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Content warning: frank discussion of depression, overuse of metaphor, spoilers for “The Count of Monte Cristo”

I have been living with depression for a while now – it’s hard to say exactly how long, for reasons I’ll go into, but I could believe anything from three months up to twelve, and honestly, there were probably signs before that. Now, while I haven’t been formally diagnosed with depression, at some point when you fit almost all of the signs (sans the self-harm and suicide ones, and I have no plans to change that), and your mental health professional of choice calls it depression without hesitation, and you were Googling months ago ‘signs of depression’ while simultaneously recognising that Googling it is a pretty good sign… look, you can call it ‘set of conditions incredibly reminiscent of but not formally recognised as depression’, but let’s just say that this thing is a zebra and not a horse that’s made it its lifelong goal to be a barcode.

It’s hard trying to explain depression, because to make the words exist, I have to think them, and depression alters your way of thinking. The best way I can try to explain it is imagine you’re trying to count or solve some sort of maths problem, and there’s someone in the room with you yelling numbers at you. At some point, you’re not sure which numbers are the right ones and which ones have just been screamed at you by someone with clearly nothing better to do, so the whole process just starts to break down. And of course, even if you stop trying to count, that guy’s still there, except he’s winning.

This is what depression does. It’s a little guy screaming negative stuff at you, and if you don’t realise he’s there, you’re just going to think that the negative thoughts are yours and therefore real.

The last few months of being consciously aware I’m depressed have been eye-opening, in a horrifying realisation kind of way – the mental equivalent of realising that the horror movie monster serial killer was inside your house the whole time. Because then the next thought is – which thoughts were “correct”, and which ones were just yelled at you?

Let’s briefly put yourself in my shoes. Your relationships with many of your friends and family have been pretty much universally declining, your love life is struggling, to put it mildly, your hobbies have seemed much less engaging, and to plagiarise Taylor Swift, work might have been okay, but it hasn’t been fine at all. After about the twentieth time breaking into tears and realising seemingly everything has been going wrong but you’re not sure what’s wrong and fixing it hasn’t helped, you start to see a psychologist. The first few sessions are you realising that these cycles of behaviour aren’t normal and that you have actually been repressing emotions for months. At some point during this process you’re having a conversation with probably about the only person in the world you can be genuinely open and honest with, and that includes yourself. Your relationship with this person has been struggling, and at some point you say something to the effect of “I care about you, more than I care about anyone else besides me, and recently I’ve been feeling like I don’t care about me some of the time.” This sentence is an immediate red flag, because while you’re struggling you’re also not stupid, and you immediately Google symptoms of depression, and the answer to the question turns out to be ‘yes’.

This is when I would like to tell you that things got better, but unfortunately recognising a problem is different to solving it. That conversation happened a few months ago, and it’s hard to say if things have gotten worse or I’ve just gotten better at noticing when things are bad. My guess is the latter, but it definitely feels like the former.

I don’t actually know which thoughts are correct, which relationships that have been damaged are my fault or not, and I don’t have the confidence to be able to figure those out or not. Reaching out is hard when one of the first thoughts is “they probably don’t want to help me anyway” or “I have no idea how they would help me” or “maybe I should keep pretending everything is fine and telling people I’m OK is a good way to maintain social interactions that aren’t about me not being OK, which I would really like to not be reminded of”.

I would love to end this on a high note, but really the best I can give you is probably a middle C. I’ve pretty much moved from ‘trying to fix what I have’ to ‘trying to live with that I have’, which feels either realistic or pessimistic and I haven’t figured out which is better. There is no easy fix for depression that I’m aware of, so hoping that this very loud, very persistent guy goes away because he gets bored is probably not the panacea that I’m hoping for. My goals now are to try to get on with life regardless, and try to actively seek happiness rather than passively have it like I used to have (though that’s far harder than it seems – Mr. Screamy does a fantastic job at reducing my willpower to fight him, and makes it far easier to forget that it’s even possible).

Some quotes that have resonated:
“You must fight them! They are a hive of monsters!” or “Yi’icekdozim! Zagim gogdaslav znazlighavev!” – something I thought of translating into my language months ago
The entirety of Preludes by T.S. Eliot
“The soul makes its own horizons; your soul is overcast, and that is why the sky seems stormy to you.” – from “The Count of Monte Cristo”

It’s also probably relevant that the last sentence of that book is something to the effect of “all of human wisdom is contained in those two word – wait and hope”.

If you stumble upon this and you have depression, then I can only offer you these comics from Hyperbole and a Half, a link to a collections of emergency contacts and websites for your specific country, and a reminder that the average length of depression symptoms is not ‘the rest of your life’, despite how much it might feel like that from the inside.

Thanks for reading.

Update: Life After Depression.

I’ve been thinking recently about the concept of the death of the author, along with the broadly related concepts of prescriptivism versus descriptivism, headcanons, and to what extent authors have the right to their own work.

So as you can probably see from the menu above, I have written some poetry. And my dilemma is this: I want to explain what I meant when I wrote the poems. I feel it is important to me that my thoughts are out there. But I also want them to stand as they are. That too is important to me. And then that got me thinking – if I state my analysis of my own poetry, to what extent does that discredit other people’s analyses? If someone else sees something in my poetry that they appreciate, and I didn’t consciously intend for it to be in there, are they somehow wrong for having found it?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, I plan on answering them.

I am drawn to a conversation I once had with somebody, who told me how ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was an allegory for WWII, and who had some rather convincing arguments. Later I found out that ‘The Lord of the Rings’, although its first volume was published in 1954, was to a large extent, planned and written before the end of that war. In fact, I can directly quote Tolkien’s beliefs on this matter. This passage is from his Foreword to the Second Edition, as follows:

“As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical… The crucial chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted.”

So the question remains: was this person wrong?

To paraphrase the great Reverend Lovejoy, the long answer is ‘no’, with a ‘but’.

Allow me a brief diversion. I am a very large ‘Harry Potter’ fan. I am very much not a ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ fan. By no means do I consider it canon – as far as I am concerned, Voldemort never had a daughter, and Time-Turners do not work that way. Furthermore, I am reticent about a lot of the extra details J.K. Rowling has released on Pottermore. Specifically, she mentioned how Dumbledore retrieved the Mirror of Erised from the Room of Requirement. This is contradicted in the book series, where Dumbledore implied that he was unaware of the room while talking to Igor Karkaroff. While there are ways to circumvent this contradiction, I can’t say I’m happy with any of them.

So now a new question emerges: Am I wrong? What is my belief about the canon of Harry Potter worth in comparison to J.K. Rowling’s?

Or how about language? I strive to be grammatically correct, because I enjoy grammar. I strive to distinguish between ‘who’ and ‘whom’, for example. But I know that most other people don’t. And I know that many people don’t believe that you should start a sentence with a conjunction, as I am so fond of doing. But I do. Here are some more examples, and you can probably see which ones I tend to side with based purely on what I’ve been doing throughout this post.

With all this in mind, let me come back to my answers to those questions I asked earlier. Allow me to briefly quote Tolkien again, from the same Foreword:

“I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader,and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

I can certainly sympathise with Tolkien to an extent here – there is something to be said for writing something with the intent of allowing the reader to form their own interpretations of the work. But I also sympathise with those who intend a specific interpretation of a work; ‘Animal Farm’ is a pretty direct and intended satire of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist Soviet Union, and another interpretation of that book is almost certainly going to be in some way inferior. And to give some food for thought, Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is often interpreted as being about censorship, but Bradbury himself has stated that he intended it to be about the decline of literature with the rise of mass media. So who is right?

Here then is my answer, and allow me to paraphrase the aforementioned ‘Animal Farm’:

ALL ANALYSES ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANALYSES ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

I believe that, generally, an author’s analysis is just as valid as the next person’s, but all other things being equal, the author’s analysis should be given some more credence until proven otherwise – one should probably trust an author to be an expert on their own work, after all. But, there’s room for a headcanon as well as canon, there’s room for applicability as well as allegory, there’s room to walk that pragmatic line between prescriptivism and descriptivism, and there’s room between subjectivity and objectivity for just a little ambijectivity.

I will be placing my notes on my poetry somewhere on this site – where, I haven’t quite decided yet. They will not, however, be on the same page as the actual poetry. I will not force my interpretation of my poetry on anybody else.

bayd.ren

Living with Depression

Death of the Author