tell me about despair
CW: depression, suicide ideation, disordered eating
You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
About a year ago, I hauled myself to UNC's Counseling and Psychological Services for the first time, and a few weeks later I was subsequently diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. This is how I tell the story now, because I figure that starting at the point of an official diagnosis might lend some credence to what even I have trouble believing as a legitimate story that's worth telling. I have said some approximation of these words at least two handfuls of times throughout my college career, mostly in professors’ office hours as I desperately beg for forgiveness in what has now become a shameful ritual. I have a half-written script prepared in my head, ready for extemporaneous recitation. It's not me, it's my depression. I promise I care. I promise I'm listening.
I offer the abridged, clinical version of my depression backstory to most people as a form of armor. I articulate each syllable of the words Major Depressive Disorder every single time I first mention it, and I take care to refer to it as MDD in conversation. I can’t bring myself to say that I simply have “depression.” In the illogical depths of my brain, the word depression is coupled with a certain embarrassment that MDD, as an acronym and medical definition, attempts to alleviate. Depression is cheapened by a shame and guilt that should not exist but does anyway, spiteful in the face of a universe that I always wanted to believe had intrinsic order and cause and reason for everything. The words Neruda wrote about love in Sonnet 17 are words that echo in my head when I think about the origin of it all: I am depressed without knowing how, or when, or from where. I do not know who gave it to me, and I do not know who can take it away, or even if it can be taken away. Depression is both a thief of love and my sole loyal companion, all at once.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
As much as I prefer to stick to the bare bones narrative of my mental illness, I can recall unnecessary details from that fateful diagnosis day, too. November 8th was the date. It was cold and my hands were dry and ashy, my brain full of rot and decay. I felt like I was decomposing. I'd often describe my state of being in terms of a sweeping and catastrophic natural disaster-- brain on fire, brain flooded and foggy, brain ravaged to pieces by a tornado. Elemental metaphor felt like the best way of encapsulating the sheer scale and horror of what I felt, which in some cruel ironic twist manifested itself in horrible physical stagnation. If only depression was as dynamic and compelling in real life as it was in my head. It makes for an easier narrative when there's action involved.
All I could do during that period of time was sleep. I consistently missed meals. I cried at least twice a day, usually before bed and then again when I woke up in the morning. I couldn't compel myself to do any work at all for class because the only thing at stake was my GPA, and when you can barely muster a meal a day grades cease to matter. The only thing that terrified me anymore was disappointing other people. During junior year in particular, there were many whom I worked with, collaborated with, and who depended on me to complete tasks that ranged from clerical venue bookings to weekly meeting facilitation. I conserved my energy for those people and that work alone.
I can't tell you what exactly led to depression entering my life so sneakily, seeping into my lungs and brain like a noxious poison. I was under the misconception that in order to be depressed, something had to happen--a traumatic event, a breakup, a major life change. I gave depression too much credit for expecting her to appear with cited reason. Throughout the first half of fall semester I tried to convince myself I was fine and just needed to settle into this new, breakneck pace of life measured in meetings and deadlines. I was co-leading one large organization and serving on the executive board of another. I was additionally working a part-time job as a full-time student. Apart from a two-week visit to attend a wedding in India, I worked 40 hour weeks at a nonprofit fellowship through the summer.
It was textbook burnout to a degree that's almost laughable in retrospect. How I didn't see it hurtling towards me, a trainwreck in the making, is beyond my comprehension. I just know that during that time, I felt that I could do it all simply because I thought I had no other choice. I couldn’t understand why my life felt so unbearably difficult when I finally had so much of what I wanted. Technically, nothing was going wrong. I was happy with my circle of friends, I was in classes I enjoyed, and I had climbed my way into leadership positions with organizations that I really cared about. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had made something decent out of it that couldn’t be snatched away, because it belonged to me and only to me. The thought of losing it all was a constant fear, but I could’ve never anticipated what actually happened: I had almost everything that could possibly give me fulfillment within my grasp, and I ceased to care about any of it.
I remember being on the phone with my sister when I realized I couldn't function anymore, that this might possibly be something more than just an endless series of “off days.” In a somewhat comical development, my brain had latched onto makeup as its sole reprieve while missing assignments piled up on my to-do list. I would scan Sephora's new product releases in the library and watch makeup tutorials religiously at home. What little money I made during that time was spent on lipgloss and eyeshadow, oftentimes at the expense of groceries that would end up rotting in my fridge anyway. It didn't occur to me until much, much later that this was my brain's last scrambling attempt to feel something--anything other than the piercing existential dread that settled quietly into my bones. When my fixation on makeup ebbed away, I was left with a new and sharp truth about my life. And the truth was that I could no longer see purpose or hope in anything, and that I desperately wanted to die.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
It's a wonder that I am still alive to write this a year later. The full wonder of it has yet to be comprehended, just because I've given so little thought thus far to processing the pervasive ache of that time. Each day that passed made the depression unbearable. I would think often about active methods of dying, and dying quickly--but truthfully, I was killing myself slowly. Rather, the depression was. I was wasting away with all of the sickliness and none of the grace of a pneumonia-stricken Victorian child. My ribs poked through my skin. I wore thick sweaters to conceal a thinness that I felt in the way my body could no longer sit comfortably in chairs, the way my kneecaps and ankles jutted out at angles that were almost too harsh. A consistently empty stomach translated into nausea that further inhibited me from eating or sleeping. It was a vicious cycle from which I felt there was no escape, and it was becoming increasingly harder to hide. My friends would bring snacks to meetings and the library because they knew I was running on coffee alone. My mother noticed the sharper edges in my face over FaceTime and sent a crate of Ensure nutritional supplement drinks to my apartment doorstep--the same drinks they give to malnourished children, under a slightly different name. They sat unopened in my room next to an overflowing laundry hamper.
Saying that I finished the semester is a gross exaggeration. I wept openly in front of professors who barely knew me and somehow procured final exam excuses and temporary grade designations, which gave me more time to finish the small mountain of work I had to do. I quit my job of almost 3 years two days before my 21st birthday. Over winter break, my family took a trip to Florida. We spent a few days in Orlando and then went to Miami, the city that my parents first landed in 24 years ago from India after being married for only six months. We visited the Kennedy Space Center and took a cruise to the Bahamas. This was the first time we'd ever indulged in a vacation like that. I sat on the tour bus at the Kennedy Space Center and wondered what incinerating in jet fuel would feel like. I sat on the lido deck of our Carnival cruise, staring out at the sea, and thought about taking a swim.
I write about this time in the past tense while I am still recovering, although even now on certain days I wonder if recovery really means anything at all. Depression has not relinquished its hold on my life, although its vice grip has eased somewhat so that during some hours, on some days, it's easier to breathe. I owe my presence here currently to Wellbutrin and therapy. I also owe my presence to the persistence of love in my life, particularly from friends who likely didn't know how much they were helping when they would accompany me during late nights in the library, or even when they just reached out to make plans with me-- and then were forgiving when I inevitably slept through them.
Even now, despite knowing it’s unrealistic, my fingers ache to provide some semblance of a linear, positive narrative that follows the glowing image of “progress” paraded across self-help and mental health recovery websites. Having scoured them all, I know that this is the type of story that doesn’t really count, or is otherwise incomplete. There is no conclusion yet, no point at which I can stand on a mountaintop and survey the journey I endured. I don’t know that I will ever be free from depression, and I’ve accepted that this is likely a condition I will have to live with and manage for the rest of my life. It’s a year later, and I still have days and weeks when I’m immobilized, when I can’t stomach food. My professors every semester have been gracious beyond measure with accommodating me. Every time I attend office hours I wonder when their patience with me will run out. But it hasn’t. Not yet.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
I began to read poetry again in March. I hadn’t read poetry with any sort of sincerity since I was 16 years old; I had drudged my way through the sonnets of Milton and Shakespeare for my English classes, but I never let them pierce me beyond an attempt at shallow intellectual inquiry. Suddenly, poems started appearing in my line of vision even when I wasn’t seeking them, requesting my attention. Being home again during quarantine meant the works of Gwendolyn Brooks and Adrienne Rich would gaze at me from my childhood bedroom bookshelf, where I privileged fiction over poetry whenever I did make time for personal reading. It felt like they were beckoning to me in a way that wasn’t demanding, but kind.
I was also compelled towards poetry again because of love--or at least, the nascent budding of love that appeared in the same way poems did, simply by falling into my line of vision and restoring some color to my sight again. I never expected romantic love to court me when I felt I was at the peak of my ugliness, inherently unstable and unloveable. I entered 2020 having rid myself of hair in what felt like an attempt at bravery until I shrunk at the sight of my naked head in the mirror. I had thrown myself into more work and responsibility, my ever-present coping mechanism despite knowing I couldn’t handle it. Work was the only way I knew how to navigate the world in the midst of a sadness that, in the words of Mark Fisher, extended to every conceivable horizon.
A new and soft relationship that was born in the first quarter of the year compelled me to write again when I hadn’t done so in months. I wrote poetry more frequently than I read it for pleasure, and yet in the past year I could hardly pick up a pen. But there was something so special about the tenderness of this time, despite what felt like internal chaos and wreckage in my brain. I was adjusting to antidepressants and simultaneously confronted with the reality that I was not, in fact, unloveable and undesirable and all these other things that I’d convinced myself were the irrefutable truth of my being. Finally, I had a companion besides depression whispering in my ear. Finally, I had a giver of love who gave so generously that even depression could not snatch it all away.
Today, I look at the vantage point from where I’m writing these words. The lights are dim in my boyfriend’s room as he types away at his computer. In a few minutes I know he will swivel to me and ask me to listen to a song, or tell me a joke. Our calico cat sits at my feet, and I can feel the vibrations of her purring through my toes. It is quiet outside. Somewhere, because it’s fall, wild geese are heading south for winter.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Wild Geese, Mary Oliver