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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Throughout my school years, while physically in school, I deftly maintained my loner status. In other places, though, things were changing.
When I was in the sixth grade, our family switched churches, and Lulu and I started attending a youth group. To our great and lasting relief, we became instant friends with the small cohort of fundamentalist Christians who were around our age, including the mature, well-spoken Judith who was a year older than me and became my best friend. We talked about everything–finally, I got to really talk–and since youth group met on Wednesdays, we saw each other and the rest of the group twice a week. After years of loneliness, my sister and I finally had kids to invite to our birthday parties, to go camping with in the summer, and to pass notes with during church.
We had friends.
It was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time. Religion wasn’t all bad for my mental health, then.
But it wasn’t all good, either.
***
Though still managing my depression with food, books and baths, I now had access to more potent potential cures: spirituality and friendship. Church gave me hope. But there were strings attached. My religious community provided me with a place where I could be my best, most confident, most outgoing self, but it also gave me a … problematic … worldview.
With an increased focus on religion came an increased feeling of guilt: I feared the wrath of God if I listened to non-Christian music or had a crush on a boy. Everything, it seemed, was sinful. The good news: if I could just stop sinning forever, I would likely be happy.
***
The church was a confidence booster for me, and my mom must have felt the same way. Along with providing her with new connections, the community strengthened a central part of her identity. She was a prophet, she declared soon after we attended our first service. And we believed her. And maybe she was.
One day, when I was eleven or twelve years old, she told my sister, brother and I that she’d had a vision of our new home in the country. First, though, we had to build it. But no worries: God would provide. She wasted no time getting the project underway.
As she researched land, contractors and blueprints, she also sold our childhood home. Then, the summer before my eighth grade year, after some months of living in friends’ basements and extra spaces, we bought an intermediate house in a different part of town. The house wasn’t as nice as the one we’d grown up in, but no one complained: it was located less than a block away from my best friend Judith and her younger sister Anne.
For the several years that we lived in that house, the four of us girls were inseparable. We baked cookies, watched scary movies, jumped on the trampoline, shared secrets–all of the things I always wanted to do with friends. At home and at church, I genuinely liked the person I was becoming; however, school remained difficult. As I entered the building each day, I also entered a fortress of shyness and sadness.
And until 3:15 p.m., I couldn’t escape.
***
One warm afternoon during the summer before sixth grade a friend of my mom’s went on a cleaning spree. Thinking of Mom’s two preteen girls, she brought us several large boxes of discarded magazines.
“Magazines!” Lulu and I said. Lulu was just a year younger than me, and we had both arrived at the age of crushes and self-consciousness. Though normally my mother forbade us from reading teen magazines, she couldn’t resist the free gift. Lulu and I brought the boxes out to the front lawn and dug in.
It was a treasure trove. One by one, my sister and I plowed through the magazines, skimming, reading, skimming again. The older girls in the pages and their daily concerns (lipstick shades, celebrity updates) fascinated me. I wanted to be like them. Of course I did.
It might’ve been my second time through the boxes that I slowed down enough to read a different kind of article–one of those socially conscious offerings that the editors seemed obligated to include at the rate of one per issue. It was about a girl who had been diagnosed with depression and was now receiving counseling and other support. In large print, there was a callout highlighting her moment of truth: “While riding on a bus one day, out of the blue, I burst into tears. And that’s when I realized I was depressed.”
My first thought: Ha! Crying on a bus? That’s not depression. That’s just … crying. I cry all the time: on the bus, in the car. Sometimes, secretly, I cry during class. She did it once, and suddenly she has a serious mental disorder? You’re not selling me on this, folks.
Depression wasn’t crying. Depression was not getting out of bed. It was losing a job, or attempting suicide, or becoming institutionalized. Anything less than this seemed a bit … dramatic. Anything less was just the pain of life.
Then I read the article.
Thank you, mental health educators.
The realization came slowly and by degrees. Isn’t it like that sometimes? At first, I filed the article in my head under “teen magazine’s weak attempt at a public service announcement, the one most girls skip on their way to the advice column.” Later, my internal dialogue shifted: If she has depression, then I definitely do. But clearly, that’s ridiculous. Then (how long did it take?), eventually, there was another quarter-turn: Oh. Maybe I do have depression. That would explain a lot, actually.
Maybe I have depression.
I have depression.
I wasn’t a martyr or a tragic figure. I wasn’t destined by God to suffer. I was a normal person whose emotional needs weren’t being met. The understanding that eventually dawned did little to solve the problem. But knowing was at least a starting point.
***
My first purposeful attempt to treat my depression was … inadequate, to say the least. It took place on Thanksgiving day of my seventh-grade year and was inspired by, of all things, a long bath. Even at that young age, I had begun seeking comfort in baths on a regular basis, outlasting the water’s heat in an attempt to remain in that place of comfort as long as possible. When I recall the experience, it’s not the tongue-in-cheek remedy that I drafted that stands out the most; rather, it’s that I remember the occasion at all.
I have only thirty or so clear, specific memories of my childhood home, and most of them deserve to be remembered: nighttime fears. Christmases. Punishments. The day I discovered my grandmother “acting funny” on her favorite chair in the family room in the midst of her fatal heart attack.
I remember my first phone call, made on our wall phone in the hallway nook. It was to Sydney after she moved away. I asked if her favorite color was still our favorite, purple, and she told me that she’d switched to blue. I also remember particularly enjoyable afternoons with my sister, playing post office and coming up with dance routines.
But why do I remember this experience–this simple bath? I remember it because it was important. That bath was the first time I purposely and knowingly considered how to manage my depression, and without the benefit of the internet, grownup involvement and proper mental health care, options were limited. Which is why my plan involved turkey.
The day of the bath I soaked for a long time, and after getting out, I lay on the bed. The familiar, welcome smell of my mother’s turkey dinner–now nearly done–came over me, and I realized something: I felt pretty good.
I feel … good, I thought. Better than I had in recent memory. Elevated to humor, I decided, half-jokingly, to create a recipe for treating my depression right then and there. I might have even written it down.
This was that plan: Step one: Get a turkey. On a day off from school, put it in the oven. Step two: Once the smell of the turkey starts to fill the house, draw a bath. Step three: Get in the bath, and stay in it for two hours. Then drain the bath fully while you’re still in it. Listen to the water as it slowly leaves the tub, and notice your state of complete relaxation. Step four: Get out of the tub and lay on a comfortable bed until dinner is ready. Step five: Eat the turkey.
It wasn’t a Turkish bath. But it was a bath with turkey. Maybe it was just crazy enough to work.
It wasn’t. But other crazy things were. And though I didn’t find out about them till much later, at least now I was taking action. I wasn’t just accepting my lot in life as I had for most of my childhood.
I was starting to make plans.
It was an inconvenient strategy, but it was important. It was my first.
I had no idea how many more strategies–both successful and not–were to come.
***
“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” Confucius.
“He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.” Lao Tzu.
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