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Though I am still alive, somehow, it is a potentially fatal condition, and lots of people die from it every year. I am speaking, of course, about disco fever. No, no, it’s depression! I was vaccinated against disco fever years ago.
“I’ve been depressed my whole life, but I only found out about twelve years ago. I’ve been kind of faking my way through since childhood. I’ve managed to stop getting worse. I want to be better.”
had spent years exhorting people to get help and to believe that they could get better while never believing that about myself.
Essentially, it was as if I were living in a house that kept catching on fire but all I had ever tried to do was douse the flames. From there, I guess, the plan was to sit in this charred, smoke-damaged house and say, “Well, now everything is okay!” without having any intention of fixing the walls, patching the roof, or figuring out where the goddamn flames kept coming from in the first place. Friends, that’s just bad property management.
can’t even define depression. I’ve never found anyone who could. That’s part of the problem. So, reader, it’ll be analogy-a-go-go from here on; strap in.
One was that I was turning fifty, which is only still middle age if you plan to be a hundred. Frankly, the sands of my mortal life were falling into the bottom part of the hourglass. I was on deadline before my dead line.
I’d be driving in to work or cleaning the kitchen or trying to sleep and boom! there came the thoughts of longing for the void, a void that I fully understood I would not perceive because that’s the thing about voids. This feeling was morbid and, yes, depressing, but it was also just pesky. What it really was, of course, was a mind that wanted to rest but kept whirring along and pushing me to dark places.
“What do you have to be stressed about?” the normies might have said, if I ever talked about these things with normal people. “You have a family, a house, a car, a good job. Just deal with it!” As if I could simply do that. As if I chose this. As if I looked at the options available to me and they were clearly labeled “Perseverance” and “Freaking the Fuck Out All the Time” and calmly said, “Mmm, yes, I select option B.”
The normies are in a big land yacht of a Buick, weighs a ton, low to the ground. When a stiff wind blows, the normies feel a mild push but continue driving, perhaps casually noting that it’s “gettin’ windy out there!” Then they go back to listening to, I don’t know, Foo Fighters. The saddies are piled into a Model T with a sail on top of it for some reason. They see the wind coming, and it’s all they can do to keep from being blown off the road and plunging into the canyon. The normies see the saddies struggle and wonder what the problem is because, to them, the wind doesn’t seem that bad.
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you can’t understand your past, then you don’t really know how your mind got to where it is now, because you simply don’t know yourself.
The longest road a person with depression travels can often be the one between where they are at present and where they can get help to improve. Seeking that out, making that appointment, and keeping that appointment can be a Herculean task. And
Yes, I’m blaming myself for getting hit by a car. Habit. Sorry.
Trauma occurs when something happens that’s too horrible for your brain to deal with, so you just store it away. Over time, the horrible thing, which is still there, starts coming out in a variety of ugly ways, causing mental problems that you don’t even associate with the trauma because it happened so long ago.
could feel as if surviving that and the car whomping made me invincible, but instead it has always made me feel like I could be killed at any moment. I don’t know why Rick put that BB in there.
Depression has no yellow warning lines. In my case, I was already carrying the trauma of two close calls with death. I also had a genetic predisposition, judging by the suicides and bleak life trajectories of various Norwegian ancestors, a low thrum of trauma that just kept getting passed down like a lefse recipe.
A disorder is when you can’t recover from that feeling. A disorder is when you feel that way even when devastating events are not taking place or when you can’t hold down a job or relationships or take care of your responsibilities.
Sad, Agitated, and Gloomy are all dwarf characters from my goth remake of Snow White.
Today, I know that my intrusive or recurring thoughts were common and linked to OCD and anxiety.
Okay, so if you’re obsessing over cartoon bands and unable to concentrate in class or have a measure of peace, you should get some help because you have a mental disorder. I never even considered
Rob Stone, for instance, was packed with muscles, six feet tall, and had a glazed seen-it-all or possibly super-stoned facial expression that made it hard to believe he was twelve. One would think he was crashing our classes while on break from managing a Jiffy Lube. He may have had children of his own.
What got me more was the tone it seemed to set along these first steps to adulthood: the Rob Stones of the world could simply take licorice ropes from the Me’s of the world, and the Me’s couldn’t do anything about it. It’s Darwin. The strong take from the weak, and thus the strong get stronger and the weak wither.
Depression has painted these good, happy, proud moments as inconsequential. Depression (who is a real dick) hides these memories from me so that when I think of junior high I think of pain and humiliation instead of being elected president of the eighth grade.
John Lennon was shot and killed in December that year, the event made more surreal by my finding out about it from Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football. A few months before that, Mount St. Helens had erupted 150 miles away, and people who had been on the news the day before were now dead, killed by the earth itself. I was terrified that Mount Rainier, a mere forty-five miles away, would be next, burying us all in ash or lava before we even knew what was happening. The thing about “active” volcanos is that they might erupt in two hundred years or tomorrow, making them sub-ideal things for
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And here, I need to make one thing abundantly clear: our generation knew we were going to die in a nuclear war. It was a fact.
In my non-obliterated adulthood, I learned that kids everywhere comforted themselves by telling each other they’d die quick.
believe that nearly every American around my age grew up resolute in the belief that the Soviets wanted to kill them first and do it quickly.
If there had been a checklist of depression symptoms back then, I could have filled in a whole lot of squares on it: Despair—Certainty of nuclear war Recurring thoughts—The Groovie Goolies Crying—The Rob Stone incident Anxiousness/restlessness—All the time
At home, there was never any open talk about Dad’s problem with alcohol or my brother Rick’s growing marijuana habit. In both cases, we denied it or silently accepted it as a thing we couldn’t do anything about, got dressed, and kept going.
Depression does its damage and then it hides, covering its tracks, making you think that it is not an illness, that you’re just bad and weird.
A subversion of the system is dazzling for someone with a mind that doubts it can work within any system.
When you grow up around substance use, you develop certain skills. Not ninja skills, unfortunately, but you learn to see what you want to see.
Only decades later would it dawn on me that normal people who never deal with depression have a sense of self-worth automatically. Just by being a person on the earth, they feel themselves worthy of respect and love and all that other cool stuff. When you’re up against Clinny D, you don’t have that core sense of self. So you frantically search the world for someone else to provide that sense of self for you.
Ooh! Forgot to mention. I was elected a student body officer in high school, led leadership programs for other students, won the state championship in persuasive speaking, and was elected by classmates to deliver the speech at graduation. In the decades since, I’ve described my school in mostly disparaging terms and characterized my time there as miserable.
Federal Way High School, and how I was scorned and shunned. Some such bullshit. Laurie, who had been my prom date senior year, finally replied, exasperated, “You were admired. You were respected. You were liked.”
And here’s where it gets really sinister. The undue idealization with which the depressed person sees the post-achievement future is matched by a real scorn for the present. So it’s not just that things will be wonderful if I achieve X, it’s that whatever I’ve earned through hard work and talent and my endless series of small decisions to this point is insignificant.
We did a kind of mutual interview a while back, and we noted that this running oneself down is a constant for people like us. “This is common for people with all the different things that we have,” she said, “which is that if I can do it, then it must be dumb. If I can do it, it’s not that hard.
As a person plugged into the entertainment industry, Neal knows he’s not alone in feeling this way, that a big achievement or pile of money would clean up the mind. “Everyone says money won’t bring you happiness. People hear that and they go, ‘Well, let’s see.’
“Every single person goes, ‘Oh, I may be different. Let me try.’ But I’ve had conversations with the biggest movie stars in the world who had come to the exact same conclusion.”
Of all the lies depression tells you, and there are many, “you are doomed” is among the most believable. Nothing is good, says the illness, nothing has ever been good, and so it stands to reason that nothing will ever be good. The way you feel in your worst moments now is how you’ll always feel.
When you’re unable to make the noise stop, a logical thought is to make everything stop. But no. I could not do that. Suicide is bad; everyone knows that. Then again, went my reasoning, the people who know that suicide is bad, the ones who say that, are part of the great swath of society for whom things go well.
Those advising against suicide are the people able to handle stuff, the people who haven’t been irredeemably weird their whole lives.
As of this writing, fifty people have died in jumps from Aurora since 1995, with over half landing not in the water but on land, often the roads and parking lot areas around the campus of the Adobe software company.
Two. It was scary as fuck, yo. Up there on that bridge? Looking down? Imagining that fall? I had walked to that bridge uncertain of what I was going to do, but to leap from that bridge meant a few seconds of falling when I would no longer have the luxury of uncertainty. To be alive without free will and with only gravity seemed undesirable. Which meant I still had desires.
Three. Jumping would mean doing something. Doing something was not really my thing. I was more inclined to not do something. I specialized in stewing.
For most people, suicide seems about as predictable as a plane crash. There is no prior warning. And that’s terrifying because then there is no way of knowing when this horror will happen again.
For people with depression, suicide is kind of like how the Mall of America is for me. It’s a real thing. This doesn’t mean everyone with depression is constantly clinging to building ledges. Far from it; it simply means we know that it’s a real place you can drive to.
If this type of despair responded to reason, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.
William Styron, author of Sophie’s Choice. He wrote about his rather sudden and extreme onset of depression in middle age in the book Darkness Visible.
Styron also provokes vigorous nods, at least from me in my reading chair, by noting the presence of what he calls a second self, “a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it.”
The fences, which are increasingly appearing on high bridges everywhere, are derided by dummies and the uninformed who say, “Pff, if people want to kill themselves, they’re going to do it anyway.” But that’s only partially true. They might do it anyway, but they might not. By this point they will know that they were close but didn’t do it. Then when they’re getting closer again, they can call on that experience. Sometimes all it takes is a moment.
