currently reading: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris
books bought:
Little Labors by Rivka Galchen
American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land by Monica Hesse
Nine Island by Jane Alison
books received:
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino (e-galley, out 8/6)
Naamah by Sarah Blake
books finished:
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Naamah by Sarah Blake
Little Labors by Rivka Galchen
Myths about Suicide by Thomas Joiner
American Fire by Monica Hesse
Nine Island by Jane Alison
Hey you,
I feel: I am getting worse at communicating. Or: I am just getting worse. Depression has fully eaten my brain. It's not that I can't write, exactly, but that I have nothing to say. (I mean to the point where I'm googling "conversation starters," or just summarizing books for people lucky enough to hang out with me in real life. Did you know that the rise of the automobile led directly to the rise of discretionary policing in the US? It's true! Check out Sarah Seo's fascinating book Policing the Open Road!) It is that I don't think I'm doing a good job of speaking to anyone. It is a feeling of impotence, something ghostly, the way I can't seem to affect anything in my environment, let alone to control it. I mean when I say I'm doing really bad the world stays exactly the same as when I say I'm well, how are you? In The Reckonings, Lacy Johnson writes, "Perhaps it is useful to return to those famous lines by Muriel Rukeyser: "'What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.' It is a powerful image. But though I return to those lines often, I think what she is saying is only partially true. Many women have told the truth about their lives, however impossible that may seem at the time, and the world has gone on pretty much as before."
(Not that either of them were talking about me, of course.)
I'm still reading, although that gets harder too; I'll read anything that can keep my interest, I say, but fewer and fewer books meet that bar, and I spend days trying to choose a single book to read, which is its own stupid purgatory. I remember the lines I like so I can pilfer them for use in a sort of crazygirl-to-english dictionary, a crazygirl Rosetta Stone. In his poem "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out," Richard Siken writes, "You see, I take the parts I remember and stitch them back together / to make a creature that will do what I say / or love me back." Or there's María Gainza in Optic Nerve: "Being good with quotations means avoiding having to think for oneself." I thought if I borrowed someone else's thoughts—if I was thinking through someone who'd had an editor, say—maybe someone would take notice.
It's certainly not working, this dictionary. I mean I don't know how to express anything to anyone. Many nights I come home from work with a single project in mind: how can I send a message that conveys the seriousness of the situation but that doesn't come off as too needy, too manipulative, too exaggerated, too fucking sad? That's not completely fucking embarrassing? Because it is embarrassing. I always end up empty-handed.
The writer Andrew Solomon said: "One of the things that gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages and eat lunch and organize themselves to take a shower and to go out the front door and that it's not a big deal, and yet you are unable to figure out a way around it." I know, too, that my depression is boring, and that it makes me boring, and self-absorbed; I can hear myself repeating myself (haven't I written a version of this before?) and that is in part what I mean by getting worse. It's also that no one will argue with me, not even in a friendly way. No one will say, Well, that's just not true, things won't be so bad forever, which makes me think either I'm right and things will be this bad forever (bad) or I've progressed to the kind of crazy it isn't worth arguing with, where it's easier to just go along with it (bad).
Or maybe they are just trying to be respectful of your views, Smalls.
Recently I've become fixated on the phrase "ask for help!" and the people who say it. A memoirist everyone loves tweeted something about how she lost a friend to suicide and ended it with "Get help" and the prayer hands emoji. I mean, get help from where? I want an answer, a real one. I've talked to the doctors and I've talked to my friends and the truth is I feel worse off for it. The difference of course being hope, some kind of faith. It is one thing to be depressed under the assumption that if things get really bad, help will be there if you can reach out for it. It's another... When I had kidney stones—before I knew I had kidney stones—I knew I'd be able to go to the hospital if the pain got worse or didn't get better, and that was a real comfort. Then I went to the hospital and waited for hours, went to another hospital, waited for hours, told them the pain was a 9, told them I'm sorry, I just can't really focus on the question, please it's really bad, please I'm sorry for asking again but is there a bed yet? Do you know how much longer? Please can you help me? And for a long time they couldn't, and didn't, and it was a security blanket I didn't know I'd had yanked away from me. No—a security blanket makes it sound frivolous—it was a safety net, and it was much easier, much less exhausting, when I thought it was there. It is depressing to know it's not.
I am being sentimental, vindictive, self-absorbed, boring, I know!
I've latched onto the Just Ask for Helpers because they are a much easier target for my fury than actual people. I've made them two-dimensional so I feel justified in hating them. I hate them, as Elizabeth Wurtzel says, for not knowing. If you want to read about depression-rage I'll point you to Prozac Nation. I haven't read it cover-to-cover in years but there are images that stick with me—someone told her at a party she'd feel better in the morning and she said I don't want to feel better in the morning, I want to feel better right now. (Perhaps impatient is the word for me—it's just that I've been this way for so long, and followed all the rules, and so I feel that it's my right to feel better, and how dare I be kept waiting?) Bunny, from Binnie Kirshenbaum's Rabbits for Food, is also a welcome addition to this canon:
"You need to listen to me," Dr. Fitzgerald says. "I'm trying to help you." For the duration of an instant, Bunny goes blind. Everything is black, tar-black and deep purple, which is then followed by a ring of light, a crisp and sharply edged light framed by fire, and the glow bores through the darkness. This is how Bunny sees rage. Slow and measured, she says, "No, you need to listen to me."
Really can't recommend Rabbits for Food highly enough. That should be the main takeaway today.
Please don't send your advice. Please do send books—recommendations, definitely, but also, please send books to my house. (I'll give you my address, I don't care!)
I'll be back soon with some books that I'm really excited for this summer, I bet my mind will come back at some point, and we won't ever have to speak about this again; until then, I remain
your friend,
Smalls