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 college, I had an unusual experience: a burglar broke into my apartment.
It was summer and at the time I lived in a third-floor apartment in a hot-summer town with no A/C. My only relief from the heat came around midnight when the not-quite-hot air blew through my open windows and door.
One night, while I sat at my desktop computer playing some generic precursor to Candy Crush, I heard some strange sounds coming from the kitchen. Scratching sounds, almost. Then a sound like a thumb tack skidding across the linoleum floor.
What the fuck was that, I wondered. Later, it turned out that it was a thumb tack skidding across the linoleum floor.
Suspecting an intruder, I sat calmly, waiting. I wasn’t going to initiate the confrontation, and the kitchen was where the front door was. Soon, a man appeared, slightly built and dressed all in black. He held a white-painted lead pipe.
He saw me and stopped. I could’ve reached out and touched him. One of us had the upper hand here, and it wasn’t me. And yet. There was that hesitation. He looked at me. I looked at him. And suddenly, I knew what to do.
“Can you leave, please?” I said. The man stared at me. I said it again: “Can you leave, please?” The man took a step back, ducked his head once in a gesture of deference and simply said, “Yeah.” Then he quickly fled the kitchen and down the apartment stairs.
As I closed and locked my door, my body flooded with adrenaline. I didn’t call the cops or anyone else; instead, I inspected the kitchen. My purse was still on the table, and there was a thumb tack, taken from the cork board near the door, on the floor.
I picked it up, thanking God for the redeeming merits of drug use. Dysfunction was the hero of the story, not me. Still, I gave myself some credit. I’d always been irrationally afraid of home intruders, concocting unlikely scenarios involving meticulous and deftly carried out plans while trying to fall asleep. But when I finally encountered one, no plan had been needed. Much later in life, I read a book called The Gift of Fear by security specialist Gavin de Becker that explained the situation clearly. Anxiety isn’t fear, it told me. True fear is what you feel in the moment. And often, it allows a person to focus and distill all of the relevant information into a brief flash of insight we know as intuition. At the time, though, I attributed my successful home defense to my superior sense of calm and level-headedness.
I wasn’t one of those people who over-thought things. I was a doer.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t true. Robin Williams once said, “You’re only given one little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it. You’re an interesting person. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Just don’t interfere with yourself.”
In another interview he said, “If you just don’t interfere with yourself, you’re quite interesting.” This was, I think, the lesson of his life.
I tend to interfere.
That summer night that I stared into the blank staring eyes of a man holding a lead pipe, I learned that I didn’t always need to control everything; often, the moment would provide all needed information.
Unfortunately, the lesson didn’t stick.
***
Should I talk about it? I wondered one evening. Benjamin and I had just finished the Netflix DVD that had come in the mail earlier that afternoon. People pay a lot of money for therapy. They said it helps. Maybe I’ll give it a try.
To his everlasting credit, Benjamin isn’t a bad listener. He doesn’t offer unneeded advice or show pity or refocus the conversation onto himself. These things I appreciated, and yet, where was the catharsis I was told would come after you bared all to a trusted person? Having had few close friends in my life, I didn’t realize that it didn’t always work that way. That night, I learned that sometimes, after you exhaust an already-boring topic like depression, you go to bed feeling worse than before. In trying to relieve the loneliness, you end up feeling more alone than ever.Okay, I told myself as I waited for sleep to come.Next time, just distract yourself instead.
This was good advice. No longer would I wallow in sadness about sadness. The first layer of sadness was enough. I talked with Benjamin about incidents, about decisions, about problems. But the topic of depression was now off the table. When he asked how I felt, I usually said I was fine.
Because really, I told myself, I am fine.
It wasn’t till much later that I learned that while rumination is unhealthy, feeling your feelings is probably a good idea. The subtlety of this distinction wasn’t within my purview at the time, but that’s okay.
Emotional maturity doesn’t come overnight.
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“Confine yourself to the present.” Marcus Aurelius.
“Perhaps I’m old and tired … but I always think that the chances of finding out what is really going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.” Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
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It’s Zen, only more practical. Get The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home at your preferred book retailer today.
