#8: salt

When I was younger (like, even five years younger) and a wave of depression hit, it pulled me under. I cried constantly, big gulping gasping tears. I wrote a lot. I felt a lot. I threw myself at walls and sucked up any substances or experiences I felt would obliterate me. I wanted to die because that felt like the only relief from this horrible existence, and I spilled my guts everywhere—erratically, though my sense of when it was appropriate to do so got better over time.

This is the kind of sadness people write about, a kind of desperate awfulness that inspires empathy in some and dismay in others. It is cinematic sadness, narrative sadness. It is the kind of sadness that people talk about when they talk about Hitting Rock Bottom. It is the kind of sadness that there is a Way Up from.

The depression I've been experiencing over the last months isn't the same. Dysthymia, they call it, which is a much prettier name than it deserves. If big-D depression is a gaping blackness, dysthymia has the color and consistency of mucus. It's disgusting in an entirely mundane way. I forget to eat. I don't really want to get out of bed, though I do, and I drag myself over to my computer and get my work done, though writing, which used to feel fluid and natural, feels like shoving too many clothes into a suitcase. This is why I haven't done much of it aside from the blurbs I have to write every week. My limbs are heavy. I'm irritated at totally pointless things because I have no control individually over the state of the world, which is perpetually on fire (some might just call this "being on Twitter").

I know logically that I feel this way for two very understandable reasons—I've always had a tendency towards it (which has been enhanced by some pretty awful life experiences, most of which happened when I was in my very formative years), and I've been pretty isolated over the last year and a half because I'm immunocompromised. I don't have the outlets a lot of other people do, though I do have a small group of people I'm close to that I get to spend time with, even if some of it is long-distance, and things like band practice, where I feel connected and creative and have fun. When something is able to crack the malaise, it feels blissful.

This isn't the kind of depression anyone wants to talk about on Mental Health Awareness Day. It is a dry depression. There's no solution, no grand revelations, no healing narrative. You just keep doing the things that you do that keep it from getting worse—you walk around the block endlessly, you go to therapy, you get lost in a movie or a book or a video game, you have a good phone call or a coffee outside with a friend—and hope that it'll get better eventually. What else is there to do? People ask you how you're doing and you say "Bad, because the world is bad?" and shrug and give that sort of half-smile, half-grimace. There is nothing to be said about it, so they just say "Yeah, I feel you," and then you move on to talking about something else.

My dear friend and co-worker Mariana Timony wrote a beautiful piece about a similar kind of depression which will appear in the publication we work for soon, and her encouragement is why I'm writing this. "I think it will help a lot of people," she said to me today, and I hope it does. Dysthymia is so much more common than major depression. In a perverse way it feels like it's almost a win for me that I feel this way—it could be so much worse. I am familiar with so much worse. This is what you get when you successfully integrate your traumas, which I guess I have done at this point. I have more resources now in every regard than I have had for most of my life, and they have all helped get me here. If anyone promises you a kind of life where you're happy all the time, run. That is some cult shit and it just isn't how life works. Sometimes things are good, and sometimes they are not.

This low-level fog will lift at some point—I have to believe it will, because it always has before. Over the last week or so it's felt a little bit less excruciating, and writing this piece has been less of a slog than usual, though I wouldn't say I'm back yet. (I didn't eat anything today until 2 pm, when I made myself eat half a sandwich.) We are taught to think that our mental health is somehow tied to our inherent worth, which is bullshit, and we are also taught to think that we can action our way out of a bad time, which isn't really how it always works. You don't take a pill and/or do enough therapy and/or do yoga or whatever and then you're magically fixed. These things are tools, and their utilities, in combination or not, may vary for different people at different times. That's not a message that sells, but it is the truth.

Later today, I will take my regular walk around the neighborhood, and maybe I will say hello to a stranger's dog or see something that strikes me as lovely. You keep going until you can't any longer.