Member-only story
Please Stop Romanticizing Depression
Pithy creativity posts, self-diagnoses, and prescriptive “cure-alls” are not the move.
Let me tell you about the time I wanted to die. Daylight had become an assault, and moving from one room to another required a passport, luggage set, and a trip on three planes. In the blue hour, I’d walk along the shoreline near my home, inching closer to the water. My body was a ticker tape of grief.
What would it be like to walk into the water, through it, under it? Instead, I returned to the box that was my home — the door served as a little grid where no light could get in. Watch me pour white wine into mugs for breakfast while laughing through Salò. Back then, I considered a film about sadism a comedy. Watch my body wracked with sobs on the bathroom floor, kitchen floor, bedroom floor, in front of the TV. Watch me watch Salò again because maybe I have it better than someone else? Maybe someone feels more pain? Is it possible when your sadness is bottomless and unrelenting.
Nine years ago, I had all this pain and I didn’t know where to put it. Where do you store pain when it threatens to swallow you whole? Do you put it in a box, a body, a container? Do you keep it at room temperature or locked in the freezer?
All I wanted was to be returned to factory settings. Recede. Take me home. Back to the beginning. Before the wars and all the wounds.
Watch me consider my options. Watch me frighten every single person I know.
Then, a doctor called in a prescription and said I needed to see him three days a week. Could someone come and stay with you? In your home. I thought about Salò. No, I said. There is no one. Maybe I had it worse.
Watch me take a pill every morning. Watch me sit on a brown sofa thinking, for $300 an hour you can afford to upgrade the furniture.
After the pills take effect, people become less afraid. I am deemed fixed, the triumphant comeback story. Watch me headline a tour. Until a year later when I get sick again and people realize this is an illness that never goes away, it lies dormant. It’s a scary thing to witness someone who will never fit into a before or after box. It’s a scary thing when the people you love realize…
