Depression feels like such a clinical word sometimes. Or perhaps a word that is so heavy, so burdensome, so intangibly rationale, that unless you look like a mess - no one can recognize it.
I was late in my second trimester, my eyes brimming with tears, when my OB said to me, “You don’t look depressed,” and I began to wonder what depression looked like.
What is depression, if not a dense fog, making it hard for you to recognize the world, and for them to barely trace your shape. What is deep sadness, if not a weighted blanket tucked in a bit too tightly. What is grief, if not the incessant feeling of having said goodbye to someone you love, refusing to let up. What is depression, if not being swallowed by the lethargy of a brutal hangover, without the memories of a dangerously good night.
We talk about mental health, as if it is all in the brain. As if there is a clear, linear, scientifically sound explanation for every emotion that inhabits our beings. As if all anxiety and depression can be explained as faulty wiring. As if medication is a cure-all.
I prefer to use the term emotional health. It feels more appropriate to describe the way a feeling will overwhelm my entire body, coursing through my veins and sitting in my gut. Emotions come in waves, with high and low tides, often wiping the footprints of pain that once seemed deep and immovable.
I was sad last week.
I’m familiar with sadness, and often embrace her like a distant cousin visiting from out of town. Knowing it might feel a bit awkward or uncomfortable, but trusting there is meaning, value and growth in her visit, and she will be gone soon enough.
Sometimes, and this time, instead of the predictable ebb and flow of sadness’s ocean, I feel the sludge of quicksand. It feels like it shouldn’t take this long. That I shouldn’t be sinking this deep.
The first time I remember feeling the immovable swell of sadness, I was 16. I was at a camp in Switzerland - my first extended trip away from home. Maybe it was just run-of-the-mill homesickness, but it felt deeper. And oddly familiar. Perhaps it was a remembering of a similar sensation, I was not yet able to identify in my younger years. It lasted two days.
This past episode lasted nine - right through my 41st birthday.
I knew exactly what triggered it, and I immediately went to work. It was an old wound, no longer fresh, but picked at long enough to expose its eternal tenderness. I unpacked my hurt with my partner - feeling grateful for his ability to hold space for a traumatic response he doesn’t have first hand experience with, while heavy with guilt for burdening him again with my emotional baggage. I sit in my car, late to help put up decorations for my preschooler’s last day of school, oscillating between grief and rage, as I process with my therapist in real-time. I lean on my husband to mirror, validate and parent our children, when I’m unable to shake it off. I go for walks. I seek realignment and relief. I’m determined to get through this shit before my birthday. I refuse to celebrate a milestone and my personal favorite day (month!) of the year, being depressed. Aside from being a sad cliché, it’s also not on brand for me. I love my birthday so much.
But the morning comes and I wake up unsettled. I’m alone in a hotel room in Ojai - literally, one of my favorite scenarios - but I cannot even appreciate that my family has gifted me with extra sleep, solitude and quiet, while they go out for breakfast. Instead, I get a perfectly timed phone call from my best friend, who receives me and my tears.
I kind of float through the rest of the day, annoyed that I can’t get through my depression fast enough. It’s so inconvenient. I text with the friends I can be real with, tell them I’m trying to be kind to myself and admit that maybe not every emotional process can be an efficient one.
We put our kids in camp for the afternoon, and spend three hours at the adult pool. When I run into a friend at the family pool a little while later, he asks if the kid-free time “filled my bucket.” Still in it, I manage a small smile and say “yes, but there’s a tiny hole in my bucket, so it doesn’t stay full for long.” He says “ah, you’ve got a leaky bucket,” and I chuckle, repeating it back to myself.
I visualize a blue plastic bucket, with a few pinholes leaking water, as I desperately keep refilling it. It could be worse, I think. My bucket could be broken. The holes could be bigger. I could be miles from a water source, with no chance of refilling it. I feel grateful for my bucket, and that it still holds so much water. I feel compassion for myself and the way I so often deprecatingly admit that I seek and perhaps need more self-care than others.
My college roommate recently described me as carrying a certain kind of melancholy. It felt fitting and comfortable. It signals sadness, but with a melodic sweetness - a poetic nostalgia for all that has been and hasn’t been, all that is and isn’t, all that will be and never will be.
It is this very tendency towards sadness that signals my capacity for overwhelming joy. Perhaps it is my knowing and trust of this absolute joy, that makes me so irritated and impatient, when it is not immediately within reach. I wonder if I’d be so concerned with my slightly leaky bucket, if I knew that it was my awareness of those pinholes that allowed me to experience the ecstasy of water overflowing from it - positioning myself closer and closer to the water source - unconditionally generous and abundant.
Which brings us to…
This Week’s Haiku
With absolute joy, Instead of bucket-filling, I drink from the source
The fog lifted the next day. It always does, eventually.
A few book recommendations, if this post resonates with you:
Bittersweet by Susan Cain
All About Love by Bell Hooks
What Kind of Woman by Kate Baer
Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel
The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron
Oh, and go see Inside Out 2. The first film is a master class in emotional intelligence, and I cannot wait to see the sequel with my littles.
Until next time, be kind and gentle with yourself.
Love,
Jess