This is an excerpt from a memoir I’m currently writing, Thirty Cures in Thirty Years: A Depression Survival Story. It is a lighthearted book about the heavy work of mental health. For updates and availability info, subscribe to the right.
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When I was in the first grade, I had a best friend. Of course, there wasn’t much competition for the title. My other friend, Joanne, had, in an act of great disloyalty and performed with great indifference, moved away several years prior.
Sydney was petite, blonde and unarguably pretty, made prettier next to my less graceful figure and plain face. I was shy—terribly shy—and she was … well, normal. We wouldn’t have been friends in school.
She was my neighbor, and our 1980s-era parents didn’t drive around to playdates, so in a way, she was stuck with me. In summers especially, we played together nearly every day, even though it was clear that at times, I annoyed her terribly.
I followed her around. I copied her, as kids do. She was the alpha to my beta. Yet, in those simple days void of personal reflection, the strategy worked pretty well. Most of the time we had fun together, choreographing backyard dance routines and teaching ourselves how to do cartwheels. We remained close, until one day in the summer before the second grade, she announced she’d be moving—in a week.
Other than events whose significance I wasn’t aware of at the time of their occurrence, this was my first defining life moment.
Our last playdate came. We spent it in my backyard. I don’t remember what we did, but there was a swing set and, if I recall correctly, clear open skies. Maybe we swung side by side, noticing the beauty of the day without noticing we were noticing. Kids do that, too. Before her parents arrived to pick her up and whisk her off to their new city, we discussed how we would say goodbye.
“Will we cry?” we wondered. “Will we kiss? What will we say?” But when, all too soon, her parents beckoned her to the car, the moment wasn’t as sad as it was awkward. Not knowing how to express our sadness, we quickly hugged and said goodbye, and after she left, it wasn’t sweet sorrow. It was just sorrow.
My best friend, my only friend, was gone.
***
A few weeks after the move, I got an unexpected letter. It was from my summer camp counselor who had heard that I wouldn’t be attending camp that year.
When my mother came to read it to me, I was in the backyard on our swing. I wasn’t swinging now, though. I was staring down at the ground, noticing how the gentle movement of my feet traced lines in the dirt.
The first thing I noticed when my mother interrupted my thoughts that afternoon was the uncharacteristic timidity of her voice. Was she … embarrassed? Why is she embarrassed about a letter? I wondered. This must be a pretty big deal.
It was from Mrs. White, she said. She gave me the already opened letter.
“I know it’s sad when a friend moves away,” I read silently. “But I hope you’ll change your mind and come to camp anyway. We want you here.”
The letter was nice. But my mom’s awkwardness as she handed it to me made me wonder. Did Mom feel sorry for me? Did she think I was sad or something? Had she discussed my feelings with other people?
Am I sad? I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it till then.
“So what do you think, Mollie?” Mom asked gently. “What should I tell her? Do you want to go?”
I looked back down at the ground, missive still in hand. “No,” I told her. “It’s not that much fun anyway.”
Mom didn’t press the issue, and I was glad for that. She returned to the house and I returned to my thoughts.
I am sad, I realized. I’m not crying. I’m not physically hurt. But I am sad, and people can tell. And it’s not just right now.
I’m sad a lot.
It was true. And to me, it was a significant realization.
I was sad, and other people could see it. They knew.
***
When my father, who suffered from depression much of his life, would describe me as a baby, he’d say that I often had a “worried, thoughtful expression” on my face.
“There was a little wrinkle between your eyebrows,” he’d tell me. “You were so cute.” Maybe to my father, my seriousness was a sign of intelligence. Or maybe he appreciated that I took after him.
Either way, I wonder: did I already understand what I was getting myself into?
I was a serious kid. Maybe … a bit too serious? In pictures from young childhood, I see genuine smiles, but I also see contemplation, confusion, chronic boredom and unanswered questions.
My mom called me “sensitive,” but I knew the label covered up something else–something bigger. I’d been lonely for a long time, and now my one friend was gone. There would be no one to fill in the gap that she left–not for a long time.
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One afternoon before I was yet school age I sat in our living room, re-reading the handful of children’s books we owned. Where was Mom? She might’ve been on the phone. For hours on end, she would gossip with her friends from church and Avon (a Mary Kay-style multilevel marketing company) while my older brother, younger sister and I would watch television and play outside. In later years, as her own depression grew, she gave up all three pursuits: makeup, church, and friends. For both of us, our social lives were a reflection of our sense of well-being.
On our eighties-chic light blue carpet, I spread out the books and studied them, one by one. Then, bored of the activity, I lay quietly and thought. Recalling saying goodbye to my brother that morning as he caught the bus for school and wishing for someone to play with, I had a strange thought: Is something wrong with me? What if I’m … retarded? That was the word we used then for people with Down Syndrome. I tried on the idea, slowly turning it in my mind. What if I’m retarded and no one wants to tell me because they’re afraid it will hurt my feelings? It was my first thought experiment.
After considering the evidence, I assured myself it couldn’t be true–my mom always told me I was smart and praised me for teaching myself to read at age three. So why did I feel so different? And why didn’t I feel good and smile a lot like the other kids? And what was I feeling, anyway? I had so few answers, and so many questions, most of which I didn’t even know how to ask.
And who would I have asked, anyway? What would I have said? Throughout childhood, the idea of confiding in someone about a serious personal difficulty just never occurred to me. I was different, I figured. I’d always be this way.
No sense in making a big deal about it.
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Other early memories corroborate the narrative of myself as a fundamentally lonely, withdrawn child: The time I relieved my bladder at my desk because I was too shy to raise my hand and ask to use the bathroom. The times I excitedly reorganized my bedroom and carefully planned my outfit for the rare playdate my mom set up for my sister and I with the kids of one of her friends. How many of these were there altogether? Four? five?
One day at recess (was I in the second grade?) a boy pointed to my feet and said, “Don’t you need new shoes?” He was right: the soles had completely worn through and one of them flapped a bit, separating from the fabric uppers, as I walked. I liked those shoes. I was comfortable with them, and I hadn’t even thought to ask my mom for another pair.
One Christmas, I received the present I’d been hoping for–a talking spelling computer. When I tried to use it and realized that, right out of the box, it was broken, my mother told me she would replace it as soon as she could. I nodded a reply, but somehow I knew she never would, and she never did.
One day in the third grade I cried in class, devastated, after being scolded by the German nun who had taught that grade at our small Catholic school for as long as anyone could remember. I had reversed the i and e in the word “friend,” and the teacher’s severity was not only embarrassing–it was a betrayal. Though the kids didn’t like me, the teachers always did, and being humiliated by her felt like losing an ally.
Often, basic tasks of self-care went undone. There’s a memory of my mother frantically insisting that my sister, brother and I brush our teeth before a rare dentist appointment. I was a bit annoyed by this, and also a shade doubtful: Why are we brushing them now? It’s too late, Mom. He’ll figure it out.
I didn’t brush my hair regularly, either. When finally my mother decided things had gone too far, she wet my hair with No More Tears shampoo (a splurge of a purchase that she showed me proudly) and worked through the knots one by one.
To her disappointment, there were tears.
***
The last time I remember being truly happy during my youngest years was when, a year or two after her move, Sydney came to town and visited for an afternoon. We played in the living room, hanging various important documents all over the walls of our “office.” But what I remember the most is the pit-of-the-stomach sadness I experienced when her mom finally said she had to go.
Sydney and I begged for ten more minutes.
“Ten more minutes,” her mom told us. All too soon, she came back. Then Sydney left, and it was over.
I didn’t know when I’d play with a friend again, but I guessed it would be a long time.
I guessed right.
In that moment, something inside me broke, and though it healed, I was never quite the same. From that moment on, I was no longer a child.
I no longer believed everything would be okay.
***
I wasn’t right about that, exactly; eventually, I would be okay. But it would take a long time to get there. In the years to come, I’d try numerous remedies for my lifelong chronic depression, and though they wouldn’t all work, some would.
Have I tried thirty cures in as many years? Or have there been more than that? Either way, for me, self-improvement has been a lifelong job. Fortunately, it’s a job that I have since figured out how to do–most of the time. And it’s a job that I like most of the time, too.
Anyway, mental health, I’ve learned, isn’t free for anyone–even for people who are naturally cheerful.
It’s always earned.
There are no exceptions.
***
As an undergrad, I majored in English and History, specializing in ancient Greece and Rome. A few years ago, I revisited some of the authors I might not have fully appreciated as a twenty-something. This included works of stoic philosophy like The Trial and Death of Socrates (the trio of dialogues individually known as The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo), Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. Other authors I read or reread around this time echoed some of their themes: Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau. Augusten Burroughs. A guy named Mark Manson wrote a book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, and it was every bit as profound as the title suggests.
By this time, I’d been a self-help writer for about fifteen years and a mental health counselor for about five. Many of my books and stories coalesced around the themes of depression treatment and of the mental fortitude such a disorder calls for. What do I most want to say? I’d often ask myself, as all writers do. What is the one thing I want everyone to know?
Inspired by my recent reading, the answer came easily: I want to help people see themselves as survivors, not victims. To take responsibility for their mental health–to see it as a job.
And here, now, was Socrates: “He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.”
And here, now, was Seneca: “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”
And here, now, was Marcus Aurelius: “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
I’m a stoic, I realized. I just didn’t know it till now.
And so, this is a book about depression–my depression, specifically.
But it is also a book about survival.
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