For the first time in a long time, I found myself incapable of writing.
This has been my experience with depression—how it colors every other aspect of life. Rather, it drains the color from other aspects of life.
This was recent, and there were a lot of factors that contributed to my not being able to write.
Recently I lost my uncle to cancer. Grief has a way of pushing everything else to the side in our lives. That is something I will write more about one day, too.
There were other things that came up after this, these ones more personal that I’d prefer not to write about here. Not now, anyway.
Afterwards, outside of these things, I felt the burning need to be working on a novel. It’s what I do, I engage with writing novels, and literally months had gone by since I’d really worked on a new project. It felt strange. I felt strange. But I was learning some things about myself, too.
A few months before all of this, I experienced a short period of what I can only describe as depression.
It seemed to come out of nowhere, without source, without a trigger, without warning. I began to feel like I’d lost a level of awareness or control over my own thoughts.
And then, one morning, I nearly couldn’t rise out of bed. I didn’t know what had come over me, or why it was so hard—and I don’t just mean the feeling where you’re so comfortable and still tired and want to stay in bed. I mean I woke up, ready to rise and get into a shower and prepare for work, but almost literally couldn’t lift myself up to do it.
I described the feeling to a friend familiar with depression. I told him it felt like my bones were filled with concrete. He said he knew the feeling all too well.
That particular morning, it took a great deal of energy and willpower but I did it, I rose and dragged myself to the shower. I felt uncomfortable all the way down, like I couldn’t take deep enough breaths. I took a shower and for the last minute or so turned it as cold as it could get. This was early in the morning so it was already cold in the house. Normally I do this for fun, because it’s energizing and apparently it’s good for you. I did it this time because I still felt like I couldn’t breathe well enough, and wanted the shock of cold water to force me to breathe. And I still remember how strange a feeling it was, the water all the way to cold but not shocking at all. Not on the inside. My body registered it, and I found myself gasping, but it didn’t wake me up, didn’t get rid of that debilitating weight under my skin, and when it was done, I felt no different. But at least I’d been able to take deeper breaths.
I don’t know how I managed to go to work that day. But I’m glad that I did. This feeling has come over me before, in fact it is, in many ways, familiar, but never so intensely. And when it comes over me, I practically make it into a personal mission not to let it poison other aspects of my life. I do everything I can to make it to work. I unconsciously hide it and never talk about it (which is something I’m learning, like in writing this post, to overcome).
I have an erratic and inconsistent grasp of time, but I want to say this lasted about two weeks. There were a couple days I did call in sick to work, and on the days that I did, I felt terrible about it but also recognize that I absolutely needed to.
There were changes in myself I began to recognize as unusual, things I suppose you could call symptoms. Without intention or even noticing at first, my default walking pace had slowed. At its worst, I remember how small the steps were, how strange it was to me that I hadn’t even noticed before the way my own walk had simply changed. I stopped writing. I went on walks to sit outside or meditate but found myself singularly aware of the weight in my bones, and of what felt like pain.
When I say pain, I don’t mean that I know how to describe it. But it’s like all I was aware of, unless I really focused on something else, was of being in some kind of pain.
It’s really the weirdest thing to write about, because my mind tries to tell me I’m surely making it up. I’m not used to talking about it, either.
I think it helped when I was feeling okay enough to at least force myself into productivity in the morning, because often, by the afternoon, it wasn’t as bad. Sometimes, however, not doing much at all consumed an unusual amount of energy. I hated this, for those two weeks. I hate that it basically laid me low for awhile. I hate the way, once it passed after those two weeks or so, looking back felt like looking at memories through a thick fog. It’s like trying to remember something from when you were on the edge of sleep, too tired to keep your eyes open. That’s what it’s like, for me, to remember myself in the midst of depression.
Where had the rest of my mind gone? The way I felt afterwards was what I’d been trying so hard to find again through that fog, but it had been impossible. Why? What about all of my energy? What about the way I walked? Even the way I spoke? Strangest of all, what about my emotions? At times it alternated between an intensity of irritability and sourceless anger, and at other times would drop into such a flatness of mood that it’s scary to even remember. Scary because it’s like feeling nothing. Like I was aware of what I wanted to be feeling, what I should be feeling, but there was only this dull flatness. Like everything, my own emotions, were muffled.
One thing I am grateful for, at least, is the awareness it gave me of depression and what it’s capable of doing, especially to my perspective of myself which is fluid to begin with.
I read a small book called Darkness Visible, by William Styron, a memoir of a descent into near suicidal depression. I learned so much about the illness from this book, and it came at the perfect time as I began to read it in the midst of those two weeks, and finished it not long after. It gave me a valuable outside point of view, an objective one, that was educational and also emotionally difficult.
I’ve since felt that same fog, but not to the same degree. It comes and goes and is, at the same time, ever-present. And the more I’ve journaled and written poetry about it, the more I’ve delved into it, the more I recognize that same feeling as something that goes all the way back to kindergarten. I don’t like the word depression, and I am resistant to the need to label something at all. But a friend told me recently that it can be good to name the beast. Even just to know, for one’s own sake. That’s where I am right now: resistant to the need to put a name to a struggle I’ve been aware of for most of my life, while genuinely curious to know what it is, and if it is what it seems to be.
I could write more about that, and about the importance of therapy and objectivity, but my intention here is to talk also about art. In this case, for me, about writing.
Over the past month or so, I’ve been sort of rediscovering writing. It’s felt as if I’m teaching myself how to do it all over again. This comes only a few months after I finished writing a novel, one I’m particularly proud of. I’ve been studying storytelling structure and craft for awhile now, and it has shaped and refined my process immensely. Yet the writing part, the line-by-line part, is something I feel I’m learning all over again—again.
Which is to say, in some sense this isn’t unusual. I think there’s a lesson there about any art, any craft. Each beginning really is a beginning. Each project is its own life and exists by its own rules that you have to learn by immersion and by doing. This is one of the hardest parts of writing, for me. The beginnings. The learning how to do it all over again. It just so happens there’s an extra dimension to it in wake of everything else that made it all the harder for the words to come.
Which echoes back to my last post—pushing that boulder perpetually up the mountain.
I’ve learned so far that, while depression, for instance, is its own struggle with its own requirements that deeply affects everything about life, it also deeply affects art. In fact, while going through those two weeks (and what I spoke of before, separate, but still depression links itself to everything), I simply couldn’t write. Not in the way that is most important to me. And learning to overcome that, seeking answers in so many places, has taught me so many things about my own creative process.
The biggest lesson is this: art is its own answer.
My experience with depression—again, I hesitate even to call it that, but I do believe it maybe unavoidable, and best to name it for myself—is that it colors all other aspects of life. Rather, it drains the color from other aspects of life. And with any artist, that is a terrifying thing, because your art isn’t exempt from that. Mine certainly wasn’t. When it comes over me, it’s like a glass dome falling around me that separates me from everything else that’s important to me in my life. The things I find joy in, or meaning in, suddenly it feels like those joys and those meanings have turned to ash. If you’re fortunate, you’ll have someone in your life—even just one person can make a difference—who is there to remind you otherwise, to leave you little reminders of the color that exists in life, or simply to be there and let you know you aren’t alone. I have friends and family I can talk to about it, and the powerful outlet of writing.
Which brings me back to this point. It can feel impossible to see things objectively when you’re in it—when you’re in what they call the fog of depression—but it is so important not to let it beat you, even if just in little ways. When it comes to art, I’ve seen friends of mine—fellow artists—fear that they’ve lost any joy or interest in their craft. This comes from people I’ve seen gush over their art, whatever it is—music, visual art, writing, etc. Suddenly it feels meaningless, it feels pointless, it doesn’t seem like it contains any joy or purpose anymore.
That’s how it was, and has been before—and will be again—for me with my own writing. The only answer to that in the world of art is to dive into it. To understand that you are not your mind, you are not your depression, you aren’t even what you are feeling. Wait it out, maybe even give your art some space. Sometimes that happens, sometimes it needs space as long as you can keep yourself full and occupied in little ways outside of it. And be ready to look at it again, and not make any definite decisions about it, because the fog will pass. And you will rediscover the color and the joy that you know is there even if there are times you can’t feel it—
—and yeah, it might feel like you’re picking up from the bottom of that mountain, and have to relearn it all over again. But that’s part of the joy, isn’t it? Not in the result, not in the top of the mountain, but in the climb.
That’s what I mean by art is its own answer. It isn’t the answer to depression, it isn’t the answer to life, but it is its own answer. And it can color everything else—and it can do it beautifully.