I’ve written about this before, in poems and essays and letters, and even an occasional paper several years ago, but the past few months brought me back to this topic. Again. Again again.
I’m back in it so I felt the need to send this letter from the trenches, I guess. Actually not in the trenches, having just escaped. I’m kind of catching my breath on a pile of dirt from which I can see something besides darkness. I refuse to use a war metaphor for this. I’m still searching for the right metaphor for this.
When I write about my depression, it’s always somewhat from a distance, because I don’t write when I’m depressed. Well, I do write, of course, but it’s not very coherent— I feel like my mind is trying so hard not to implode and let the dark rush in that I don’t have time for stuff like legible handwriting or complete sentences.
And, obviously, I’m a very high functioning mentally ill person. So people sometimes are surprised to hear that I have been hospitalized for my depression, that it started when I was a teenager, and that I consider it an integral part of who I am. It’s a chronic disease that I’ve had all my life and will have until I die. (Unless someone finds a cure!)
I’m not depressed now and I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. But I realize that people like me who have been given so many gifts in life have a responsibility to speak up and tell the story. Not the story of my depression — that would be pretty boring and depressing — but the other story, about my wonderful life. I have a job that I love and I’m passionate about, two amazing kids, great husband, family and friends and the financial resources to sit around writing essays like this. People with mental illnesses are all around us, looking fine and fighting such a hard battle. Maybe you are a person with a mental illness, or maybe you know someone who has one. It’s easy for me to be open about this and have a good attitude because I have all kinds of support — tenure, health care and medicine and all kinds of other things that a white woman my age with a college education in America gets to have. I need to write this because here I am — a happy sad crazy girl woman who loves life today, and is so grateful for it, but knows that at any time this happiness could go away and I will just have to slog through it and try to not be depressed. Now, when I have the energy to write and think clearly I feel like I need to say this to the world: hold each others’ hands. Listen to each others’ stories. Be warriors for kindness and peace. It isn’t just about mental illness, although that’s the topic that I have special knowledge of. It’s about really looking at the people around you with soft eyes and trying to make things better because we all are fighting the same hard war, just different battles with different names.
I do feel as I always have, that when I communicate (in any way), I’m somewhere else and I’m sending dispatches from that place. The place is usually pretty ok. It’s better than a demilitarized zone. I’ve returned home again. For now. So I guess it the war metaphor wasn’t too bad — or at least it’s somewhat better than the snake metaphor I came up with when I wrote about this topic five years ago. And I still have hope — that even though I will face depression again, I might come up with an even better metaphor - and essay — out of that.
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