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.

Darcey Steinke is a novelist. She wrote Suicide Blonde, among other things, but that book was a hit, translated into seven languages. In this essay, ‘Poodle Bed’, she writes eloquently and very very specifically about a bout of depression she experienced, following her parents’ breakup and a breakup with her boyfriend.

Since she was a child, she used to take her favorite blanket and create what her brother called a “poodle bed” in her closet, where she would curl up when she felt sad, or needed comfort. She still does this as an adult.

One of the reasons this is such an effective essay is that she stays personal and subjective. She is not trying to discuss Depression as a whole. She describes, blow by blow, what her experience was, and what she felt, and thought. This is the stuff that is so hard to get at. Depression dulls the edges of experience, things flatten out, and it is very hard to describe in a way that actually gets the experience across. One of the best evocations of depression (and psychosis, really) in literature is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Now Raskolnikov is obviously a Travis Bickle-type, and so shouldn’t be lumped in with Depressives, per se – however, Dostoevsky’s description of what life feels like to Raskolnikov, its obsessions, its worries, and its flatness, his inability to connect, his isolation, is one of the greatest achievements in literature. That’s the thing about Travis Bickle: his behavior is often incomprehensible and even monstrous. But the genius of it (the writing, and the performance) is that we empathize. I wrote about that here: especially in terms of the painful scene with Peter Boyle. The destabilizing effect of Taxi Driver is that we are never allowed to separate ourselves from Travis’ outlook. It is a great work of compassion, when looked at in that context. Crime and Punishment works in the same way. Life for Raskolnikov is a bell jar of pain. He has no escape. And neither do we, when reading the book.

The way Dostoevsky does that is by staying specific. What Raskolnikov sees, thinks, feels, smells. The only way to approach a universal truth is by staying in the specifics. We see this time and time again in art. There is a fine line between being specific and being self-indulgent or exhibitionistic. Sometimes I read a personal essay about depression, and the person is unable to achieve that transcendent universalism: they don’t have the gift of transcendence. I wrote about that a little bit here, comparing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay about his Crack Up and the recent Elizabeth Wurtzel piece which got everyone talking. If I had to analyze the difference, I would say that Wurtzel lacks the distance required to really describe her own crack-up. She is still IN it. She’s also not as talented a writer as Fitzgerald, so there’s that, although I am still glad that she wrote the piece. I think she was doing her best to get at the truth of her situation. But there’s a strain of self-righteousness in the work that I think people were pissed off by, and also a lack of self-awareness. It is true that depression can dull your perceptions: you cannot see the forest for the trees. That’s part of the agony of it. You cannot think your way out of it.

Darcey Steinke, here, does not make Wurtzel’s mistakes. She has some distance from the crack-up, and can re-enter the experience through sensory details, which really resonate and last. You know she is saying, “This is what happened. This is how I felt. This is what I saw.” It is the opposite of self-indulgent (an accusation often thrown at depressed people trying to describe their depression, and believe me, it does not HELP.) I think trying to describe Melancholy, an affliction that has been with us since man was conscious, is one of the most important things a writer can attempt. Maybe YOUR life is all pretty ponies and happy endings, and you have a positive perspective that helps you weather the storms, but that is not true for a vast number of us, and it is great when a writer can actually crack open those seams and let us see what it was like.

It’s different for everyone. The human mind is wily, strange, and elusive. But I know I read Darcey Steinke’s piece about her poodle bed, and her baffled family, and her unbearable sadness, and although the particulars are different, I related. She is getting at some Big Truth here. I appreciate it very much.

Here’s an excerpt.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey: ‘Poodle Bed’, by Darcey Steinke

I sent the red-haired boyfriend away that night, folded my futon in half, wedged it into a corner, wrapped the blue comforter around me, and sobbed. The identity I’d cobbled together was coming apart like tissue paper in water. I felt as if I had to hold on to the edges of the futon. My body began to feel as dull and dead as the bookshelf or the hardwood floor. At three in the morning I called my mother, who got so upset over my sobbing that she called my little brother, who was also living in the area. He dutifully came over in the middle of the night and slept on the floor beside my poodle bed.

In the morning he helped me pack up my stuff and drag the furniture to the street corner. In the late afternoon we took the bus up to Bernal Heights to his girlfriend’s apartment. My mother bought me an emergency plane ticket home even though I already had a bus ticket to Virginia; she understood I couldn’t handle the droning three-day ride. My brother ordered Chinese food and we ate silently while I cried. He was afraid to touch me, and when I clung to his neck, he patted my back, his palm flat and awkward. I knew my brother loved me but his gesture embarrassed me. His girlfriend was more comfortable with my endless crying. She made me a kind of poodle bed on their couch with a woven Mexican blanket and a tapestry pillow stuffed into a white case. They slept on the other side of the French doors and the form of their bodies under the blanket, spooned together, made me feel like a disembodied spirit. They were vital people with an apartment and a singular, loving relationship. I had killed myself and was only a ghost now come back to lurk around and mooch off their young lives.

When a strip of light appeared on the horizon, I got up to shower. I remember the spray of water, the way the first light fell into the liquid strains and made it look metallic, and how the water seemed to scald my body. I glanced out the little bathroom window. The scene was like a miniature medieval painting, with slanted roofs spread over a pinkish mountain, and again I had the painful sensation that I was dead, or worse, had never been born. Time zigzagged sideways. I didn’t exist, so I could take no pleasure in the material world. In fact, I held a grudge against everything that contained mass, from the bar of soap in the dish to the navy shower curtain with the overly cheerful and red dashes of color.

My brother rode with me on the airport shuttle bus. I remember the faces of the people coming out of their homes, and how each time a new person with an anxious expression stepped inside and sat down on the vinyl seats, I felt sadder. Everything seemed to increase my misery, the changes in the morning light, the blue mailboxes on the occasional street corner, the fact that a whole year of my life had been wasted. I felt like I’d been found incompetent and fired from my own life.

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.

What a thoughtful and difficult essay this is. Edward Hoagland, a man in his 50s at the time, writes about suicide. His perspective is not mine, and that is one of the reasons I so appreciate his contribution, because it shows the universality of depression, how no one is exempt. And while generalizations sometimes are not helpful, sometimes they are. It can help one feel that one is not alone. Hoagland was a Korean War vet, so he grew up in a time when heroes were revered, when men were expected to behave in a certain way. He writes a lot about men in this essay, and it’s a fascinating glimpse of the struggles of men, culturally, socioeconomically, emotionally. Women are (to generalize) expected to be more interior-looking (mainly because only until recently they did not have any political power). And men were supposed to be more objective. Hoagland has found that to be true, but it’s not so black and white. He has found that when he has confided in women of his suicidal depression, women are more likely to follow up with periodic phone calls, postcards: in other words, his emotional abyss is on their radar. Whereas when he has spoken with male friends, they will listen, they will sometimes admit that they, too, have felt that despair that he mentions. But that will be that. There are positives in both reactions. People get so nuts nowadays when anyone dares to say “women are like this” or “men are like this”, and it is just another example of how public discourse has deteriorated. Let us admit nuance, let us talk about nuance, let us not be so black and white. We are dead in the water if we stop being able to listen to one another.

And, in a way, that is the topic of Hoagland’s essay. He talks about suicide and the devastation it leaves behind in families and friends. He talks about the different kinds of suicide: those who slip quietly away, conscious of not wanting to leave a mess, and those who want to go out in a blaze of glory, messing up other people’s lives (ie: jumping in front of a rush-hour commuter train). There is the “selfish” criticism, and Hoagland suggests that men are more likely to be painted with the “selfish” brush, because of their position in society (even still, even now, this is true). What have YOU got to complain about?? is the common theme. You have a wife, a job, a house in the suburbs … what on earth is wrong with you? This, naturally, can make things worse, for the man suffering from suicidal ideation.

This makes me think of Lee Strasberg’s theory of the “blight of Ibsen”, described in Clifford Odets’ 1940 journal:

He spoke of what he called “the blight of Ibsen”, saying that Ibsen had taught most writers after him how to think undramatically. He illustrated this by an example. A man has been used to living in luxury finds he is broke and unable to face life — he goes home and puts a bullet in his head. That, Lee said, any fair theatre person can lay out into a play. But it is not essentially a dramatic view of life. Chekhov is dramatic, he said, for this is how he treats related material: a man earns a million rubles and goes home and lies down on them and puts a bullet in his head.

Hoagland is curious about the fact that more men than women kill themselves by guns. He is not defensive, so I would hope that people are not defensive in response. He asks a woman friend why she thinks that is, and why it is that more men than women commit suicide in general. His friend says, “I’m not going to go into the self-indulgence of men.” Hoagland is not angry at that response. On the contrary. He considers it, and considers the implications. One of the important things to keep in mind, and this is something that classic psychotherapy often doesn’t touch, is how society works ON us.

Consider the Victorian malady of “hysteria”. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that women suffered from such a thing due to political reasons, and political powerlessness. Political powerlessness can manifest itself in all kinds of insane ways. It is a valid response to having no social outlet, no freedom (outside the domestic realm), and a society designed to keep you on a pedestal. You know what it means when you’re on a pedestal? It means you are supposed to be perfect, and everything that happens to you that is NOT perfect is somehow wrong. You are not human. In Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, he describes the first moment the two are naked, and the shock Oscar feels when he realizes that women had hair “down there” too. (Unfortunately, we are back in the Dark Ages yet again in our current day when it comes to women’s body hair, but that’s another topic.) The ignorance of Oscar, of the fact that women are actually human, is a social and political problem, although human beings on the ground at the time obviously wouldn’t see it that way.

The focus on sex in psychotherapy is not entirely off the mark, especially if society is repressed. However, cultural and political injustice have as much to do with “depression” as bad childhoods. It’s a depth unplumbed in most therapeutic literature that is not strictly feminist in bent. But Hoagland approaches it in his piece, and for that, I am truly grateful. He is coming at it from the male side, and the pressures men feel in society, and also how “not done” it is to even mention these pressures. You aren’t going to get much sympathy. You’re a man, you’re top of the heap, you’ve got it all, what the hell are you complaining about?

Again, this is not something I relate to, because I’m a woman, but I am appreciative of Hoagland for how clearly he puts it out there.

He opens with a chilling revelation: He has a gun at home, he’s had it for years. He was a good marksman, he enjoys shooting, no biggie. But at some point in his 50s, he stopped trusting himself to have bullets in the house. He just didn’t want them to be around, in case some abyss opened up. He knew he was a danger to himself.

And what does death actually mean? What does death mean to someone who fantasizes about it? Who knows that that is a path he COULD take, if the situation got bad enough? It’s still so taboo. Hoagland is brave enough to talk about it. He’s brave enough to talk about the sadness of men, and the helplessness of men, something that can be completely destabilizing to men, especially because society expects men to be strong, to suck it up, to do the right thing, to be a provider, to show no weakness.

In a deeply moving sentence, Hoagland writes:

Men greet one another with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

There’s another piece in the collection by an African-American woman which is FASCINATING, because she talks about the cultural and social pressure on African-American women to be “strong”. Nobody wants to hear about the depression of black women, least of all other black people. It is very isolating for this writer, and it’s a greatly compassionate and revelatory piece, and probably very validating for other black women who suffer similarly. The “Mammy” stereotype is a racist trope, obviously, but that’s the horrible thing about racism’s legacy: it can get inside your head. You’re supposed to be a “Mammy”, white people expect it of you, and other black people expect it of you, and to admit you’re “depressed” when you’re black? Self-indulgent nonsense. But I’ll post an excerpt of that essay when I get to it, it’s one of my favorites in the entire book.

Hoagland’s essay is brutally honest, and to some degree is a philosophical contemplation on death, and our relationship to that great mystery.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey: ‘Heaven and Nature’, by Edward Hoagland

I can remember how urgently my father worried that word would get out, after a preliminary operation for his cancer. He didn’t want to be written off, counted out of the running at the corporation he worked for and in other enclaves of competition. Men often compete with one another until the day they die; comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor. As breadwinners, they must be considered fit and sound by friend as well as foe, and so there’s lots of truth to the most common answer I heard when asking why three times as many men as women kill themselves: “They don’t know how to ask for help.” Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

I’m not entirely like that; and I discovered when I confided something of my perturbation to a woman friend she was likely to keep telephoning me or mailing cheery postcards, whereas a man would usually listen with concern, communicate his sympathy, and maybe intimate that he had pondered the same drastic course of action himself a few years back and would end up respecting my decision either way. Open-mindedness seems an important attribute to a good many men, who pride themselves on being objective, hearing all sides of an issue, on knowing that truth and honesty do not always coincide with social dicta, and who may even cherish a subterranean outlaw streak that, like being ready to violently defend one’s family, reputation, and country, is by tradition male.

Men, being so much freer than women in society, used to feel they had less of a stake in the maintenance of certain churchly conventions and enjoyed speaking irreverently about various social truisms, including the principle that people ought to die on schedule, not cutting in ahead of their assigned place in line. But contemporary women, after their triumphant irreverence during the 1960s and 1970s, cannot be generalized about so easily. They turn as skeptical and saturnine as any man. In fact, women attempt suicide more frequently, but favor pills or other passive methods, whereas two-thirds of the men who kill themselves have used a gun. In 1996, 87 percent of suicides by means of firearms were done by men. An overdose of medication hasn’t the same finality. It may be reversible, if the person is discovered quickly, or be subject to benign miscalculation to start with. Even if it works, it can be fudged by a kindly doctor in the record keeping. Like an enigmatic drowning or a single-car accident that baffles the suspicions of the insurance company, a suicide by drugs can be a way to avoid making a loud statement, and merely illustrate the final modesty of a person who didn’t wish to ask for too much of the world’s attention.

Unconsummated attempts at suicide can strike the rest of us as self-pitying and self-aggrandizing, however, or like plaintive plea bargaining. “Childish,” we say, though actually the suicide of children is ghastly beyond any stunt of self-mutilation an adult may indulge in because of the helplessness that echoes through the act. It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide that they don’t want to live.

Love is the solution to all dilemmas, we sometimes hear. And in those moments when the spirit bathes itself in beneficence and manages to transcend the static of personalities rubbing fur off each other, indeed it is. Without love nothing matters, Paul told the Corinthians, a mystery which, if true, has no ready Darwinian explanation. Love without a significant sexual component and for people who are unrelated to us serves little practical purpose. It doesn’t help us feed our families, win struggles, thrive and prosper. It distracts us from the ordinary business of sizing people up and making a living, and is not even conducive to intellectual observation, because instead of seeing them, we see right through them to the bewildered child and dreaming adolescent who inhabited their bodies earlier, the now-tired idealist who fell in and out of love, got hired and quit, hired and fired, bought cars and wore them out, liked black-eyed Susans, blueberry muffins, and roosters crowing – liked roosters crowing better than skyscrapers but now likes skyscrapers better than roosters crowing. As swift as thought, we select the details that we need to see in order to be able to love them.

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.

Novelist Russell Banks (Affliction, Sweet Hereafter: A Novel, Cloudsplitter: A Novel) writes a fascinating account of dealing with his wife’s depression, something that I imagine many partners of depressed people would so relate to. He is married to poet Chase Twichell, and she also has an essay in the book. The two pieces reside back to back in Unholy Ghost, and what an interesting look at a marriage, told from both sides of the fence. Chase has clinical depression, and knows that she will be on psychotropic drugs for the rest of her life. She keeps her eye on new studies, tries new cocktails, anyone who is depressed knows that there isn’t just one magic pill that will take it away. Depression is wily, it can build up resistance. Her essay is good, but I was really taken with Russell Banks’ take on things. It’s quite specific.

He opens the essay by saying that when people who have read his books meet him, they are often surprised that he is not depressed. It seems like a man who could write a book such as Affliction (the title alone!) or The Sweet Hereafter must have a depressed outlook on life. Banks analyzes this and analyzes the role of fiction and fiction writers. Having seen depression up close and personal throughout his marriage, he believes that he would never have been able to write the novels he had if he had been clinically depressed.

Beyond that, from my experience of depression, which derives mainly from my continuing happy marriage to the poet just mentioned, a woman who happens to be clinically depressed, scrupulously self-analytical, and supremely articulate, I have come to believe that the consciousness of a depressed person rarely supports an attitude (or fiction) like mine. A depressed fiction writer with an attitude filled to the brim with sadness and anger nourished, not like mine by a hierarchy of value, but by her malfunctioning limbic-diencephalic systems, would probably be suicidal. Unable to separate her consciousness from such an attitude, unable to withdraw from it as the comedian withdraws from his comedy, she would likely be destroyed by it.

He writes about his marriage with beautiful tenderness. They were made for one another. They are happy. But there is a third person in the marriage. He equates it to living in a family where there is an alcoholic and the alcoholism is another member of the family, a silent hovering presence, always felt, acting on everyone. His wife’s depression was that third person. Often, he had to deal with BOTH: his wife and her depression, and he had to try to separate out the two things, which, as you can imagine, was not always easy.

There is such a thing as “depression logic”, a concept I really like. The experience of depression, as opposed to regular sadness, is so harrowing that the person suffering it comes up with all these different ways to survive it. Virginia Heffernen, in her essay in the book, calls her survival rituals The Pillars: I will go to the gym, to church, to work, and as long as I respect The Pillars, I can bargain with my depression to stay back. Depression Logic can be ruthless and incomprehensible to loved ones who are trying to understand or help. Heffernen describes telling her friends about her life and her feelings about it, and many of them would say, “You’re sounding very abstract.” That’s Depression Logic. The trick, for loved ones (and there are many many books out there devoted to people who take care of/love depressed people, with helpful tips), is to speak to the Person inside the depression, NOT the depression itself. Treat the depression like a third person. Not to be ignored, but to be put into perspective. In the chaotic experience of depression, the depressed person erects different survival techniques and explanations. If the depression has gone on for years, if the person has been depressed since she was a child, then these survival techniques will be well-honed, sophisticated, and, to some degree, impenetrable. Psychiatrists and therapists (the good ones) do not engage with Depression Logic. They recognize it for what it is, and call it out to the person (“That’s your Depression Logic talking.”), and continue to engage with the real individual. They recognize the disease at work. This is so so difficult to do if you are not a trained professional and if, like Russell Banks, you are married to someone who is depressed.

You become a caretaker. You become an adjunct psychotherapist. And yet you are not trained in the topic, and you are also more entangled with the person emotionally than a psychotherapist ever is. What is the difference between sympathy and enabling? How do you separate it out?

That’s what Russell Banks’ beautifully compassionate and honest essay is about.

An example from my own life of Depression Logic. In 2009, one of my Crack Up Years, I met my good friend Rachel for a beer. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of months, and so she was quietly shocked at the change in me. I knew how bad I was, I’m not crazy – or, less triggering word, insensible: I was aware of the dire-ness of my situation and I was aware of my “affect”, so to speak, but by that point I was on the spiral down, and there was nothing that could stop it. This is how these things go. I was telling her what was happening. Because I was mid Crack Up, I can see now that I was hauling Depression Logic at her feet. “Here is how it is for me. Here is how it IS. This is how life is.” Depressed people will often defend their Logic, too, and ferociously: It can feel like it is the only thing between you and the abyss. Rachel didn’t say anything, just listened, asked questions. She’s a good friend. She listened, as I monologued about the truth about what was going on. She didn’t argue, she didn’t try to poke holes in my argument. I would have resisted that. Finally, I stopped talking. She thought for a long while about what I had said. And then she said (and it’s a comment that changed my life), and she said it in the gentlest and yet firmest way possible, it was Love, the way she said it: “You do realize, Sheila, that everything you just said is not true.” It was like she had poured a bucket of water over my head. And it was the WAY she said it. If she had said it in a scoffing or dismissive way, I would have been cut to the core. (But I don’t have friends like that. I am very fortunate.) The way she said it got through to me. I was startled. I have many good friends, all who had been helpful to me during that bad time, but nobody had said something like that in quite that way. For whatever reason, she cracked through the edifice of Depression Logic, with its austere purity and terrifying symmetry. I looked at her, devastated and startled, and said, “It’s not?” She shook her head, with the most beautiful look of sympathy. I took it in, I thought about it, and said, “Rachel, it FEELS so true to me.” She nodded. “I know.”

I have never forgotten that. In that moment, Rachel spoke to the Sheila underneath, the real me, not the sadness that had become my entire personality in 2009. Her gentle yet firm words, her refusal to accept my Truth from me, her insistence that what I was saying about myself was not true, and also her understanding that it felt SO TRUE to me, changed me. The episode was far from over, but her words resonated, echoed, and I still think of them.

There are times when I feel myself talking to myself about myself (how’s that for a bad sentence): If you’ve read me for a while, you know my thoughts on Narrative. How we create narratives for ourselves. Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That is so true. But what narrative? What if we choose the wrong one? People choose hurtful narratives for themselves all the time: “I’m a loser. Of course bad things happen.” “I am just a person who doesn’t deserve Love.” “I’m just not built to be successful.” “I’m selfish, mean, worthless.” Whatever. And so these narratives act on the confirmation bias. A bad thing happens, and instead of being able to put it into perspective (“sometimes bad things happen”), it is looped into your overall narrative for your life, it has confirmed your assumptions about yourself. “Of course bad things happen to me. This is exactly how I understand the world to work, and so of course I just keep getting slammed.” Nobody said depression didn’t manifest in selfish or self-involved ways. It is one of the most annoying things about it.

So the narratives persist. Here’s a post with some thoughts on narrative, and you can see some Depression Logic at work there (I had a desire to delete all of my 2009 posts in between April and October, but I’m leaving them up.) Here’s another big post about narrative, particularly when it comes to being an essay writer, a memoirist. Narrative changes then. It becomes even more conscious, it is something you sculpt, massage, work on.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is often very helpful (as opposed to regular talk therapy) because it gets at the behavior, not just the causes (ie: bad childhood, bad puberty, traumatic event, whatever). You may understand the causes, but the behavior persists. The narratives we have for ourselves, especially those of us who struggle with mental illness to some degree, CAN be changed. You can’t change your childhood (although I have always loved that line from Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood”), but you can certainly change your Narrative of it. And when the narrative has changed, when you tell yourself the stories of your own life in a different way, miracles in outlook-shifting can occur. Trust me. What Rachel was doing, in her gentle yet very firm way (she was NOT going to accept my version of the truth, because she recognized that she was dealing with the Logic of my Depression, not my real self) was saying: “The narratives you have chosen for yourself, the parameters of interpretation you have set, are not true.”

This is clearly a lifelong process. I go back to the Joan Didion quote. Telling ourselves stories is not just about writing a novel, or a poem, or a blog-post, or whatever. It happens in our own minds. How do we interpret world events? How would you describe the Vietnam War? You’ll tell it from your own perspective, and you have a Narrative about it, based on your understanding of history, politics, whatever. Telling ourselves stories is the human condition. For the Depressed person, if you can get at the stories you tell yourself, you often get to the root of the problem. Not so much the events itself (traumatic event, bad childhood, violent parents, whatever the issue is): but how you tell yourself the stories of these things.

I have traveled far from Russell Banks’ essay. Let’s get back on point. He writes about his love for his wife, and his feeling of helplessness when he would watch her go down into the trough. Also, fascinatingly, he writes about how he started to develop symptoms of depression himself, basically in solidarity. This is quite common. Depressives can be very Bossy, they can dominate a room. Banks felt that he needed to be open to the possibilities of his own sadness, as a way to understand his wife, but also because he wasn’t sure of his place in all of this: his marriage, his relationship to her. It seemed a requirement that he take on her view of the world. How do you separate out the Depression from the person? This is codependency speaking, something alcoholic families know well. But depression can operate in the same way. Russell Banks breaks down how that happened in his own marriage. It is very hard to understand depression if you have not experienced it personally. You say to yourself, “I’ve been sad sometimes”, “I’ve had low periods, I get it” … but depression is another animal entirely.

I imagine his honesty here has helped a lot of people, partners to depressed people, who just want to help, relieve, aid their loved one. It’s a great act of generosity to put yourself out there like this. The honesty in his revelation of being a “custodial male” with the body of a “failed father buried beneath” the “basement floor” … This is why he is a great novelist. You must be able to tell the truth on yourself, like that. Even in fiction. You must not shrink from such truths.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey: ‘Bodies in the Basement’, by Russell Banks

The phobias first, for they appeared first and were the tip-off. For years, certainly since her adolescence, my wife had suffered from what we half-jokingly called “urbophobia”, fear of cities, especially New York City, an urb I rather loved, had visited all my life, and had resided in – from 1982 until 1988 (the year my wife and I set up housekeeping together in Princeton, New Jersey, where I was then teaching). Since my adolescence, I had responded to Gotham pretty much the way small-town American intellectuals have reacted since Whitman’s time, romanticizing its history like Thomas Wolfe, glamorizing its funky bohemianism like Kerouac, and embracing its varieties of humanity like a social scientist on speed. Everything about the city excited me and nourished my mind; nothing repelled or scared me (although, naturally, I avoided danger with the same rational care that I took when crossing streets against the lights – I always looked both ways).

Until, having failed to displace my wife’s phobias with my enthusiasm for the city, I began to see it with her eyes, instead of my own. The city hadn’t changed; I had. Now it seemed physically and psychically threatening to me, noisy and invasive, chaotic and cruel; for the first time, I found myself judging my numerous friends who continued to love the city as I once had, viewing them as somehow more parochial than I and sentimental and self-deluded. None of this, of course, was my wife’s doing; none of it was her desire – quite the opposite. She felt embarrassed by her fear of the city, handicapped by it, and the last thing she wanted was to share that fear with me. Yet there it was: in looking out for her, I had begun to look out with her. Failing to protect her from a thing she feared, I had come to fear it myself.

It was the same with all but a few of her other symptoms of depression. Although I had never suffered from migraines, I now worried that perhaps I would, or should. And although I had never slipped into the slough of near-suicidal despond that she sometimes endured, I began to magnify my own occasional dips and slips into morbidity and to rely less on humor to get me back on track and more on anxiety and agitated will, which, predictably, got focused on issues of control: the more I felt able to control matters both large and small, the less likely the fall into despondency. It was a middy effective solution, but the end result was a raised level of ongoing anxiety and the constant care and feeding of a fast-growing control freak.

My reaction to all this was to blame my wife – to be angry at her, first, for not having allowed me to cure her of her depression, and then for infecting me with it. Crude, I know, but not uncommon, I fear (especially among custodial males with the bodies of failed fathers buried beneath their basement floors). Happily, it didn’t take long for me to see that my wife was not responsible for my condition; I was. Physician, I told myself, cure thyself, and saw then that this self-inflicted “infection” was in fact a homeopathic cure, in which like cures like, and by means of which I was allowed to see the extreme and defining difference between my minor case of depression, contracted by my having confused empathy with sympathy, and my wife’s major case, which went, not with her choice of spouse or diet or job or residence, but with her brain chemistry. It went with her body. And bodies don’t have attitudes: they have consciousness.

In the intervening years, much has changed, and all for the better, partly because of my growing comprehension of the nature and etiology of my wife’ condition, but mostly because of the rapid development and deployment of antidepressants. In the meantime, I have learned a great moral lesson and have tried to apply it to as many aspects of my life with my wife and others as possible. I have learned to feel for my wife and to avoid feeling with her. To sympathize and not empathize.

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.