Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

by Kelly Williams Brown

People who haven’t been depressed assume it’s sadness, but that’s not it at all. It’s not a feeling; it’s the emotional flu, and it debilitates you. Things are going on around you, but you’re too sick to care. You can kind of get it together sometimes, maybe go to the grocery store and stare at the Gatorade and put some into your basket, although even this decision is so confusing and hard. But then you’re too tired to keep standing, you hurt, and you just can’t walk much farther. So you go sit down on the pharmacy’s blood-pressure-taking bench for a while and then cry because life is asking so much of you and you have no answers. By the time you get back home and into bed, you feel more tired than any human has ever been.

I dedicate myself constantly to someday achieving this level of criticism. So for me to just not care, to find everything equivalently awful, is to be estranged from myself.

This was the first time I began equating very inequivalent things. Maybe I will eat something today, or maybe I will drink water and then have two sugar-free Popsicles. Maybe I will drive home and park in the driveway, or maybe I will smash the car into the guardrail, but in a way that looks accidental. Maybe I will go to class tomorrow, or maybe we will all catch a break and the sun will explode.

I isolate because I can’t think of anything except my own pain and self-disgust, and those who can’t think of anyone but themselves aren’t the best company. As you curl into your own misery, everyone else recedes into a shadowy background. It’s the same as physical pain; there is so little room to care about anything else.

Along with the incidents that can trigger depression—loss, catastrophizing, family history, and trauma—it was the first time I experienced an actionable desire to be free of all of it, free of my life, and began to walk toward something terribly dark.

I knew that divorce means loss, and not just of that one relationship; it billows out, and you end up losing so many more people than you’d guess.

Honestly, my body does a lot of things well, and one of them is immediately gaining a lot of weight during times of societal disturbances.

I am now moving through the world in a very different way emotionally, mentally, and physically. I’ve become invisible to men, which is just fine with me, but I can’t fit into any of my clothing and cannot dress like myself anymore. I put all my favorite dresses down in the basement, so they won’t mock me, and I stop looking in mirrors because I don’t really recognize the person who looks back.

I lie in bed one night and pull a neck scarf tight around my neck. I don’t really mean it; I just want some sensation other than this black, numb cloud that hangs around me.

“When I saw you, I was mad—I was mad about how fine you seemed, as if nothing had happened. ‘I’m sorry that you’re upset; you’re not helping me with this,’ you said. I carried so much rage after that—as if I was upset about my role as a character in your life, and not deeply afraid of what you might do to yourself.”

There’s a debate about whether this is healthy, but I believe this is what has helped me survive.

I am empty and ravenous and rattling inside.

Almost none of what makes me happiest is compatible with parenthood. I love sleeping in, taking a laze, soaking in absurdly long baths, lolling around in UGGs, watching Vanderpump Rules, and fucking off on a road trip or to New York or even to another country if I get a good deal on tickets. There’s also the question of submitting your body to the process. I like my figure, my boobs, my tummy, my long hair. As someone who historically has not always been okay with my body but cherishes it now, it’s frustrating to think of it all changing immediately and permanently. I worry about having a husband who doesn’t want to fuck me or, much more likely, a me who doesn’t feel sexy or sexual anymore.

After all, this depression stuff is genetic; in fact, some scientists now think that five mental health disorders “long thought to be distinct”—autism, ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia—may all share a genetic similarity.

I can point to the people, on both sides of my family, who have struggled similarly. Did I really want to carry on that tortured legacy into another generation?

I truly wonder, sometimes, why no one said anything. But perhaps they did, and I didn’t, or couldn’t, listen.

When it’s your brain that goes haywire for one brief, horrible moment, the overriding emotion that lingers in the aftermath is simply shame.

I cannot cope with his anger toward me. I wish, so much, that he would just be happy that I’m alive, that he would treat me gently, that he would not silently seethe, and that if he did have to do that, that he would just let me be.

I’m making it for myself, to stay busy. To stay engaged. To stay alive.

Depression is so talented at turning you from a foodie into someone who wishes they could just eat a compressed nutrition bar every day, except about everything.

I truly do think, now, that depression is like diabetes. Many lifestyle changes can help, but for me, the right medication has to be in place. Otherwise, I’m just not well enough to enact those lifestyle changes.

You can handle this. You will be okay. It will suck, terribly, but you will move past it, and it will just be another funny-horrible detail of this time in your life.

It never occurred to me that maybe the question I should ask wasn’t “Why is he being so loud?” but rather “Why am I being so quiet?”

We were two very flawed people who were trying our best to help each other but also failing miserably.

All I could think about was how, before all this, he’d told me I was the best thing that had ever happened to him, that he was terrified of losing me, that he wanted to be better, and could I please be patient with him? And I had been a good girlfriend, I really had. I could not square in my mind that he both loved me deeply and that he couldn’t look at me. I was so full of my own grasping need that I couldn’t address or maybe even see his, and vice versa.

But despite all of this, I know, deep in my heart, that I’m going to be okay, and this radical thought gets me (slowly) out of bed in the morning.

I know I’ve fucked him up, but I don’t understand at the time why he can’t just get over it. I am better! Why isn’t he?

It sounds small, but it’s not. It’s fucking huge to have humans in your life who you’re accountable to, who you see face-to-face and talk to, who you collaborate with, who you get up in the morning and put your makeup on for.

It has taught me something precious: the satisfaction I take at a job is not the title or the specifics of the work I am doing. It comes from the people who I am working with, the connections among us, and what we can do together for a cause we believe in.

You and life have some things in common: you are both more capacious than you seem. Things, both good and bad, change much faster than you imagine they do. You do not know what the future holds. Also, what if you kill yourself, but the next day your worst enemy goes viral and is dunked on by the entire internet? Don’t chance it!

The epigraph of this book is from a letter called Consolation to Helvia that Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger sent to his mother after he was exiled to an island: “All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.” This is a lesson I have absorbed fully. I have every terminal degree in wretchedness, and now I take comfort in it because I know it is not fatal.

None of it is owed to me because I tried to throw it all away, and yet it and I are still here.