The country of depression

by: Evelyn Lau
essay from: OUT reflections on a life so far

typed~ hic
Please notify me if you find any typo

It began there, in that time between childhood and adulthood. How I loathed my life, my newly adolescent self! It was the usual resume of teenage misery, unremarkable in the end. Everything around me seemed thick and woolly and static -- the unwavering street outside the window of our little house, with a torturous glimpse of the down town lights in the distance, like a mirage I would never reach. The pudgy flesh I was gaining from my secret food binges made me feel leaden and sluggish. The texture of my skin, the oil in my hair, my ugly, scratchy clothes -- everything felt wrong, repulsive. I often prayed I would die in my sleep, so I would not have to face another day at school as an outcast. [...]

But when I next open my eyes there would be the familiar grey light through the window, and the depression would descend like a blanket. If it was winter it would be dark, and I would go to the kitchen to eat breakfast next to my father before he headed out on yet another of his unsuccessful job searches. The linoleum cold beneath our feet, our silent, awkward chewing. I would look at the soft slices of bread on my plate, how they broke apart under the jab of my knife with its dab of butter no matter how carefully I tried to spread it, and rage would course through my body. Why couldn't I butter a piece of bread without it falling apart? Why couldn't I be perfect? I wanted to take the entire loaf of bread in my hands, smear it with butter and honey, smash it in my hands, and hurl it against the wall. Perhaps then my father would rise from the icy lake of his torment, his unhappy eyes would focus, and he would see me.

I thought of suicide constantly; what likely stopped me was the thought of the trouble I would get into from my parents if I tried and didn't succeed. In the meantime, every day was a small eternity to be endured. The light in my memory of this time seems always to be charcoal grey, or black. The air felt thick in my nostrils and throat, and the depression expanded to fill the days, weeks, and months with its massive, rolling fog.

I was twelve, or thirteen. Younger, even. Perhaps it went on for months, stopped for a while, then started again; perhaps it continued for years, with only days of remission in between. Why can't I remember? Time meant something different then, and what seemed like years might only have been months, or weeks. But I remember looking at a calendar on my bedroom wall on which I had crossed out the days with big ink Xs, flipping back through the months and realizing I had been depressed for most of the tear. The memory of this is murky, a swamp of mornings waking in darkness, fear throbbing in a tight knot in my chest, and then the long day ahead wrapped in grey cotton. This state was different from pain, or panic, which I had known earlier -- those emotions arrived, were experienced, then left like their brighter counterparts. You survived them, and they had an acuity that depression, in its muffling weight, lacked. When I was depressed I would have given anything for a sharp, precise emotion, even if it was only sadness. Depression had no edges and therefore no borders, no discernible beginning or end.

Doctors claim that serious depressions are often triggered by loss, or by an accumulation of losses. Perhaps I was mourning the loss of the time when we had been more or less happy, as families go, before my father became unemployed and retreated to the dark basement in shame, before my mother became increasingly hysterical and stalked through the house terrifying me with her unpredictable moods and preoccupations. Before the arrival of my sister, who sat curled up in the crook of my father's arm while I watched from a sullen distance, murdering her in my mind. Perhaps I anticipated the unrecoverable loss that lay ahead, the day when as a fourteen-year-old I would walk out the door of my parents' house and never look back.

And then it went away. Or, perhaps, the depression remained but there but there was little room for it. I left home and tumbled into one crisis after another -- drugs, prostitution, suicide attempts, sleeping on the streets. Depression was elbowed aside by the immediacy of fear, by the cartoon nausea of bad LSD trips and drug overdoses, by struggling daily to survive. In retrospect, perhaps all that behavior was a form of self-medication. It was still better than the cotton-packed days of depression, which I learned to quickly eradicate with a handful of pills, a cupful of methadone, several tricks turned in a row.

In my early to mid-twenties the fog thinned and then seemed to lift for good. When I woke, the clear day lay ahead. I could intellectually recall the fact that I had been depressed -- I restricted it to a period in my early adolescence -- but could no longer feel it viscerally. It was like recalling a migraine, a pinched nerve, the time when you were at the kitchen counter and the knife slipped and sliced your finger open. You could describe it in some detail afterwards, but the memory of the pain would be less than a shadow of itself. This is how the body heals, how the mind closes over pain like scar tissue over a wound. When people I knew complained about being depressed, I had to swallow my impatience with them. I thought that at least they should have the grace to keep it to themselves, since there was nothing so dispiriting as listening to people almost lovingly explain the topology of their depression. The relentlessness of it, the iron lid over all their days. At least if they were experiencing a particular crisis there was heightened feeling, and you could offer a shoulder to cry on, a suggestion for action that they had overlooked, even a solution to their problems. Depression was something that simply went on and on, and wore out everyone around the depressed person.

I would try to sympathize by saying that I, too, had gone through a period of depression in my early teens. But that was all it was in my memory: a bleak, sluggish period, a long time ago. I never ceased to be grateful for its departure, though. I did remember that it had seemed worse than the most piercing pain, and so even when there was turmoil in my life, and grief, I was glad that it didn't devolve into depression. I began to think of that bleak band of time before running away as unique to a teenager's changing hormones and my circumstances at home; I saw myself as safely beyond its reach.

Then something happened. The doctors say that one serious depression puts you at risk for another during the course of your lifetime; two increases the likelihood of a third, and so on. You may not even be aware of the gravity of the precipitating losses at the time; you may think you are dealing with them just fine, that indeed you've dealt with a lot worse in the past. But then one morning you wake and discover that the fog has crept in overnight. It is banked out in the streets, so heavily that the outlines of the buildings in your familiar city are lost. There are no streets or mountains, no glimmer of water. It is in the room with you, pressing down over your nose and throat and almost suffocating you. You try to rise, to live your normal day, and discover that you can't get out of bed. You are as immobilized as if you had had a stroke in the middle of the night, while you slept. But this is ridiculous, you think. Nothing's wrong with me. All I have to do is get up, the way I've done every other day, without thinking about it. And yet you can't.

What happened to cause this depression? It took about a year to develop. Each loss, by itself, was not a cause for collapse. When I count them they fit on the fingers of one hand; they seem embarrassing in their slightness. Some setbacks and problems at work, several troubled relationships that ended badly. But these events occurred within a year and somehow, taken together, the impact they had was greater than the sum of their individual parts. I slid into depression, imperceptibly at first, then rapidly. I could not write for months on end, plagued instead by obsessive thoughts and memories. The depression that had been lurking -- sneaking in under the closed door, around the window frames, filling my room slowly with smoke -- poured in and sealed me shut inside its grey heart.

An acquaintance once described to me what it was like when her back went out and she couldn't get out of bed without considerable pain. She would lie on her mattress visualizing herself to the bathroom, then down the carpeted stairs to the kitchen. As she did this in her mind, she counted the steps necessary to reach each destination; these small journeys she had once made without thought had suddenly become momentous.

I found myself wishing I had some physical explanation for the mornings when I lay in bed unable to make those same journeys. The depression, often accompanied by a racing heartbeat, was there in the room as soon as I woke. It was in that first silver of consciousness in that instant before I was aware of the light through the blinds, or of who I was. Some mornings, miraculously, it wasn't there, and I got out of bed and started the day like a normal person. But most mornings its iron bars locked down my limbs. It had a weight to it, like a mattress. I lay unmoving, and even if there were stripes of baby-blue sky and sunlight through the blinds, my mind was bathed in grey. I was flooded with the same nameless, nauseating terror that a friend who once complained about his depression had described -- an unfocused sense of impending doom, as of your own death or dismemberment, made more unbearable because it was without cause. You could not say, Well, I'm lying here frightened to death because I have just lost my life's savings, or I have been diagnosed with cancer, or there is a stranger in the room standing over me holding an axe. There is only your hammering heartbeat and the black curtain dropping down across your mind.

[...]

Before the depression -- and it was like that, there was a time before and then a time after -- I loved dinner parties. The conversations, the food and wine, the warm company of friends, the stimulating addition of strangers. After the depression came, dinner parties were to be endured, and I didn't always know how. I would arrive early, hoping that would compensate for the fact that I would inevitably be the first to leave. At first I drank too much, hoping to recover some sparkle or sheen, the verbal faculty and the capacity for enjoying the company of others that I had lost. For a while, alcohol presented itself as a viable cure for depression -- it poured a bright glaze over my vision, improved my affect, restored some cheer. I would feel a rush of energy and bonhomie, my tongue would loosen and words would trip out as easily as they once used to. But, of course, the depression the next day would be that much worse, and eventually I began to limit myself to two or three drinks over the course of long dinners. Thus I would be sober -- in every sense of the word. Moribund, really. In a way, this was worse. Around the table people would be rocking with laughter, gesticulating, their voices rising in volume, conversations competing with each other in noise and conviction. I strained to laugh along, weakly, in order to convince the host that I was having a good time even though I wasn't adding to the conversation. I stared at the faces around me, their mouths gasping, their eyes shiny and intoxicated, their laughter louder than jackhammers. I looked blankly at the rows of exposed teeth and gum, and it seemed I could see, with a sort of detached X-ray vision, the skulls beneath the stretched skin. That was all these people were, skeletons temporarily covered with flesh and pretense. I wanted to cover my ears with my hands. Somewhere in the multiple threads of conversation there was a story, a joke, but I could not follow it, could not catch it. Their voices assailed me from all sides in a cacophony. I let myself drift, dreaming of my white bed, my soft square of sleep. In the bathroom, away from the loud guests. I would look at myself in the mirror, where my face appeared round and puffy from too much sleep, waiting a few merciful, quiet minutes before ducking back out to the party as into a hail of bullets.

Often, someone would say something that would send me into a rage. It is said that depression is rage turned inwards, rage given no other outlet. I thought of depression as the grey side of a coin that is scarlet on its reverse. The rage was always lurking; a woman's hooting laughter in a darkened theatre would not simply irritate, it would touch off in me the entire store of built-up rage, completely unrelated to her. I would hunch in my seat, weaving an elaborate fantasy of torturing, raping, and murdering her. Someone would say something seemingly innocuous, and my blood would choke as it boiled. I would feel as if I were drowning in a sea of red; I would try to stay on the surface, but wave after would submerge me. I had not known anger like this since my adolescence, my childhood -- the sort of rage that comes when you are accused of something you haven't done, or when a repulsive stranger is running his hands over your body. It was a child's anger, uncontainable, overwhelming. It was all I knew. I swallowed and tried to hold it back, but my heart would be racing and it would take everything not to crush the wineglass in my hand, to feel shards of glass bristling out of my flesh, or throw it against the wall and watch the pieces rain down. I practically panted with the effort of holding back, and though I never did what I wanted to do -- mostly because I would suddenly have a clear and terrifying memory of my schizophrenic aunt, who when I was a child would throw dishes against the wall during dinner in an attack of rage and paranoia -- I did derail a few social occasions with the anger I couldn't stop from spilling over. It shamed me, this impotent rage, this impatience with the people around me -- their little habits, which I had previously barely noticed, now irritated me so much I wanted to claw their faces until they bled. How do you admit such monstrous thoughts, even to yourself? But that was the severity of it. Something that might once have been a minor irritation, a fly buzzing in another room of the house, was now nails running down a chalkboard next to my ear.

[...]

How different is one person's tale of depression from another's? Is it often only the same story? Writing this essay, I was afraid to read the work of other people who had written in detail about their depressions -- I worried that not would the story be the same, but we would have somehow found the same language to describe it. The same phrases, the same words. How many ways are there to examine this litany of inertia, anxiety, anger and detachment? To describe a mental landscape from which all pleasure has drained, leaving it like, I imagine, the surface of the moon, pitted and barren? How could an affliction that feels so personal and singular, and in many ways inexpressible, actually be shared by so many? Like those ads that appear from time to time in the newspaper, run by some university or research group: "Are you depressed?" and, following, some of the symptoms. You recognize yourself, but it seems as generic as those pamphlets in the doctor’s office asking if you are an alcoholic, and you are because you, too, have lied about your drinking, missed work because of it, drink because you are nervous in social situations, etc.

[...]

Depression often seems to be accompanied by a certain level of narcissism. Its sufferers are always telling you how they feel, always checking the barometer of their emotional weather. They issue reports on it as they would on a matter of national significance. When I talk to my depressed acquaintances, their unhappiness becomes a claim on my attention and concern. A simple “How are you?" will elicit a detailed report on the person's recent moods and emotional states. This is the world they have come to occupy, the one they are trapped inside, and for all they know it has taken on the dimensions of the physical world itself. There is no other news, no weather or wars in another hemisphere. When you are not depressed yourself, it is a difficult state to tolerate in another. There is no visible wound to bandage, no doctor's pronouncement of a terminal illness with which to sympathize. There is only the unspooling of the grey ribbon of their days. You want to order them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to take a good look around those around them who are less fortunate and yet still manage to notice the sun shining in the sky, the first tulips pushing out of the earth. [...]

Their voices on the phone, disembodied, are instant indicators of their emotional states. When they are depressed, the usual highs and lows of infliction, of life and curiosity and enthusiasm, are drained away. Sometimes they cry, and then they sound like children, inconsolable.

[...]

I have never taken an antidepressant, and thus cannot describe -- though the writer in me would like to -- the physical and emotional changes, the sway and lift, the swirling sparkling grainy patterns of behavior breaking apart and re-forming. I wonder what about me would change, and cannot imagine the world emerging from under the shadow of certain depressive behaviors -- the sun coming out and a crisp slant to the architecture, everything clearly delineated, unmuddied. What would it be like to be free of those burdens, how many more hours in the day would there suddenly be to learn something new? Would my thoughts stop rotating obsessively around the tracks and grooves worn into my mind? Would I suddenly be free of whatever it is that immobilizes me, tethers me firmly to the past? It is a short leash that extends only so far as I strain towards defining a new life for myself, my own life, away prom parental expectations and childhood experiences that redefine, over and over, all my relationships -- from the most casual conversation with the grocery clerk to the most intimate sexual entanglement -- so that it sometimes seems to me that our fate is to live out our lives replaying what hurt us, what was taken away from us or denied us when we were small, watchful, easily damaged creatures.

What has stopped me from trying antidepressants, at least as an experiment, is the fear, of course, that

It began there, in that time between childhood and adulthood. How I loathed my life, my newly adolescent self! It was the usual resume of teenage misery, unremarkable in the end. Everything around me seemed thick and woolly and static -- the unwavering street outside the window of our little house, with a torturous glimpse of the down town lights in the distance, like a mirage I would never reach. The pudgy flesh I was gaining from my secret food binges made me feel leaden and sluggish. The texture of my skin, the oil in my hair, my ugly, scratchy clothes -- everything felt wrong, repulsive. I often prayed I would die in my sleep, so I would not have to face another day at school as an outcast. [...]

But when I next open my eyes there would be the familiar grey light through the window, and the depression would descend like a blanket. If it was winter it would be dark, and I would go to the kitchen to eat breakfast next to my father before he headed out on yet another of his unsuccessful job searches. The linoleum cold beneath our feet, our silent, awkward chewing. I would look at the soft slices of bread on my plate, how they broke apart under the jab of my knife with its dab of butter no matter how carefully I tried to spread it, and rage would course through my body. Why couldn't I butter a piece of bread without it falling apart? Why couldn't I be perfect? I wanted to take the entire loaf of bread in my hands, smear it with butter and honey, smash it in my hands, and hurl it against the wall. Perhaps then my father would rise from the icy lake of his torment, his unhappy eyes would focus, and he would see me.

I thought of suicide constantly; what likely stopped me was the thought of the trouble I would get into from my parents if I tried and didn't succeed. In the meantime, every day was a small eternity to be endured. The light in my memory of this time seems always to be charcoal grey, or black. The air felt thick in my nostrils and throat, and the depression expanded to fill the days, weeks, and months with its massive, rolling fog.

I was twelve, or thirteen. Younger, even. Perhaps it went on for months, stopped for a while, then started again; perhaps it continued for years, with only days of remission in between. Why can't I remember? Time meant something different then, and what seemed like years might only have been months, or weeks. But I remember looking at a calendar on my bedroom wall on which I had crossed out the days with big ink Xs, flipping back through the months and realizing I had been depressed for most of the tear. The memory of this is murky, a swamp of mornings waking in darkness, fear throbbing in a tight knot in my chest, and then the long day ahead wrapped in grey cotton. This state was different from pain, or panic, which I had known earlier -- those emotions arrived, were experienced, then left like their brighter counterparts. You survived them, and they had an acuity that depression, in its muffling weight, lacked. When I was depressed I would have given anything for a sharp, precise emotion, even if it was only sadness. Depression had no edges and therefore no borders, no discernible beginning or end.

Doctors claim that serious depressions are often triggered by loss, or by an accumulation of losses. Perhaps I was mourning the loss of the time when we had been more or less happy, as families go, before my father became unemployed and retreated to the dark basement in shame, before my mother became increasingly hysterical and stalked through the house terrifying me with her unpredictable moods and preoccupations. Before the arrival of my sister, who sat curled up in the crook of my father's arm while I watched from a sullen distance, murdering her in my mind. Perhaps I anticipated the unrecoverable loss that lay ahead, the day when as a fourteen-year-old I would walk out the door of my parents' house and never look back.

And then it went away. Or, perhaps, the depression remained but there but there was little room for it. I left home and tumbled into one crisis after another -- drugs, prostitution, suicide attempts, sleeping on the streets. Depression was elbowed aside by the immediacy of fear, by the cartoon nausea of bad LSD trips and drug overdoses, by struggling daily to survive. In retrospect, perhaps all that behavior was a form of self-medication. It was still better than the cotton-packed days of depression, which I learned to quickly eradicate with a handful of pills, a cupful of methadone, several tricks turned in a row.

In my early to mid-twenties the fog thinned and then seemed to lift for good. When I woke, the clear day lay ahead. I could intellectually recall the fact that I had been depressed -- I restricted it to a period in my early adolescence -- but could no longer feel it viscerally. It was like recalling a migraine, a pinched nerve, the time when you were at the kitchen counter and the knife slipped and sliced your finger open. You could describe it in some detail afterwards, but the memory of the pain would be less than a shadow of itself. This is how the body heals, how the mind closes over pain like scar tissue over a wound. When people I knew complained about being depressed, I had to swallow my impatience with them. I thought that at least they should have the grace to keep it to themselves, since there was nothing so dispiriting as listening to people almost lovingly explain the topology of their depression. The relentlessness of it, the iron lid over all their days. At least if they were experiencing a particular crisis there was heightened feeling, and you could offer a shoulder to cry on, a suggestion for action that they had overlooked, even a solution to their problems. Depression was something that simply went on and on, and wore out everyone around the depressed person.

I would try to sympathize by saying that I, too, had gone through a period of depression in my early teens. But that was all it was in my memory: a bleak, sluggish period, a long time ago. I never ceased to be grateful for its departure, though. I did remember that it had seemed worse than the most piercing pain, and so even when there was turmoil in my life, and grief, I was glad that it didn't devolve into depression. I began to think of that bleak band of time before running away as unique to a teenager's changing hormones and my circumstances at home; I saw myself as safely beyond its reach.

Then something happened. The doctors say that one serious depression puts you at risk for another during the course of your lifetime; two increases the likelihood of a third, and so on. You may not even be aware of the gravity of the precipitating losses at the time; you may think you are dealing with them just fine, that indeed you've dealt with a lot worse in the past. But then one morning you wake and discover that the fog has crept in overnight. It is banked out in the streets, so heavily that the outlines of the buildings in your familiar city are lost. There are no streets or mountains, no glimmer of water. It is in the room with you, pressing down over your nose and throat and almost suffocating you. You try to rise, to live your normal day, and discover that you can't get out of bed. You are as immobilized as if you had had a stroke in the middle of the night, while you slept. But this is ridiculous, you think. Nothing's wrong with me. All I have to do is get up, the way I've done every other day, without thinking about it. And yet you can't.

What happened to cause this depression? It took about a year to develop. Each loss, by itself, was not a cause for collapse. When I count them they fit on the fingers of one hand; they seem embarrassing in their slightness. Some setbacks and problems at work, several troubled relationships that ended badly. But these events occurred within a year and somehow, taken together, the impact they had was greater than the sum of their individual parts. I slid into depression, imperceptibly at first, then rapidly. I could not write for months on end, plagued instead by obsessive thoughts and memories. The depression that had been lurking -- sneaking in under the closed door, around the window frames, filling my room slowly with smoke -- poured in and sealed me shut inside its grey heart.

An acquaintance once described to me what it was like when her back went out and she couldn't get out of bed without considerable pain. She would lie on her mattress visualizing herself to the bathroom, then down the carpeted stairs to the kitchen. As she did this in her mind, she counted the steps necessary to reach each destination; these small journeys she had once made without thought had suddenly become momentous.

I found myself wishing I had some physical explanation for the mornings when I lay in bed unable to make those same journeys. The depression, often accompanied by a racing heartbeat, was there in the room as soon as I woke. It was in that first silver of consciousness in that instant before I was aware of the light through the blinds, or of who I was. Some mornings, miraculously, it wasn't there, and I got out of bed and started the day like a normal person. But most mornings its iron bars locked down my limbs. It had a weight to it, like a mattress. I lay unmoving, and even if there were stripes of baby-blue sky and sunlight through the blinds, my mind was bathed in grey. I was flooded with the same nameless, nauseating terror that a friend who once complained about his depression had described -- an unfocused sense of impending doom, as of your own death or dismemberment, made more unbearable because it was without cause. You could not say, Well, I'm lying here frightened to death because I have just lost my life's savings, or I have been diagnosed with cancer, or there is a stranger in the room standing over me holding an axe. There is only your hammering heartbeat and the black curtain dropping down across your mind.

[...]

Before the depression -- and it was like that, there was a time before and then a time after -- I loved dinner parties. The conversations, the food and wine, the warm company of friends, the stimulating addition of strangers. After the depression came, dinner parties were to be endured, and I didn't always know how. I would arrive early, hoping that would compensate for the fact that I would inevitably be the first to leave. At first I drank too much, hoping to recover some sparkle or sheen, the verbal faculty and the capacity for enjoying the company of others that I had lost. For a while, alcohol presented itself as a viable cure for depression -- it poured a bright glaze over my vision, improved my affect, restored some cheer. I would feel a rush of energy and bonhomie, my tongue would loosen and words would trip out as easily as they once used to. But, of course, the depression the next day would be that much worse, and eventually I began to limit myself to two or three drinks over the course of long dinners. Thus I would be sober -- in every sense of the word. Moribund, really. In a way, this was worse. Around the table people would be rocking with laughter, gesticulating, their voices rising in volume, conversations competing with each other in noise and conviction. I strained to laugh along, weakly, in order to convince the host that I was having a good time even though I wasn't adding to the conversation. I stared at the faces around me, their mouths gasping, their eyes shiny and intoxicated, their laughter louder than jackhammers. I looked blankly at the rows of exposed teeth and gum, and it seemed I could see, with a sort of detached X-ray vision, the skulls beneath the stretched skin. That was all these people were, skeletons temporarily covered with flesh and pretense. I wanted to cover my ears with my hands. Somewhere in the multiple threads of conversation there was a story, a joke, but I could not follow it, could not catch it. Their voices assailed me from all sides in a cacophony. I let myself drift, dreaming of my white bed, my soft square of sleep. In the bathroom, away from the loud guests. I would look at myself in the mirror, where my face appeared round and puffy from too much sleep, waiting a few merciful, quiet minutes before ducking back out to the party as into a hail of bullets.

Often, someone would say something that would send me into a rage. It is said that depression is rage turned inwards, rage given no other outlet. I thought of depression as the grey side of a coin that is scarlet on its reverse. The rage was always lurking; a woman's hooting laughter in a darkened theatre would not simply irritate, it would touch off in me the entire store of built-up rage, completely unrelated to her. I would hunch in my seat, weaving an elaborate fantasy of torturing, raping, and murdering her. Someone would say something seemingly innocuous, and my blood would choke as it boiled. I would feel as if I were drowning in a sea of red; I would try to stay on the surface, but wave after would submerge me. I had not known anger like this since my adolescence, my childhood -- the sort of rage that comes when you are accused of something you haven't done, or when a repulsive stranger is running his hands over your body. It was a child's anger, uncontainable, overwhelming. It was all I knew. I swallowed and tried to hold it back, but my heart would be racing and it would take everything not to crush the wineglass in my hand, to feel shards of glass bristling out of my flesh, or throw it against the wall and watch the pieces rain down. I practically panted with the effort of holding back, and though I never did what I wanted to do -- mostly because I would suddenly have a clear and terrifying memory of my schizophrenic aunt, who when I was a child would throw dishes against the wall during dinner in an attack of rage and paranoia -- I did derail a few social occasions with the anger I couldn't stop from spilling over. It shamed me, this impotent rage, this impatience with the people around me -- their little habits, which I had previously barely noticed, now irritated me so much I wanted to claw their faces until they bled. How do you admit such monstrous thoughts, even to yourself? But that was the severity of it. Something that might once have been a minor irritation, a fly buzzing in another room of the house, was now nails running down a chalkboard next to my ear.

[...]

How different is one person's tale of depression from another's? Is it often only the same story? Writing this essay, I was afraid to read the work of other people who had written in detail about their depressions -- I worried that not would the story be the same, but we would have somehow found the same language to describe it. The same phrases, the same words. How many ways are there to examine this litany of inertia, anxiety, anger and detachment? To describe a mental landscape from which all pleasure has drained, leaving it like, I imagine, the surface of the moon, pitted and barren? How could an affliction that feels so personal and singular, and in many ways inexpressible, actually be shared by so many? Like those ads that appear from time to time in the newspaper, run by some university or research group: "Are you depressed?" and, following, some of the symptoms. You recognize yourself, but it seems as generic as those pamphlets in the doctor’s office asking if you are an alcoholic, and you are because you, too, have lied about your drinking, missed work because of it, drink because you are nervous in social situations, etc.

[...]

Depression often seems to be accompanied by a certain level of narcissism. Its sufferers are always telling you how they feel, always checking the barometer of their emotional weather. They issue reports on it as they would on a matter of national significance. When I talk to my depressed acquaintances, their unhappiness becomes a claim on my attention and concern. A simple “How are you?" will elicit a detailed report on the person's recent moods and emotional states. This is the world they have come to occupy, the one they are trapped inside, and for all they know it has taken on the dimensions of the physical world itself. There is no other news, no weather or wars in another hemisphere. When you are not depressed yourself, it is a difficult state to tolerate in another. There is no visible wound to bandage, no doctor's pronouncement of a terminal illness with which to sympathize. There is only the unspooling of the grey ribbon of their days. You want to order them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to take a good look around those around them who are less fortunate and yet still manage to notice the sun shining in the sky, the first tulips pushing out of the earth. [...]

Their voices on the phone, disembodied, are instant indicators of their emotional states. When they are depressed, the usual highs and lows of infliction, of life and curiosity and enthusiasm, are drained away. Sometimes they cry, and then they sound like children, inconsolable.

[...]

I have never taken an antidepressant, and thus cannot describe -- though the writer in me would like to -- the physical and emotional changes, the sway and lift, the swirling sparkling grainy patterns of behavior breaking apart and re-forming. I wonder what about me would change, and cannot imagine the world emerging from under the shadow of certain depressive behaviors -- the sun coming out and a crisp slant to the architecture, everything clearly delineated, unmuddied. What would it be like to be free of those burdens, how many more hours in the day would there suddenly be to learn something new? Would my thoughts stop rotating obsessively around the tracks and grooves worn into my mind? Would I suddenly be free of whatever it is that immobilizes me, tethers me firmly to the past? It is a short leash that extends only so far as I strain towards defining a new life for myself, my own life, away prom parental expectations and childhood experiences that redefine, over and over, all my relationships -- from the most casual conversation with the grocery clerk to the most intimate sexual entanglement -- so that it sometimes seems to me that our fate is to live out our lives replaying what hurt us, what was taken away from us or denied us when we were small, watchful, easily damaged creatures.

To Be Entered...

Background Information.
Born in 1971, Evelyn Lau is the daughter of a chinese immigrant family.....
She works and lives in Vancouver.