Depression

Two weeks ago, when it was finally warm and sunny here in Michigan, I pulled out a cream hat that I bought last fall. I love it. It is big and floppy. It reflects the sun, keeping me cool. I think it looks fabulous (the beloved disagrees with this assessment. Whatever they say about marriage, dissent continues to be an order of the day.) When I first pulled it out of the closet, I could not bear to wear it. I bought it on vacation. A photo of me in the hat from vacation is below. I did not want to wear it because the vacation is the last time I remember being happy.

Happiness is, of course, ephemeral. Even under the best of circumstances. It is always coming and going. Often the happiest moment is not in the moment itself, but in the memory of the moment. Yet to delve so deeply into unhappiness that happy becomes a distant land, that happy becomes something that is unimaginable, something that feel forever elusive. To be so unhappy that to look at a photo of the happy self in the past feels painful. To wear a hat purchased in the happy past, hurtful. This type of painful, hurtful unhappiness we conventionally call depression. I fiercely resist that label.

It has been years since I read Kate Millett’s Loony-Bin Trap. I did not understand it as a younger woman. I understand it today. The trap is that depression is the construct to alienate us from the legitimate anger, even rage, that surrounds the conditions of our lives. Here is my simple conclusion: I am not depressed; everything that I am feeling and thinking is a normal and ordinary reaction to the conditions of my life and the conditions of the world. These conditions are deeply fucked up.

Think about it. How is someone supposed to react when she is driven from her home? When bigoted neighbors seek to intimidate and harass? When local government bans part of one’s property from being in its county? How am I supposed to react to having my dog threatened with death? How am I supposed to react when a small group of neighbors decide that me and my family are so threatening, so abhorrent that we must be banned and driven away from our home? I maintain that any reaction that I have is a reasonable reaction under these conditions, and any reaction and all feelings aren’t collective depression. They are rage, they are anger, they are reasonable and honest struggles for survival.

I am like Millett. I refuse to be the problem. I refuse to personalize the problem. I refuse any notion of depression. I refuse anything that makes me and my internal life the problem. The problem is outside me. The problem is the world. I am not interested in fixing myself. I’m actually no longer interested in fixing the world. That is another of the beliefs that I have lost over the past six or seven months. I am interested in wearing the floppy hat and sitting in the sun. Still crying, but able to imagine the future possibility of laughing.

A picture of happiness in a hat.