On Depression
By: Elizabeth Buck
Tags: Mental Illness, Depression, Writers Block

While I try to write something — anything — daily, I’ve found it difficult to write anything coherent lately. Obviously, this year has been difficult for all of us. I’m impressed that anyone can be creative in the midst of it all. I’ve struggled off-and-on for the past seven months of the year, oscillating between feeling energetic and unmotivated. I’ve had to force myself to focus creatively while existing in a near-constant state of un-inspiration and negativity.

See, to me there’s nothing romantic about depression. I’ve never found suicidal ideation to be sexy, have you? But in entertainment and certainly on the internet we can’t help but try to recreate our darkest moments in palatable ways for the consumption of others who may or may not relate to the particular feeling being represented. For some, such media is cathartic. I, however, have never found anything realistic out there.

How does one put words to such deep despair? To answer this question, I Googled some quotations on depression recently to see if I could relate to any of them. Two of them stood out to me, one because it felt aspirational and another because I actually related to it:

“It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.” — Stephen Fry

“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.” — Elizabeth Wurtzel

It’s the latter half of Fry’s quotation I wish I could relate to. Sure, I’ve read a lot of books while depressed, combed the depths of my mind, and watched more YouTube than is healthy; nonetheless, I have also been immobile during those times.

And it is when I’m immobilized that I wish my depression to be purposeful. I wish all life’s woes to turn out the way a romantic comedy does. Some lazy curmudgeon finds love and suddenly abandons all cynicism and endeavors to achieve their dreams. Wouldn’t life be great if we could all work out our problems in ninety minutes or less?

Another of my bothers on expressing anything related to mental illness is coming across as gauche at best and self-indulgent at worst. Elizabeth Wurtzel, for example, was called narcissistic and self-indulgent in criticism of her trend-setting memoir Prozac Nation. To put it plainly, I don’t want that to be me. For that reason, I hardly ever address mental illness in my writing. I’ve thought about working it into a few scripts, but I find it hard to be objective about something so particular yet universal.

Underneath all of my writer’s block and frustration over representation, there is also shame… and more frustration. A vivid memory I have from a short time after I was diagnosed with depression was trying to have a candid conversation with one of my science teachers on the subject. She tried to be reassuring in all the conventional ways by telling me I’m not alone and that I could always come to her for help on homework if I’m struggling. Unfortunately, I only felt resentful of that advice. Through the pills and the therapy and the friends to talk to, the feeling that no one really gets it has prevailed.

Maybe it’s that sense of no one understanding that’s the universal bit. Perhaps the incoherence of what’s in our heads and the inexplicable feelings and the frustration and the disappointment shouldn’t and can’t be represented properly. Maybe that’s okay. Ultimately, of course, our objective is not to express what we are going through but to survive it.