step around

11 January 2018

Sometimes I wish I could be as wise as I am when I write.

For me, writing is revelatory. As I write, words come out that I didn’t know were in me, thoughts that I hadn’t realized I’d been thinking, patterns and connections that I didn’t see before. Sometimes when I write, someone else speaks – someone much, much older than me, someone more knowledgeable, more understanding, more confident, more certain and sure of herself. Often, as I write, I feel a sense of warmth and calm come over me; it is the feeling of being protected, of not being alone, of being watched over. 

It doesn’t really matter what I choose to call this; mostly it just feels comforting. And recently, completely inaccessible.

I haven’t written anything – anything for myself, anything that I felt proud of – in about six months. I could pass this off on the increasingly busy schedule that my return to university brought about, or call it simple writer’s block (and it is, in part, both of these things); however, since it has taken me a while to be able to do so, I would like to call it by its name, which is Depression.

It goes like this: some days are fine. Other days I notice as soon as I wake up a sort of pulling, sinking feeling in my chest, as if there is a great black hole in there and it’s drawing everything inside of me into it. Sometimes it feels like my mind has been stuffed with damp grey wool, taking up all the space so that I can’t exist as anything other than a large piece of damp grey wool in human skin. Sometimes I have felt that I’ve lost days in a row, moving through them like they are a thick and obliterating mud, and the only evidence that I existed at all during those times are my hours at work, dutifully clocked in and out, notes typed up from lectures that I can’t recall, receipts from trips to the store to buy more eggs that I don’t remember running out of.

I have experienced this before, in high school – my junior year, when I mostly cried a lot and usually didn’t want to get out of bed and asked my best friend in her truck in the morning before zero period, in the middle of winter with the heater blasting, what I would do if I felt this way for the rest of my life. But I didn’t feel that way for the rest of my life, because time kept on and the shortest and darkest days of the year passed from my mind and I never learned to call it by its name then.

For me, the naming of a thing is important. I like words, and I like clarity. Sometimes naming bestows power, and sometimes it takes power away. In this case, it was the latter – naming the thing made it small. I could set it on the floor and walk around it and see all its colors and angles; I could sit inside of it and look around and see its internal architecture; I could place it in my palm like a stone and hold it out, first to my parents and then later to my therapist, and say, “Please help me with this.” It felt good. It felt like taking off a backpack I’d been carrying for probably my entire life and finally opening it to see what was inside.

I’ve written a lot about how I wouldn’t be able to recognize how much I’d changed over the past couple of years and during my travels until I returned home, to a fixed place; however, now I realize that I couldn’t have possibly understood the depth and breadth of that change until I returned to the “fixed place” of what defined me for essentially the first twenty years of my life: academia. Writing this now, it seems obvious and a bit silly – in one way or another, my entire perception of myself and what I would become had always pivoted around academics. The concept of home and my interaction with my childhood home (though a slightly jarring return initially) turned out to be relatively more fluid and easily adaptable than I thought it was going to be. Academia is different. It is an institution larger than myself, larger than my family, larger than my experiences, existing totally apart from those things for the past two years, even though it had dictated the rhythm of my years for almost as long as I could remember. Of course it would become a litmus test of where my identity and mental state stood; there was never going to be any other way of things, and I was too caught up in my concerns about coming home at all to anticipate that.

After only about three or four weeks back in classes, I realized that what had made me tick two years ago wasn’t necessarily what made me tick now. My interests had changed, I’d fallen out of step with academics, and I couldn’t figure out how to get back into it – or if that was possible in the same way that it was before, or if I even wanted that. Everything I thought I knew about myself, about what was important to me, about what I enjoyed, and about what I wanted my future to look like had been swept away in a massive tidal wave of uncertainty and disillusionment. To my lurking companion, Depression, this was like a big old “Kick Me!” sign taped right in the middle of my back.

Long story short: I got my ass kicked by my own brain these past six months. Like, really really REALLY hard. You know what, though – and here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write – I think it was kind of a good thing.

Not the depression, obviously. Depression can go fuck itself. 

What I mean here is that in the process of dealing with that depression, I was forced to reevaluate my entire life and self with a frankness and accountability that I had never employed before. I wouldn’t really describe it as fun, and I would certainly not say that it is done, but sometimes:

Sometimes, when you feel like a piece of damp grey wool in human skin, you have to work hard to remember what it feels like to be a human in human skin. So you make yourself write moments down, to look at and remember later:

The sound of the train at night that I hated at first, but is familiar and comforting now.

Waving hello to the same people on the bus every day.

The way the bay looks in the autumn on the drive to work in the morning – clear, and bright, and clean.

That old-book smell in the anthropology library.

Walking home in the twilight and listening to late summer crickets.

The sound of my neighbor talking to her cat outside my bedroom window every evening.

Cooking a meal with new friends and laughing until my sides ache over nothing at all.

Taking the train into the city on the weekend and buying a single pear at the farmer’s market and eating it right there on a sidewalk .

Napping on the lawn under the oak trees in between work and class – staring up at the light coming in through the leaves, sneezing from the pollen afterwards.

When later comes, you’re glad to have those. After a while, noticing them is easier, and you shout-sing loudly alone in the car for the first time in a long time.

Sometimes, when all of the things that you thought defined you crumble away, there’s brand-new space for other things. Once you stop panicking because of all that open space, it feels kind of good to stretch. There’s room in here for so many things that you hadn’t even imagined before; it seems like there’s close to a hundred thousand directions to go, things to do. You get kind of a weird feeling about it at first until you realize that the weird feeling could maybe, possibly, if you peered down at it through a microscope at just the right angle, look like…excitement. Life just got big. Like, really really REALLY big.

In July of last year, still wracked by the sense of dislocation and un-belongingness that had settled in since coming back to California, I wrote about that feeling and the process of trying to belong somewhere again:

This is the fault of no one and no thing. It is just the way it is. There is immeasurable loss in this discomfort. There is also growth and light, like a cleansing flame, although usually one must wallow around in the mud and darkness a bit first.

(Sometimes, I wish I could be as wise as I am when I write.)

But here I am, anyways. I’ve wallowed. I really got stuck in there: my boots became heavy with that mud, all cake-y and clay-ey. But I found a good stick to scrape it off with, and good shoulders to hang on to while I’m doing the scraping, and now it’s starting to feel a little easier to move again. I’m keeping the stick close by, though, and the shoulders, and I’m keeping a sharp eye out for mud patches on the trail ahead. I know what to look for. I’m hoping that maybe next time I can just step around.