Depression in 100 Word Doses

The cold comes first. It slithers in while I sleep—in the middle of the night or during a late afternoon nap. I gasp awake. The lifeless air is littered with murdered molecules. Hypnos and Thanatos do battle. Is this nightmare or death? I focus my eyes, recognize my bed, my white cotton sheets, my pillow. I identify my telephone, clock, and tissue box and the table they rest on. But an aura shimmers around the familiar sights as if they, and therefore I, have been beamed to another world and fall short of reassembling ourselves as we were before.

*

I am afraid to be dead. Not of dying. Well, that too; I don’t want pain or to see my death coming. But dead means nonexistence and that’s what terrifies me. I am seven, lying awake, not understanding how my parents could have created me just so that one day I would be dead. I want them to take it back. I spend hours, days, years trying to imagine being lifeless until the adrenaline forces me to run. How do others go about their days? Don’t they know? I live behind a veil of warped senses where I am alone.

*

My eyes, an inverted pair of cataractous binoculars, through which I recede until I am too far away to reach. My ears, underwater, magnify my uneven heartbeat; external sounds distorted, like a womb without the security of a mother’s uterine embrace. Land dips and rises; no stillness in its swells. From sandbar to crevasse I stumble, hand running along walls and rails for balance. All sensation a carnival distortion. My scalp too tight. Breath in small doses through pasty lips.  Pulseless biorhythms. If I don’t chew and swallow soon, my body will forget how. It will be like this always.

*

Sleep is a tease. As a child, I watch her bestow her blessings on my parents and sister. Years later, she kisses my children’s foreheads. She closes the eyes of my husband but shuns my presence next to him. I beg her to come to me. As the sky lightens, she relents. I tumble into her arms. At the time I should be waking, she tightens her grip. I grip back. Meeting the day is too much of a commitment. Fourteen hours to get through with no obvious reason why. I tread water, waiting for my feet to touch ground.

*

Questions:

• Were the migraines depression?
• The school phobia?
• The stomach aches?
• Those times I pouted to get attention. Would a happier child have performed tricks?
• When my mind told my body it wasn’t worth the bother to eat, was that anorexia?
• When I became attached to my protruding bones, was that depression?
• When I feel like a phony posing these questions, does it mean I am healed?
• Do you think I am a depressive sycophant because I walk, talk, and function?
• What do you have to be depressed about, huh? You wannabe.

      –     Wannabe what? Do you think I like this?

*

My first therapist, in college, was a damp looking round man, too comfortable in his squeaky leather chair while my agoraphobic, wasting self couldn’t wait to get back to my room. The Austrian Jewish grandmother I saw in my twenties had an accent that scared me. I heard judgement and missed her compassion. Then motherhood became my therapy. Tethered by three invisible umbilical cords, I was kept from the abyss. The kids grew; the cords stretched. My toes dangled in the cold air of the dark pit. My third therapist is more mirror than foreigner. My molecules begin to reassemble.

*

The stories I tell her:

• The one about my mother’s unhappiness, her blank eyes, my conviction that I couldn’t live without her
• About how she loved my sister more
• About the silence at the dinner table
• About my parent’s marriage falling apart; facing my father’s imperfections
• About my mother’s cancer, my exclusion from the inner circle; of no one telling me she would be cremated
• About being a motherless mother
• About my son with anaphylaxis, my daughter with cancer
• About the resentments I carried into my marriage
• About what happens now

*

I reach the end and start over. I repeat the story of how, on the day of my mother’s funeral, I was the only one who didn’t know my mother hated her cancerous body and wanted it burned. I tell again about being caught in, or the precipitator of, my parents’ rift. I talk about my husband’s anger over our daughter’s health, which made my burden heavier. Again, I ask, “What now?” What happens when the years-long surge of adrenaline that is motherhood ebbs, when I no longer need to lift cars off stricken children? Self-pity fills the empty space.

*

My stories are all beginnings and middles with no ends. I say, “me, me, me,” and “I, I, I.” For fleeting moments, I can see beyond my narrative. But the cold creeps in and I curl around it. I add a litany of physical complaints. I see a cardiologist for palpitations, a gastroenterologist because of weight loss, a gynecologist to rule out ovarian cancer, a neurologist because of head and neck pain, a maxillofacial specialist because of jaw clenching, an acupuncturist, a physical therapist, a homeopath. I feel safe only on the psychiatrist’s couch, while dread waits for me outside.

*

My voice is too weak to finish my stories. My body has been rejecting food and is now too light to carry the weight of my cement feet. I crawl onto the couch and say, “It’s time.” I take the proffered pill. I call the bitterness on my tongue failure. I am weak, a broken bone that should be able to reset itself. The words and stories I have been repeating in my 45-minute sessions should have woven a tight enough ace bandage around my mind to hold it together. But the couch cannot help me on its own now.

*

I notice the jittering in my chest first. Then the tremor in my hands. Tap my knee lightly and I’m likely to kick you in the face. I am so cold. I sleep; jerk awake. Sleep; jerk awake. I stutter to the morning. I’m worse. I’m worse. Slow down on the serotonin. Give it two more weeks. One week to go. Dive under the big wave to get to the clear water beyond. My body quiets. Heat returns. The carnival ride is over. I begin speaking again. Rewritten versions of old stories. I start saying “she” and “he” and “us.”

*

Although imperfectly, and with lapses and letdowns, I was loved. I was shown the wonders of music, nature, and books—my three saviors when the cold threatens. I was also given a thirst for understanding how things work. So, I keep wondering, why—despite the love and the lessons—I carry this shadowy veil? It too was bequeathed to me—the sorrows of my mother and her mother fed to me in the womb and through the air we breathed together. My emotional metabolism is unfit for digesting sadness. I store it like fat cells. Why does knowing this help?

*

Adjuvant Therapy:

•  Walk the dogs immediately upon waking
•  Dance to Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito.” Twirl to the final minutes of Mark Knopfler’s “Speedway at Nazareth.”
• Immerse in salt water; sit on the ocean in my kayak
• Write longhand in a notebook or on paper scraps
• Track the Milky Way’s position across the summer sky
• Watch the aerial choreography of swallows, dragonflies, butterflies
• Leave a heated room for the slap of cold air and snow
• Exercise, meditate, Tai Chi
• Learn something; change careers
• Help others tell their stories of illness and trauma

*

Forty-five years of what didn’t help:

• Magnesium and potassium supplements
• Lavender oil on my pillow
• Chamomile tea
• Warm milk
• Light box therapy
• Himalayan salt rooms
• People who say, “chin up,” “soldier on,” “it’s all about attitude”
• Me thinking they’re right
• Consciousness raising groups or any group where an already raised consciousness is required for membership
• A new hairstyle and clothes
• Calling my mother five times a day
• Crystals and talismans (only good for fidgeting with)
• Bach’s Rescue Remedy Spray
• Tranquilizers
• Googling Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors

*

I am still afraid of being dead but the urge to bolt has eased. What no longer scares me:

• Flying
• Escalators
• Elevators
• Driving on the highway by myself
• Walking down the streets of Manhattan
• Crowded spaces
• Closing my eyes in the shower
• Not knowing where the exit is
• Being far from home
• Losing my mother because that has already happened, and I survived

I have loosened my grip on my children and become mother to myself. I can see a time when the couch won’t be necessary. But not yet.

*

The dead air resides in my peripheral vision. It floats into view and recedes. Sometimes it veils my entire line of sight and settles in for a visit. I say hello. I bring it with me to my therapist. Carry it through my walks and my work. I show it what else I can do—write, teach, lead—that it is not my whole life anymore. Its stays have become shorter. The difference between now and college is forty-five years of effort, accumulating years of clarity over shadow, wisdom over innocence, independence over helplessness. For now, the depression is contained.

***

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