The Sheila Variations

On the essays shelf:

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

Another essay from Unholy Ghost, a collection with different writers writing about their experience with depression.

A major issue with depression (TM) is that it eludes language. This is not an original observation, and really since we’ve had language, human beings have been seeking to find appropriate/accurate language to describe this particularly awful and persistent state of being. The Bible does a good job in parts. Poets are particularly good. Winston Churchill described his own depression as a “black dog”, which really resounds with me. Your mileage may vary. It’s frustrating to not have words (outside of cliches) to describe your own experience.

Speaking of language/poets, the title of this excellent essay, which is about language, comes from Shakespeare, As You Like It, from the classically “melancholy” character Jaques.

I don’t think this matter of language just concerns writers, although they may be more attuned to it, since avoiding cliche and finding accurate terms is part of their stock in trade. But even in the writing trade, those who are depressed (in a clinical sense) have a hard time explaining “what it is like for them”, and it becomes even more difficult when the word “depression” has entered the lexicon so forcibly, in a short-hand way, as a stand-in for all of the complexities of brain/emotional chemistry. Then it’s even more alienating. Because the word itself seems to cut off the experience. I wonder if others have felt the same way (I am sure they have). So the word “Depression” is used by everyone, and in a way the word itself is used to cut off the expression of the depth of the experience. It is used to “sum up”, and nobody wants to hear about how you feel split off from yourself, how you feel like you live in a dark windowless room (I think of what I consider to be Sylvia Plath’s saddest line, in a poem where she imagines what her baby sees when she looks up at her mother: “this ceiling without a star”.) You try to find the right words, and someone sums it up, “Sounds like you’re Depressed.”

Joshua Wolf Shenk (great name, huh?) is a journalist specializing in mental health. He wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln, a famous melancholic person. He has struggled with a nameless sense of dissociation since he was a child, being split off from himself, always observing, in a way that is quite painful, but also has helped him to be a writer (and writing helps him with the feeling). Drugs do not help him. Therapy has helped, a bit, at least in finding ways to express his sensations and experience (sometimes a good therapist or doctor, trained to listen on that other deeper level, can “sum up” your experience with an image that sets you free, at least in terms of giving you a structure to understand). My doctor pointed at an empty chair in his office and said, “We are going to put your illness over there in that chair, and we are going to deal with it from over here. We will separate what is your illness and what is your personality. And so the illness will stay over there.” Sounds so simple, but it was really really helpful. Because you can go into a mind-trip: “I’m crazy.” “I clearly can’t cope with life.” “I am an incapable person.” Etc. But depression (TM) is an illness. You wouldn’t NOT treat yourself for pneumonia if you had it, and you wouldn’t consider it a moral failing or a character flaw if you had to get treatment. So I like the image of my illness sitting over in that chair, in the room with me, but distinguished and separated out so it can be managed. It’s an image, a stand-in, a metaphor that is helpful.

William Styron, in his book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, says that he does not like the term “depression” – it is too flat, too unexpressive of the reality of the experience. He prefers “melancholy” (and I guess I’m kind of with him on that). Naturally, doctors need diagnostic language, but when everyone and their Mama babbles about depression without really knowing what it means (and not wanting to hear what it means), you’ve got a problem with language. This is the thesis of Joshua Shenk’s essay (and, not surprisingly, he quotes George Orwell on language. When you limit language, Shenk writes, you limit the “capacity to imagine”, a great great phrase.)

Here is an excerpt.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey: ‘A Melancholy of Mine Own’, by Joshua Wolf Shenk

In Seeing Voices, his book on the language of the death, Oliver Sachs notes that philosophers have long dreamed of “a primordial or original human language, in which everything has its true and natural name; a language so concrete, so particular, that it can catch the essence, the ‘itness’ of everything; so spontaneous that it expresses all emotion directly; and so transparent that it is incapable of any evasion or deception. Such a language would be without (and indeed would have no need for) logic, grammar, metaphor, or abstractions – it would be a language not mediated, a symbolic expression of thought and feeling, but, almost magically, an immediate one.”

I hoped for such fluid, full, direct communication in therapy. I tried to express the relentless stream of criticism that I directed at myself and others, the way I felt split in two, the dull and sharp aches that moved around my body as though taunting me. I wished to plug a probe from my brain to the doctor’s so that he could see – without mediation – how I stood outside myself, watching and criticizing, and could never fully participate in a moment. How I felt bewildered, anguished, horrified.

Instead, I often found myself silent. When I spoke, it was with stumble and stammers. Words – unhappy, anxious, lonely – seemed plainly inadequate, as did modifiers: all the time, without relief. Ordinary phrases such as I feel bad or I am unhappy seemed pallid. Evocative metaphors – My soul is like burned skin, aching at my touch; I have the emotional equivalent of a dislocated limb – were garish. Though this language hinted at how bad I felt, it could not express what it felt like to be me.

I suppose the combination of words, body language, and silence did, in some measure, convey the message, because my first therapist was able to offer me a helpful phrase. “Is it,” he asked, “as though you have a soundtrack of negative thoughts in your head – the volume rising or falling, but never going silent?” I pictured an old reel-to-reel tape machine, sitting alone on a table in an empty room. I lingered over the image, comforted, especially by the acknowledgement that it never stopped. And I felt a spark of recognition, a kind of introduction to the meaning of my own experience.

The soundtrack image was an imperfect one, as I do not “hear images” in the sense of hallucination, nor are the bad feelings that echo inside me always in words, nor can I always discern the difference between self-criticism and observation, between a gratuitous self-slap and a guide to truth.

But of several hundred afternoons in that Cincinnati office, this moment stands out – the offer and acceptance of a liberating, idiosyncratic metaphor, one that would need many revisions, but at least got me on the page. By contrast, I have no memory of hearing the word “depressed”, which was how I was described at that time to my parents and to insurance companies.

In his exhaustive survey, Melancholia & Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times, the historian Stanley W. Jackson concludes that “no literal statement” can convey the experience. But he found that, over 2,500 years, two images recur most often: “being in a state of darkness and being weighed down”. If we consider “melancholy” and “depression” as condensations of these images – as more than diagnoses – they retain enormous power. One of my earliest attempts at essay writing dwelled at length on an image of a dark room lit only by the space beneath the closed door. I did not make a habit of spending time in such rooms. The image of darkness imposed itself upon me, as it has for so many, as a symbol of distress.

And my dislike for the word “depression” does not mean that it has no application in my life. I am often “bowed down greatly” (from Psalm 58), feel weighed upon, feel myself on lower than level ground. Compared with others, it seems, I get less pleasure from what’s pleasurable and have a harder time with what’s hard. My sex drive is often muted (even without antidepressant medication, which exacerbates this problem). Work and activity that require some suspension of self-consciousness – like playing team sports – are difficult, bordering on impossible. I’ve tended toward activities in which self-criticism can be an asset, like writing. A tightness, an anxiety, a desperation usually grips me when I wake, relaxes its hold only occasionally through the day, and accompanies me when I lie down.

But, even as metaphors, these words are too thin to contain a life. For example, the times when I do pass from withdrawn to talkative are often quite unpleasant. Darkness aches, but light blinds.

On the essays shelf:

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

Another essay from Unholy Ghost, a collection with different writers writing about their experience with depression.

It is difficult to describe the harrowing experience of reading Nancy Mairs’ essay. It’s epic. Interestingly, it’s placed back to back with Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s essay on black women and depression, in which Danquah, a black woman, jokes (in a wary way) about all of the depression memoirs that seem to originate from white women in the Boston area. Mairs is a white woman in Massachusetts. Her depression showed up early in her life. She was committed to an asylum for half a year in 1967. Chillingly, she says that she now knows that she was not “crazy”, but that the asylum made her crazy, a common thing that happens. Treat someone as sick, they will act sick (to paraphrase Frances Farmer, another noted “madwoman”). Nancy Mairs had a husband, a daughter, and a lifetime of feeling inadequate and anxious to the point of panic. School filled her with dread, and not being good at something (quadratic equations, for example) was a horrifying experience. She could not manage it. She kept diaries, which she quotes from extensively throughout this monster essay. She eventually became an essayist, and she says that she sees how early that drive to create a narrative for her own life showed up.

She was given shock therapy in the asylum, something she had fought against, refusing to sign the forms that would allow it. Her refusal, or any sign of independence, was always interpreted as part of her illness. Any autonomy of self was suspect. It’s terrifying to read. (Another example, which made me love her: while in the hospital, she would sit in the common room with her transistor radio, and listen to Red Sox games with a little earpiece. When the Red Sox would score, she would cheer out loud, a common and valid response from any sports fan. But in the context of the hospital, it was seen as evidence of her Cray-Cray.) This is not to say she did not have a serious illness. Her panic and depression were so overwhelming they engulfed her. And, following that, the shame in not being capable, or able to “cope”, drowned her further. It’s a devastating self-confirming loop.

Her husband stuck by her. She writes, awfully, about how everything ceased feeling real, even her own daughter. That was right before her hospitalization. The way she writes it, the staff of the hospital were not trained to deal with the whole person, and many of them were “getting their experience” at this hospital before moving on to more prestigious hospitals like McLean. So there were lots of newbies, basically. She was admitted in the middle of the night, a huge mistake, which gave her the feeling of being in a state of emergency. She was catatonic with despair, and the doctor in charge of admitting her, who barely spoke English, kept saying to her, “Why are you here? Why are you here?”

Incompetent.

She writes so well about it that you long to bust her out of there. She was a child in the 1950s, and a young adult in the 1960s, and psychiatric medicine was still relatively new, and many of the “cures” were brutal. The shock therapy obliterated her short-term memory, although it did help her get her appetite back (she had slipped down to 93 pounds while in the hospital). One can only imagine how frightening that must have been, and how scared her husband and daughter must have been. She writes, honestly, about how she could tell that her daughter, very young, sort of discounted her mother as a valid influence in her life. Her daughter was All About Dad, which makes sense. Many bridges needed to be repaired.

The question remains: why did so many white women, so privileged and fortunate, all that, have such an issue with depression? Mairs writes (and I loved this line):

The wider my horizons, the more space in my world for disaster …

So why is that? We could be dismissive of these “privileged” women who can’t cope, who are so weak as to fall apart, the whole “first world problems” thing, but all of that is highly toxic to me, and I stay away from people who hold such views. When fighting for your mental health, you must do what you can to be with people who are positive, who love you, who can call you on your shit, but do so from a loving place. Contempt is forbidden. Life is hard enough. But Mairs is aware enough of her position to really speak about it. It’s fascinating.

I recently read Joan Acocella’s Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, a book on the “hysteria” phenomenon, particular to the Victorian era, as well as the “multiple personality disorder” phenomenon (very similar in nature), which exploded in the 80s and 90s, fading pretty quickly (although it still has some influence in psych literature). So here is where things get political, and here is where people start to tune you out, because of “feminist fatigue” or whatever the hell their problem is. There is also a dovetail with Elvis, as there usually is. If, on an unconscious level, you do not like the formula set out for you by the culture, if you fear you cannot live up to it, cannot fit into it, or have no desire to join that culture … often splits in the psyche can occur. (We have seen this come about in a tragic form with the recent epidemic of suicides of LGBT teens. A classic example.) The entire culture shouts at you at almost every moment, “Here is what you should want.” I’m a middle-aged unmarried woman with no children, so you’re going to just have to take my word for it, how intrusive and oppressive the messages can be when you don’t fit into the demographic at ALL. I am not feeling sorry for myself. In many ways, my life suits me. I love that I am free and unfettered, and I can go to Memphis by myself for a week and have a blast by myself. Regardless, this is my life, I only have one of them, and so I do not want to walk around with my head down, shamefaced about how I don’t have any of the things my peers have. HOWEVER: if you are a sensitive person, as most depressives are, then you will feel these things deeply. You will have to monitor your boundaries like a Soviet prison camp guard. You will have to pick and choose what you let into your head. It can be exhausting. The overall social construct is there, it’s set in stone. I am an outlaw, in many ways. I don’t mean to sound grandiose. I have many friends in similar positions. And all of my friends are accepting, and don’t give it a second thought, that my life doesn’t look like theirs. That’s not why we’re friends.

My point is, though, that that pressure is real. That pressure exists. And sometimes it does engulf the landscape. Shaming comments about being “self-indulgent”, or being “selfish” , are hurtful, ignorant, and insensitive.

But on a political level, especially in Mairs’ generation: you have the white picket fence dream, and you are supposed to fit into that. It is a VERY specific dream. It’s not just about finding someone you love and going off and being happy. It’s domestically-based, it involves specific products and outward aspects, and it’s the be-all end-all if you are a woman. There is a vast amount of research, both anecdotal and actual, showing that this attitude can actually CAUSE craziness.

Women were all going insane in Victorian-era with something called “hysteria”. Doctors would masturbate these women to orgasm, basically to calm them down. And with all the research, nobody seems to have said, “Women are freaking out because they lack political power and agency.” I am not an expert, so maybe some people were saying that! But in general, it was seen as a medical malady, rather than a political one.

And here we have again, a white woman, who is fortunate, educated, and privileged, being unable to deal with life as it is supposed to be. Her reaction to the culture was to basically opt out of it, by getting sick. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is all about that. I missed the political implications of her book when I first read it as a teenager, her dread of the conformity of the 1950s. Now that’s pretty much all I see. Again: Elvis is relevant: much of the mayhem he brought about seems to have been a reaction to the conformity of what was expected of girls at that time. As Lester Bangs observed in his famous obituary for Elvis:

Elvis Presley was the man who brought overt blatant vulgar sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America (and thereby to the nation itself, since putting “popular arts” and “America” in the same sentence seems almost redundant). It has been said that he was the first white to sing like a black person, which is untrue in terms of hard facts but totally true in terms of cultural impact. But what’s more crucial is that when Elvis started wiggling his hips and Ed Sullivan refused to show it, the entire country went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent which culminated in the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the sixties.

I mean, don’t tell me about Lenny Bruce, man – Lenny Bruce said dirty words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing, whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truck driver who worshipped his mother and would never say shit or fuck around her, and Elvis alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as repressed as ours and how much you could get away with, but Elvis kicked “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” out the window and replaced it with “Let’s fuck.” The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates.

This is political in nature.

Also, it is important to keep in mind how oppressive the pressure is for girls to be “pleasing” and please others. There can be a certain relief in submerging into depression, saying, “You know what? I don’t give a shit anymore.” It’s all related, and is quite a tangle. Untangling it has been the work of Mairs’ life.

Mairs essay, like I said, is enormous and there are many different elements to it, all of them fascinating (she’s a hell of a writer). But here’s a section I particularly liked.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey: ‘On Living Behind Bars’, by Nancy Mairs

I finally found out what was “wrong” with me years and years later in a conversation with my present therapist. I had been bemoaning – still – my inability to make friends when Ken asked me how I had liked to spend my time when I was young. After I described, with considerable enthusiasm, the long walks I took in all weathers through the woods behind my house, he said, “There’s a term for people like you.” “What?” I perked up, always eager to pick up a new bit of psychological jargon. “It’s called being introverted,” he said. Introverted, for God’s sake. Some new jargon. Yet, familiar though the word was, I’d never applied it to myself. And suddenly, trying it on, I understood that my loneliness was not an aberration but an existential choice. “I think I ought to want friends,” I jotted in my journal after our conversation. “But by and large people don’t exist for me unless they’re present or built into my interior landscape. And I certainly don’t want to spend time with them.”

Introversion is no illness. It’s simply a habit of mind. Why then did I view it as the doom of my happiness and fulfillment? I could have done so only by believing that the one avenue to that happiness and fulfillment was laid not with my own insights and actions but with my relationships to others. And there, of course, is the paving stone of a womanly existence: to create and elaborate the social bonds that sustain community. Church fairs. Choir picnics. PTA. Summer playground programs. Covered-dish suppers. Christmas pageants. The men may leave the community regularly – in a village the size of the one I grew up in, all but a handful had to work elsewhere – but they leave their women behind with their telephones and their morning coffees and their bridge luncheons and their afternoon teas, all talking a mile a minute, their words like needles and patches and thread, their lives one long quilting bee of human bonding. Gossip is not idle. It is an exercise in design, the picking out of patterns in the social fabric. The fingers of every woman strengthen and embellish the whole.

A woman clumsy with a needle can thus be a serious liability, as can one who shirks the task. I kept meandering off, both literally, on those long solitary wooded ambles, and figuratively, plunging into inward thickets because I had “too much to think about.” My mother moderated and socialized my behavior as best she could. She frowned at, though she did not forbid, my jaunts. She paid for, though she could ill afford, ballroom-dancing lessons, summer camp, Fellowship retreats. She discouraged those too-passionate single attachments I formed desperately time and again, those fascinations with one other which disrupt the warp and woof of social intercourse. Instead she approved of group activities, and these I plowed into compulsively, taking on more and more responsibility, until the race from stage to printer to pulpit to meeting hall left me more than half dead with exhaustion.

None of this gave me any less to think about, only less time in which to do the thinking. Why then did I do it? I was a genuinely good child, a typical first-child/girl, who liked to please others. My mother conveyed to me, for the most part tacitly, that my natural way of being – solemn, solitary, reflective – was neither wholesome nor attractive; and my experience certainly bore her out. I was in a hopeless bind: to do as I would – to please others – I could not be as I was. And the greed for thinking: What does that signify? Simply, I think now, that I was a writer, which is not so dreadful a fate when you think about some of its alternatives. I could, for example, have been a certified public accountant. But from this distance I can see that, for that girl in that small town in the late 1950s, it set up some insoluble conflicts that turned it into quite a dreadful fate indeed.

On the essays shelf:

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

Another essay from Unholy Ghost, a collection with different writers writing about their experience with depression.

One of the best essays in the entire collection.

I’ll just admit flat-out that I hadn’t considered the fact that people of color (in this case, a black woman) would have any issues whatsoever in admitting they were depressed (or, no more so than white people would: it’s hard either way). I just figured that depression obviously hits everyone, there’s no reason that white people should be more depressed than black (or vice versa). An essay like this works on multiple levels, and could be considered almost revolutionary, in the fact that it gives voice to a population that has been left out of the literature of depression.

And it was illuminating, too. Now nobody wants to admit they are depressed. Nobody is PSYCHED that they are depressed. But Danquah, in her essay, expresses the reality for black women in Western culture, still racist in many ways. From both sides, I should hasten to mention, and she goes into that in her essay. The racist trope of the “Mammy” still has currency in our culture. Black women are expected to be strong, caretakers, unflappable. They usually play “wise” women in Hollywood (either that, or whores, or nurse-aides. We are just now, in the last 20 or so years, seeing that start to break apart, although we still have a ways to go.) Black women are supposed to be rocks. In their churches, they are the ones who keep things running. They are never allowed a bad day. And if they DO have a bad day, and lose their temper, then suddenly they are the “Angry Black Woman”, another racist trope. Totally hemmed in.

And so: you are a black woman and you struggle with depression, as Danquah does. She makes it clear, in her opening, that she reads books to escape, learn, grow. She doesn’t need to read books that reflect her experience. That’s not why she reads. But it’s different for her in terms of depression literature. There, she is looking for herself. She is looking for validation that she is not alone. There must be other black women who suffer in a similar way. But book after book is written by white women, Jewish women, all who seem to live in Boston or its suburbs (she’s very funny about that: “What IS it about Boston??”). And so what happens, overall, is that she started to feel isolated (and isolation is one of the defining characteristics of depression, anyway – but in her case it was exacerbated).

She details a couple of anecdotes that are chilling and eloquent about the overall reaction of well-meaning people (look out for those well-meaners, they’re the worst) when she would tell them she was writing a book about black women and depression. One white woman says, laughing, “… when black women start going on Prozac, you know the whole world is falling apart.” She clearly meant this as a compliment: You black women are so strong, you are known for your strength, God help us if you admit you are weak. Can you see how harmful that attitude is? The pressure it puts on black women? Danquah also experienced similar reactions, however, from the black community. She would get hostile/dismissive reactions from black women. One black woman said to her, “Depression? I don’t think they were talking about us. That is not a luxury we can afford.” One other black woman said to her:

“That’s all about white folks who don’t have any real problems, so they have to create stuff to complain about. If black women started taking to their beds and crying about postpartum depression, who’d be left to play nanny to all those white babies?”

This leaves no space, none whatsoever, for a black woman to admit she struggles.

Interestingly enough, while she was an MFA student at Bennington, Danquah met Robert Bly, who is, perhaps, the apex of a certain kind of White Male. All kinds of stereotypes and preconceived notions apply there as well, something Danquah was well aware of. One day, she sat with Robert Bly at his table in the cafeteria. She had never met him. One of her classmates introduced her and said, “Meri is writing a book on black women and depression.” Danquah writes:

Robert Bly looked over at me again and said, without hesitation, sarcasm, or irony, “Whew. That’s going to be one really long book.”

I love this. I love that he got it. Danquah writes:

Based on his frank reaction, Robert Bly obviously had some idea of what is hidden behind that myth.

Danquah speaks of the pressure in the black community to “keep it real”, which means all sorts of different things, but in her case, she felt it meant ignoring the warning calls of real illnesses, such as postpartum depression, other kinds of depression – an unwillingness and inability to distinguish illness of a psychological nature. This is deep stuff. The essay could only be written by a black woman, who knows this stuff from the inside, and has the writing skill to parse it all out.

This is a not-to-be-missed essay and should be read in its entirety. The excerpt can’t do the whole thing justice. You get the sense, as you read it, that this really is an act of service, and not in the “Mammy” sense, but in the compassionate and courageous sense. She is willing to speak the truth, she is willing to put it out there and risk cruel comments from pretty much everyone who do not want to hear the message.

She has struggles with her depression, as a black woman, that white depressed people just do not encounter.

Great great essay. Here’s an excerpt.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey: ‘Writing the Wrongs of Identity’, by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah

As a black woman struggling with depression, I don’t know which I fear more: the identity of illness or the identity of wellness. One might imagine that the identity of wellness would, naturally, be the more desirable of the two. But that’s usually the problem with desire: what you see is not necessarily what you get. The societal images of black female wellness, as evidenced (still) in present-day popular culture, have nothing at all to do with being well. Far from it. They have everything to do with the lies of history – a history that, invariably, has been shaped, created, or informed by the poisonous ideology of racism.

In those lies black women are strong. Strong enough to work two jobs while single-handedly raising twice as many children. Black women can cook, they can clean, they can sew, they can type, they can sweep, they can scrub, they can mop, and they can pray. Black women can fuck, too. They are rarely romanticized, just oversexualized. Hookers, whores, Thursday-night concubines, and sultry-voiced back-alley blues club singers with Venus Hottentot hips. Either that or they are desexualized, just straight-up masculinized, mean-faced and hardened. Whatever the case, black women are always doing. They are always servicing everyone’s needs, except their own. Their doing is what defines their being. And this is supposed to be wellness.

Not that the identity of illness is any better. Its only appeal is the allowance for vulnerability. You are able to need others, to invite their assistance, to accept their love – the catch is that you also have to be fragile. Anybody who’s ever really been sick knows that the tolerance level for illness is low. Once the get-well roses begin to wilt, everything changes. Compassion and caretaking turn into burdens and vulnerability becomes weakness.

If the illness is something as nebulous as depression, folks begin to treat it like a character flaw: you are lazy, incapable, selfish, self-absorbed. The list is pretty much the same regardless of one’s race. But race cannot and should not be disregarded: there is no room in the black female identity for weakness, laziness, incapability, selfishness, self-absorption, or even depression.

If I were to say that reading all the books by those depressed white people did not have a profound impact on my ability to come to terms with my own battle against depression, it would be disingenuous. Each one was like a mirror. Even if the external reflection looked nothing at all like me, what I saw of the internal reality was an accurate representation. The disease was the same, the symptoms were the same. The resulting confusing and hurt were the same.

None of that was enough though. I craved wholeness. I wanted to recognize all of me. Yet no matter how much these authors’ confessions assuaged the discomfort I felt within, their stories could only meet the marrow and bone. They could never move outward and touch the flesh, the blackness that dictated the world in which I existed. What they could, and did, do was inspire me to write my own story. In writing that story I began, finally, to see why voices like mine were all but absent in discussions about depression.