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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My eighth grade year, my sister and I switched schools, joining the kids we would live near when our country house was ready. On my first day, I sat in biology class reading Seventeen magazine with what I hoped was diffidence. I wondered if the new start would make me new, too.
The new school didn’t have recess, but it did have lunch periods and mid-morning breaks. Though I quickly found a table to sit at during lunch–it wasn’t hard to pick the other geeks out from the crowd–the breaks confounded me: how would I pass fifteen minutes inconspicuously? It was a daily struggle. Often, I lingered in the bathroom. Sometimes, I sat by the lockers and pretended to read. Then one day early on in my eighth grade career, after exiting the bathroom, my worst nightmare presented itself: there in the main corridor where our lockers were located, seemingly all of the other kids had formed two rough circles.
I scanned the circles quickly. One contained all of the more popular kids, while the other contained everyone else. Only two girls sat on the bleachers, off to the side: April and April. Best friends. Unpopular, but kind.
I knew that if I joined one of the circles, no one would mind. I also knew that if I joined the two Aprils, they’d probably welcome me.
I didn’t do either, though. The distance between my locker and the other kids was too great. So I looked back at my locker and pretended to look for something. Then I returned to the bathroom.
Maybe they’ll think that I was having my period, I thought. Not surprisingly, this idea was little comfort.
Ten minutes passed. Finally, the bell rang. I had made it through another embarrassing moment.
***
The incident was not an isolated one. Despite improvements in my home life, my depression was worsening. Middle school, for me, was the deepest valley of my sadness, and high school was the beginning of the slow, long climb toward higher ground.
These are hard years for most people, right? The self-consciousness and hormones. The fear of not fitting in. But the harsh combination of loneliness and puberty was not the only contributing factor to my declining mental health.
Genetically, I was likely at a disadvantage. My father’s depression was as much a part of him as his joblessness and alcoholism. Sundays were his drinking day, my mother told me. She also told me of the times he would call her on those days, gun in hand.
Self-esteem, too, was a big part of the problem. I was never particularly pretty and I had no sense of style to balance out my aesthetic shortcomings. Later in life, confidence would become my most attractive feature, but that day was many years away. Our family didn’t have the money to purchase me a new look, either; as I write this over thirty years later, I still have occasional nightmares that I have nothing decent to wear.
I didn’t like my glasses, so I simply didn’t wear them, even though my vision was in the legally blind category. How many years did I spend squinting? When that year I finally got contacts, another blow to my self-esteem came: I discovered what I really looked like.
I’d been doing my makeup all wrong. My hair was even worse. But the really bad news: I just didn’t look good. This realization hurt, but not just because attractiveness is a cultural requirement for female sufficiency. It hurt because of its perceived symbolism. Something was wrong with me–indelibly, intrinsically wrong.
And I was powerless to change it.
***
Years later, during my grad school residency, I entered the school cafeteria to see most of the tables filled. At each, students chatted amiably, bonding over chicken and rice. The only spot left for me seemed to be at an empty table.
An empty table. This again. Would I eat alone, as I had throughout my school years? Though technically, I always sat next to other kids, in every cafeteria in which I ate, my place was at the far end. I was ignored. As a thirty-nine [?] year old woman, I should have known that someone would join me at that empty table. But my reaction to the situation wasn’t logical; it was [word]. A wave of desperate loneliness came over me, a physical memory, and unlike some other waves, it was too high for me to breathe over. After an almost imperceptible pause, I joined the food line, hoping no one would speak to me.
Someone did speak to me. I didn’t reply, though. I shook my head and they seemed to understand. They turned away.
I’m okay. I’ll get through this, I repeated to myself forcibly. No one is looking at me. Just get your food and sit anywhere.
I returned to the empty tale, sat down and stared at my plate. Soon, the dean of the school, an unfailingly kind man, the kind that you trust immediately, joined us. This was too much. After pushing the food around my plate for a few moments, I excused myself and went to the bathroom, bringing my phone with me. I locked the door, sat on the floor and called my husband, David. He’d know what to do.
And, to his everlasting credit, he did. “Yeah, that happens,” he said after I told him about the awkward situation.
I took a few deep breaths. “What should I do?” I asked.
He said, “Just go back in and pretend it never happened.” His tone was respectful but also casual.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You can do this,” he said.
It was exactly what I needed to hear.
When I returned to the table the dean and a fellow student who had joined us were discussing the merits and drawbacks of publicly funded early learning programs. I joined the conversation, disagreeing with the woman who opposed them before learning that the dean had worked closely with one of these programs for years. He and I continued talking long past the time the others excused themselves. Was there a hint of surprise–maybe respect?–in his eyes when he realized that I had fully recovered my composure? I knew that he knew that I had powered through a difficult moment. Still, the force of it shook me.
This wouldn’t be the only time being alone in a crowd would overtake me in that sudden, whole-body way. And most of them didn’t end this well. Even today, I often have to breathe through the first half hour of any social occasion in which I’m surrounded by strangers. Sometimes, just breathing isn’t enough.
***
In summer, I often sleep in a tent in my backyard. I look up at the trees and realize with gratitude that compared to them, I am small. One evening as I lay under the blankets I listened to a comedian describe her experiences with her several serious mental health disorders. In the midst of the expected self-deprecating jokes, she said that depression isn’t normal sadness. Depression is not getting out of bed. It’s genuinely wanting to discontinue living because not only your mind but your physical body hurts so badly. Anything short of that, she said, is just the blues.
I thought, That can’t be right, though. I know that feeling of hurting physically from depression, and I know what it’s like to lose the appetite for living. But most of the time, I want to stay alive. I appreciate what I have and who I am. But also, there’s a sadness that never fully goes away.
I know from my training and work as a therapist that there’s a difference between Major Depressive Disorder, the kind the comedian was describing, and the kind I have, Persistent Depressive Disorder (formerly called Dysthymia). I’m thankful that my depression isn’t a debilitating thing–not anymore, anyway. But having lived with the condition from before my earliest memories till the day I write this–over forty-five years in all–I don’t underestimate its power, its tenacity. Persistent Depression isn’t the fire that burns the house down, leaving you to rebuild once it has flamed out. It’s the water in the basement that you have to siphon out each day, lest it creates cracks in the foundation.
My favorite poem is “The Heavy Bear” by Delmore Schwartz, and I would quote the whole thing here if I could. Since I can’t, I will just say that “The heavy bear who goes with me … Has followed me since the black womb held.” He “Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,” and I don’t quite know who I’d be without him.
Sadness goes with me, but it’s not the kind you feel when the home or person you love is no more. It’s the sadness of yet again entering a cafeteria in which you have no place to sit.
***
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