And something is cracking/I don’t know where/Ice on the sidewalk, brittle branches in the air…
(Funny to be quoting my fellow Barnard alum Suzanne Vega, of whom I’ve never been an unequivocal fan, and odd not to include the next, more positive stanza, but I’m not there yet.) This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic, I think, because my energy is at an unusually low ebb even for me (and let’s just say that my normal energy level is somewhere between that of a hermit crab and a three-toed sloth), so I don’t have the mental or physical stamina to write much. That’s because I’ve been in the grip of a truly crushing, deep black depression off and (mostly) on for the past couple of weeks.
And it’s not triggered by anything in particular, which makes it worse in some ways. Yeah, school got pretty stressful at the end of the semester (and I still have a paper to finish–looking like I’ll be taking an incomplete there). And yeah, the constant, sickening feeling that my job is demeaning and insulting to me gets worse at times, including recently. And sure, coming back from seeing beloved family all too briefly over Thanksgiving made me homesick and made me feel my mom’s absence–which I feel every minute of every day, don’t get me wrong–more acutely than usual.
It would be great if I could blame it on the holidays, but I never get the holiday blues; I love this time of year, everything about it except the homesickness maybe, and December is always one of my favorite months. And in any case, these are the sort of blues that I can usually ride out, and they’re nothing I haven’t coped with before. The medication I take–one of those ubiquitous SSRI types of questionable efficacy (mostly I notice that they’re helping only if I quit taking them for a while and start to feel worse all of a sudden)–usually helps with this sort of blah feeling too.
But not this time, and I’m actually scaring myself a little, because it’s been so long since I’ve felt like this. I had a brief bout of absolute nonfunctioning terribleness in about 1992, which sent me to a shrink because I was convinced that I had some sort of generalized anxiety disorder. (This was before panic attacks became all the rage, and I knew I didn’t have those anyway; it was more that I’d be sitting on the bus on my way home from work and suddenly know–not just think or fear, but know–that the house had blown up from a gas leak or a burglar had gotten in and killed the cats or that my then-husband had been in a terrible car wreck.) The shrink I saw was caught up in the beginnings of the “fuck therapy, here are your meds, check back next season” trend in psychiatry, and I was only able to see him every few weeks, but he still did his absolute best to be a real therapist, as well as putting me on Prozac (which helped tremendously for years, and then quit working at all). He was a wonderful guy. After listening to me calmly, and keeping me calm, through our first “intake” session, he asked me just before I left, “Do you feel safe?” I lost it at that point, because it was exactly the right question to ask, and because I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t think I was going to give myself a haircut (to use my favorite euphemism) or anything–I had already tried that, at age 20, which is a story for another day–but I didn’t feel safe. I felt terrified, safe only if I was under the covers, preferably with all the pets nearby.
I’m at that stage again, but if I think about it, I’ve only had brief breaks from being at that stage; it’s just worse now. I can’t seem to connect or concentrate or care about much of anything (unless it’s four-legged and purrs). This first happened to me when I was almost 16 and discovered Nick Drake. I won’t say that Nick Drake caused my depression, certainly; for one thing, in retrospect, I can see that I had symptoms as early as age 5, and besides, in some ways, the catalytic effect that his depressive but not depressing music had on me back then was probably a good thing, because it brought to the fore some awful stuff that had been festering inside me and would only have gotten worse had it stayed buried longer. But I often used the phrase “Nick Drake depression” back then so my friends would understand that I was describing a particular kind of bleak, black hopelessness that I’ve felt only a handful of times in my life (as opposed to the chronic but somehow low-level depression that is my constant companion and keeps me, has always kept me, from living anything really resembling an actual life). It’s been a long time since I’ve even thought of the phrase “Nick Drake depression,” and now I’m right in the midst of one, and I don’t, honestly, know what to do.
That Suzanne Vega song is called “Cracking,” and I tend to think of it/sing it when I’m coming out of a depressive phase, because the next line goes: The sun is blinding/Dizzy golden, dancing green/Through the park in the afternoon/Wondering where the hell I have been. There’s a Lori Carson song, “Where It Goes,” that covers much of the same ground, but the album of the same name, from which it comes, is still so much the story of my recent life that I don’t think I can even post about it yet…and again, I’m not at the positive point at which the song resolves yet. Not even close.