is an excerpt, although I highly recommend seeking out the entire collection.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey: ‘A Delicious Placebo’, by Virginia Heffernen

I would mention the Pattern, for instance, or treason. I’d spin out theories to movie agents on the phone or strangers on buses, whom I interrogated about their families and their faith. I couldn’t stop myself. If anyone struck up a conversation with me, I drove it steeply deeper. I also talked that way to my friends, who told me that I sounded “abstract”. Sometimes I thought they were right, and so I briskly invented an antidote, the Pillars – a rote series of activities designed to ground me like a middle-school curriculum: exercise, travel, religion, dates, art/music, job. Robotically, I went to the gym, to church, to the Met, to parties, to Seattle. I tried to confine my schedule exclusively to the Pillars – checking them off like a tourist – to keep myself from meandering or morbid thinking. When I stuck with it, I congratulated myself on my own sad, neat world. No one can call me abstract now, I thought. But other times I thought, To hell with people who think I’m abstract.

Rejecting advice or wisdom made me feel solitary, bunkered, and furious. In those times, depression didn’t stay pure; it got scorched with anger. That meant no more church and no more compassion. I paced briskly through the Pillar rituals, feeling hot flashes of meanness – glad to see people suffer, glad that someone got into a divorce mess, very glad that a man slept with an empty Mad Dog bottle hugged to his chest on my building’s front steps. Good, I hope he dies, I thought, and it seemed like a new alliance – with death now, which I imagined as an I-beam, slamming through my chest.