Notes: A Few Thoughts On Depression

This is kind of a personal essay.  It's not really funny or insightful.

At seventeen, I became very unhappy for reasons I didn't totally understand.

I was just finishing twelfth grade.  College promised a respite from all the mistakes I'd made in the past four years, particularly social ones.  I should have been looking forward to reinventing myself, and at some level I imagined that I was.  My parents, especially my mom, had found their tribes in freshman year - I pictured a tangle of young people piled onto a dorm room bed or huddled over papers; cramming, chatting away and falling asleep in the library.

People asked me if I was nervous, since it's so unusual for Canadian kids to travel away from home for school.  (Of my advanced placement class - full of people much brighter than me - of a hundred and ten, four left the country and only about fifteen went outside of BC.)  I said no, and I really think I meant it.  High school had become a thick, muggy column of air I had to push my way through.  I regularly fell asleep in class, and my teachers expressed concern about my 'home life'.  I laughed it off.  My home life is perfect.


When my parents organized a trip to Japan to visit my cousin Gay, however, I pled too much schoolwork and spent spring break locked in my room, sleeping through the day and emerging only to brew a fifth, sixth, seven pot of tea or to take another half-hour long shower.  I was accountable to no one, especially not myself.  But, I thought, it wasn't my fault.  It was high school's fault.  As soon as I escaped its toxic fumes I would emerge triumphant as the fun, intelligent person I knew college would extract from me.



I somehow graduated with my International Baccalaureate Diploma intact.  My performance in the second term of senior year was shameful, but my projected grades and my scores from previous years was good enough to get me into Hamilton College.  If the school had known my actual scores on those IB tests, they might have thought twice before accepting me.


The summer went by like a slowly descending bellows I didn't want to look up and see.  I worked sporadically at my part-time job; the assigned tasks seemed to help with focus, and talking to customers comprised most of my human interaction over those last two months.  I stopped talking to my friends.  Most assumed I had already left for school - the ones who persisted I studiously avoided.


When I got to Hamilton, classes were wonderfully interesting, the campus was beautiful and the kind of things I had imagined were happening all around me.  I just suddenly couldn't hook in.  My limbs and especially my head felt perpetually heavy, and I started to miss class to sleep.  I blew off the acquaintances I had made at orientation before they could become friends.  My roommate was a modelesque, basketball-playing party girl and we barely spoke, which may have been indifference on her part but not on mine: I was ashamed that she knew how rarely I went to class.


About a month and a half into the term my sociolinguistics teacher Bonnie Urcioli called me into her office.  She was a wonderful, bird-like woman in her sixties with floaty pants and a penchant for costume jewelry, and her class was fascinating.  That day I remember we had been transcribing Car Talk, and had assigned a piece of reading about Gallic language roots and divergences.  When she handed back work at the end of the hour, I just got a blank piece of paper with Please Come See Me After Class written on it in spiky handwriting.  I hadn't handed in last week's homework.


In her office, she stopped my knee-jerk apology before it started.  "Are you all right?" she asked.


I was confused.  I had been expecting a straighten-up lecture, not concern.  "I know you're not from here," she said, "and that's tough for a lot of kids.  You're obviously smart, you like the material... when you're awake you're a great student.  Is it homesickness?"


I thought about home.  I didn't think I was homesick - I didn't feel a pang when I thought about it, just a wave of dull, foggy confusion.  My mom had been writing me letters and I hadn't written back.  That wasn't the action of a homesick kid.  A bad one, maybe.  "No," I said.  "I'm sorry, I've just been under the weather.  I'll try harder."


"You better," she said.  "I like you, but I can't give marks for work you don't hand in."  She sent me on my way with a card for the on-campus counseling centre.  I signed up and promptly slept through my first two appointments.  I felt lazy, and sad about feeling lazy, and numb about feeling sad.  I probably would have felt angry too, but I couldn't muster the energy.

This isn't to say I had never been sad before, or that I'd always been able to pinpoint the source of my problems in the past.  Everyone is unhappy sometimes.  But it felt different.  I'd hooked myself into a kind of diffident lethargy that would have appalled my seven, twelve, or even fifteen year old self.  The phrase 'she's let herself go' took on a whole new meaning.  I wandered around in a fog, and was more often asleep than awake - for the last few weeks in November I moved my bedding and a few clothes into a basement stairwell in the art building and slept there so I wouldn't have to answer to my roommate when she came in with a friendly 'hi' at four in the afternoon and I was just waking up.  I ran away from my own room.

I didn't keep my promise to Bonnie.  By the end of December, I finally had to tell my parents what I'd done - to admit how completely I'd failed and how utterly clueless I was about the cause.  They were amazingly supportive and unjudgemental - my greatest regret about that time is how much I must have hurt them by hiding the truth and refusing to communicate.  I don't know if I can ever really apologize.

The day we moved my things out of the dorm room, the campus was deserted.  It was a small mercy; I do not think I could have faced my roommate and explained the situation to her.  I left a short, meaningless note on my stripped bed and we lugged my belongings out into the freezing cold.  I sobbed the whole time, ugly, runny-nose crying.  My sister was flitting around looking at the dorm, curious and a little excited to see the school.  I couldn't look at her without an overwhelming rush of shame.

I feel lucky when I say that that was one of the worst days of my life: in the grand scheme of things, it pales in comparison.  But it has provided me with a constant source of worry.  If I didn't know why it had happened, I was powerless to prevent it from cropping up again (which it did).  I didn't want to talk to anyone about it.  It just seemed - stupid.  A hateful expression of inborn laziness and decadence that brought no pleasure, just paralysis.

My parents did everything they could to get me back on my feet, but I was armoured with guilt and curled in on myself like an armadillo.  "What happened?" my dad would say, confused.  "What happened?"

"I don't know," I bleated back.  It sounded so tinny.  Fake.

The first time my dad brought up depression, it felt like an initiation into some kind of cult.  This person had depression.  That person had depression.  Apparently it runs in the family.  "Talk to them about it," he urged.  "They can help you."

I didn't exactly take my dad's advice, but this strange slice into my perception of my family slid over into my perception of myself.  There's a truism out there that you grow up when you see your parents as people instead of Mom and Dad, but that has always seemed a little simplistic to me.  Learning about my family, listening to their stories as I grew old enough and sad enough to hear them, I imagined a translucent skin of struggles layered over the informational nervous system I already had about each person.  It wasn't a good feeling, but it was a powerful one.

Since December of 2008, a lot has happened in my life.  As an adult, I see my family differently, and I'm sure they see me differently too.  But knowing that the people I love have faltered, that everyone has that overhead-projector sheet of pain and confusion wrapped around themselves, I can keep moving forward and know that screwing up doesn't make me a bad person.  It just makes me slightly whimsical in the brain pan.

I still can't dismiss the waves of foggy uncertainty that occasionally break against my life.  I still don't always handle them well.  But once you reach out of a bad place once, it is much easier to do it again.

Cheers
Julia