Mostly, it’s just that I forgot.
By the time I got around to remembering, thanks to a timely intervention by my therapist, two months had gone by. By that time, I was sinking deeper and deeper.
One (just one) symptom of depression is what I call ‘selective amnesia’–a self-ravaging ability to recall any but the most awful shit about yourself. The condemnation is often so severe it leads to that other symptom of depression–suicide.
[Hey-hey-hey, hold on a minute here–what’s with the heaviness, pal? I just come to read your next list of Top Five SH Gurus Who Are Odds-On Favorites To Be Accused of Sexual Assault in 2021.]
[Man, trust me I hear you. And that important post is coming, I promise. Just do me a solid and spot me this one, just this once, then no more heavy shit for a while, ok? You got my word.]
Misunderstanding Depression
Earlier this year Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin announced that his beloved son, Tommy, killed himself on New Years Eve. The note he left carried with it a sentiment that I, and anyone who suffers from depression, can relate to.
Please forgive me. My illness won today. All my love, Tommy.
Then he hung himself. Or ate some pills. Maybe swallowed a bullet. Turned his car into a coffin in his parent’s smoky garage. Who the fuck knows? Doesn’t really matter, does it? Besides, his parents didn’t specify his method of exit. Instead, they wrote this:
“On the last hellish brutal day of that godawful miserable year of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people all over the world died alone in bed in the darkness from an invisible killer disease ravaging their bodies and minds, we also lost our dear, dear, beloved son.”
Then, as if in preemptive response to the inevitable stupidity of those who might wonder what else could have been done (nothing, that’s what); to shut the mouths of all those whose ignorance makes mockery of pain, reduces emotional anguish to human weakness, and somehow turns suicide into a character failing, to all of them his parents offered this:
“And despite very fine doctors and a loving family and friendship network of hundreds who adored him beyond words and whom he adored too, the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy, this young man of surpassing promise to our broken world.”
Fine doctors. A loving family. Friendship in the hundreds. Adored beyond words.
Overwhelming pain. Unyielding. Unbearable.
This young man.
Our dear boy.
Ok? So…put that fucken puzzle together for me, will you? Where to even start? I mean, Harvard grad + doting parents + loving friends = what, suicide?
But I’ll give it a shot. After all, I knew Tommy.
See, to most people suicide is the tragic outcome of those who failed to treat depression properly. But people like me know better. Suicide is a symptom of depression, not a failure to treat it. Put another way, depression causes suicide in the same way that Parkinsons causes hand tremors or that dementia causes weird math at the grocery store checkout.
Again, it’s a symptom of the disease, not a failure to address it.
How do I know? Like I said, I knew Tommy. In fact, lot’s of us did. And not only the hundreds of “loving friends” to which his parents refer in that heartbreaking letter. Anyone who has ever had to stare down what my favorite writer, William Styron, described as “the bed of anguish devouring my brain” knows that there is, in fact, no staring it down at all. There is only the faint reservation of hope that the hand tremors will, at some unknowable point, go away.
Until then, the unrelenting torment of depression, one that cannot adequately be described in words to someone not similarly afflicted, screams its fucken face off for you to end you. It does not stop. Not for a second. Tragically, sometimes it takes what Tommy did in order to make it stop.
Great Smile, Right?
If you’ve read this far, you’ve no doubt scrolled up a few times to double-check the byline–is this a guest post? The fuck happened to the goof who makes fun of self-help frauds and calls McConaughey’s new book a gleaming turd bowl?
It’s me. Same guy.
And that picture below you see of Tommy, the guy who killed himself, beaming his ain’t-life-grand smile?
That’s him. Same guy.
Look again. It’s him. Great smile, right?
See, it’s not that Tommy and I need to smile more, lighten up a little, look harder at the bright side, count more of our innumerable blessings, pep up our negative attitude or–God help me–“snap out of it”. No. In fact, the well-meaning insistence to do so by loved ones–and SH optimism proselytizers–usually makes things worse.
As masters of emotional disguise, we can smile pretty for the camera—Say cheese…Cheeese!—and nod convincingly at all the right parts of your story while, inside, the tangled wires devouring our mind are on life support.
Be honest: Would you guess by looking at that picture of Tommy, ‘our dear boy’, that he was lying in a “bed of anguish devouring his brain”?
Because I would.
To me, it’s plain as day. Then again, after 46 years of practice you’d expect I could spot a comrade.
The truth, one that very few people with depression will tell you because we’re too busy perfecting our dinner party face, is that we desperately—desperately!—want to live. It’s just that, to us, minute-by-minute mental reminders are required to convince ourselves that the opposite isn’t true.
People with real clinical depression, separate from those who, you know, get bummed out from time to time, sometimes die. That’s reality. That’s the disease. They die because in some cases, Tommy’s being one, however vigilant and thorough their devotion to treatment, to get better, to beat it, their “illness won that day”.
For some reason, this concept is easy for people to grasp when it comes to conditions with physical manifestations–muscular dystrophy, diabetes or ACL–or those that come with aging–Alzheimer’s, dementia, and in the case of men chest-high pants. Yet, when it comes to mental illness there is still widespread insistence, or at least unspoken judgment, that depression is a character failing and suicide a coward’s play.
Good thing we have Nietzsche, who left clues as to why such blockheaded beliefs by inbred dumbshits exist: “Man has no ears for that which he has no experience.”
In other words, some people just can’t, for the life of them, conceive of a human experience that’s different from their own. Pretty pathetic, I know.
My dad, God bless him, is like that. Three of his four children have a form of mental illness yet he still subscribes to the macho-man, gut-it-out strategy of overcoming hardship that is no doubt a product of his Holocaust-era, Israeli military upbringing.
For better or worse, I don’t have that luxury. My battle is as real as Tommy’s.
If Nietzsche’s sentiments characterize my dad, then perhaps mine are better captured by Rumi:
“Be kind to others for they face a battle similar to your own.”
Back To Normal
Like I said, the past two months I simply forgot. Forgot who I was–a 46-year old man with clinically diagnosed depression.
However religiously I’d take my pills, make my therapy appointments, get my daily exercise, meditate, journal and do all the other mundane shit that goes along with treating a mental disorder, I still sank.
I just kept telling myself I was having a hard day. That this is normal. That it’s normal to…
…react viscously to your saint of a wife asking if you want some leftover fried rice…to count down desperately the hours until the mercy of bedtime…to lose interest in sex and chocolate croissants and the next day…to feel totally overwhelmed, emotionally leveled, on a day with nothing, but absolutely nothing, to do.
Mostly, I forgot that depression, like all killers, is a fucken liar.
I wish I could have reminded Tommy of that.
He seemed to forget, too.
Rest In Peace, our dear boy.