Wherever and whenever you stop digging
Something very wonderful has been happening to me in the last handful of months, and the simplest way I can describe it is that I feel like myself again. I’ve written a fair amount in this newsletter about the fog that is depression, which is something I’ve struggled with since my late teens. I write about it because reading what other people have written about their experiences of depression is the main thing that has helped me to get through it, to feel that I am not alone in it and to find my own way through it.
Depression comes in waves, usually the direct result of my material circumstances which, on one or two significant occasions, have dredged up difficult memories. It is sadness that outstrips its cause, that becomes a self-sustaining thing, which is why it is so difficult to contain.
My most recent bout of depression happened in the buildup to the publication of my second book. I love writing, but publishing a book is very hard. You feel both entirely exposed and completely powerless, and, having put so much passion, effort and time into your work, there then follows the incredible difficult task of very quickly detaching your own worth from how strangers perceive it. Publication should be a celebration of all that work, and yet, I tend to find — and I know that plenty of authors feel this — it feels like the opposite. This time around, I really struggled.
The advantage of having been through depression many times is that you know how to cope with it. After my book was published, I had a big trip planned, and going away helped to hold it off for a little bit, but when I came back, I felt worse. But I know now that getting through it isn’t a matter of big revelations, but rather being quietly firm with yourself, telling yourself, without resorting to self-punishment, that some small changes of direction are required, one day at a time.
It will be different for every person, and what helps me, is structure. Most recently, this has looked like making myself go to the library every weekday and (with the exception of writing this newsletter, which I write most weeks at home in my pyjamas), not working at home, because I find it so much harder to stop thinking about all the difficult things I’m trying to write about if I am working in the place where I should be relaxing. Making sure that I relax when I have the time to relax. Extremely important is prioritising ways to secure a regular income, because depression that has to do with money and material safety is in my opinion the very worst kind of depression. Not drinking always helps me, because alcohol is after all, a depressant, but equally important is being sure that not drinking doesn’t mean not socialising because time with people you love is the best antidote to depression.
I say there are no big revelations, no silver bullets. But, out of that time dedicated to taking care of your environment, your routine and yourself, there can come plenty of smaller ones, which might just add up to that quiet optimism that comes from knowing how to handle this in ways that you didn’t ten or five years ago, maybe even six months ago, and that now, you can trust enough to stop digging down inside yourself and look around instead, feel neutral towards or maybe even glad of what you see.
I certainly feel that way. Depression can be a way of hiding from yourself because you feel tormented by things that have happened in the past or the way that you are now in the world, and you feel as though it would be better to be anybody other than yourself, because in the pit of it, you don’t realise how many other people feel or have at some point felt exactly the same way. The really wonderful thing is that when you do come up for air, you feel really truly glad that you are yourself and nobody else. And because you’ve felt the opposite, and you have known how depression can become this great, self-sustaining thing, that contentment, can be just the same: that a feeling can outstrip its causes and continue to grow.
I like best how Maggie Nelson puts it, right at the end of Bluets:
“One thing they don’t tell you ‘bout the blues when you got ‘em, you keep on fallin’ ‘cause there ain’t no bottom,” sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses.
Do not be overly troubled by this fact.
With all my love, Rosie xxx