The black dog
This week I have been depressed. (I almost didn’t write you this blog post as a result heh.)
People are often upset when I say that I’m depressed. They hurry to hush me, to distract me, to tell me it’s not true. “Cheer up,” they say, “don’t overthink.” It reminds me of how people react when I say I’m fat. “So what if you’re overweight,” they say, “you can easily lose the weight if you exercise and diet.” Isn’t it funny how smoothly that prefix “over-” is zipping around marking the boundaries of what’s acceptable and what’s too much, with barely any connection to reality or experience!
For instance, how much thinking is enough thinking? In fact, how do you even measure thinking? By time? By result? By levels? By circuits? And, similarly, what is “weight” that we are over? How do we choose it? But, even more pressing than those questions is this one: how do we deal with it?
We do not deal with fat well, and we do not deal with depression well. We devalue the word depression itself but equating it to sadness — not to belittle the pain of sadness, or grief, but the expected manifestation of an emotion is a far cry from a debilitating illness. There’s a lovely quote from Andrew Solomon’s wonderful A Noonday Demon:
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
I’ve never found a better definition for my depression than this. So much of it is grief for things I never had and can never have now. So much of it has nothing to do with my circumstances. And yet, there it lies, the black dog walking alongside me. There is no fighting it — though every time it recedes I think hopefully that it will not return.
We’re made deeply uncomfortable by depressed people — just as we are by fat people — because acknowledging their existence means accepting that “normal” isn’t true. Accepting mental illness means accepting that we do not have total control over our minds and emotions, and that is unacceptable to the rationalist mindset we venerate as a society. Accepting fatness means accepting that we do not have total control over our bodies, and that is also unacceptable to the rationalist mindset we venerate as a society. Accepting either of these means they could happen to us. And god forbid we not be thin and rich and happy, right? <eyeroll>
This discomfort leads us to avoid being associated with mental illness and with fatness, and thus begins the cycle of stigma. We do not let people exist as they are, we do not let ourselves exist as we are, because it would mean relinquishing control. With fatness, you can’t hide it, so you take the rejection and abuse and shame. With mental illness, you can, until it gets so bad that you can safely be put into the “crazy” category and dismissed as an anomaly.
Isn’t that just a recipe for disaster?
Our obsession with happiness is just as bad as our obsession with thinness — both drive us to seek a perfection that isn’t possible. And both feed capitalism very well! Strive to be happy by buying things or working hard at something you’re passionate about. Express your happiness by buying stuff for yourself and people you love. Buy this diet plan/diet pill/workout plan so you can be thin! What about the radical notion that we don’t need to be happy all the time? That sadness, anger, frustration and despair are also emotions, part of the apps that came with the phone, as it were, and need to be used? What about the radical notion that we don’t need to be thin to be healthy?
These days, after SO MUCH THERAPY, when I’m having a bad day, when “le sad” comes visiting, I don’t fight it. I don’t try to be strong. I stop, take the time and feel my feelings. I spent three days reading and refusing to do anything at all (which is a privilege I am very grateful for at the moment), and slowly, slowly, I have emerged with the fire of grief banked, so now I can find my energy and do other things with it. So when someone says they’re depressed, or they’re sad, don’t try to cheer them up unless they ask you to. Hold space for their feelings, and try not to react from your own discomfort.
