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Friday, December 11, 2015

Do you live with roommates? ( An essay about depression)

"Yes I do," I replied to the crusty old Polish accounting Professor who sat across from me every Yom Kippur. " Oh I see," he exhaled more than exclaimed, while barely hiding his disappointment.   "Lena! Give me some whitefish!" His wife put the printed pictures of her grandchildren down and scooped a large vat of congealed mayonnaise soaked carp onto his plate. "I brought these pictures because I knew you'd be here, Bella!" The family, and all the orphaned accoutrement who broke fast with us every year, had taken to calling me my father's endearment, and now the word felt more like irony than a compliment. I kept my mouth shut and ate.

Every holiday I have the same goal. Keep it clean dollface and you'll get through unscathed. But the four person unit I call my family works differently.  As if the language of privacy and discretion was a dialect lost on my immigrant derived famiglia:

FAMILY: In human context, a family (from Latinfamilia) is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children. Anthropologists most generally classify family organization asmatrilocal (a mother and her children); conjugal (a wife, husband, and children, also called nuclear family); and consanguinal (also called an extended family) in which parents and children co-reside with other members of one parent's family.


Echoing in the cold barren hallows of my brain I could hear that old crabby golum hissing: "Oy, she must be depressed."  Although my body stayed in the dining room, carb- loading and smiling, my mind travelled elsewhere. Somewhere along the way in my growth as a human being I was taught to be demure and discreet about depression.  Even though I grew up in a loud mouthed household full of colorful pushy characters who were never repressed about anything- somewhere along the way "Chin Up" translated into "get over it" or "act as if." And so my ire grew as I had to soak up the taste of my own bitter acrid self loathing induced by the ogre across the candelabra.

Later in the evening, after the alte kakkers bid their long adieus, my mom suggested I write a blog and practice being personal in public. This was a huge olive branch. She hates all virtual representations of people. She's scared of stalkers and people knowing 'our' business.  But she knew about my book  and that I was going to write about things she had done wrong and personal things about sex and bodies and even more humiliating: love.  Warts and all, she knows everything about my life and albeit it can be a cantankerous relationship sometimes - for the most part its a safe space. This complicity on her part to encourage me to speak out loud gave me a newfound inspiration that was much needed.
But then as quickly as she supplanted my courage, she tsunami'd it away; "will this help with your depression? Maybe you can get off those awful medications.  I mean I know it's for pelvic pain but hopefully you can just will your way out of this."  I felt like a beaten down prisoner. I relented.  I answered her in short concise answers, signifying nothing but filling in voids where my faint voice needed to be inserted."No I can't." "Yes, I will think about that." "Ok, I hear you." She's old. It's my turn to take care of them. It's my turn to practice thankless unconditional love and overcome whatever prior trespasses they unwittingly or wittingly executed. I'm 40. It's time. But hearing her exclaim my depression out loud rocked me.

I can not say that I have always identified as a sufferer of depression. One way or another, there was always an external reason to feel bad. I was sad because I was fat. I was sad because my love was unrequited.  I was sad because my dad was sick. I was sad because I was in horrible physical pain.  I was sad because I was failing... an endless array of excuses that were happening TO me (and only me).  At no given point did I understand that my feelings about my life were a choice. This disenfranchisement is most probably what caused the real despair.  The secondary pain is always the worst.  It's the radiating sorrow that comes from pondering what all of 'this' means about you.  What will others think? What kind of person am I to have this suffering? Who will love me if I am broken like this?  It's a caustic cocktail of shame, supposition and judgement that has absolutely no factual resonance. But it's very real to you. About a year ago I was in so much physical pain that I was ready to check myself into a hospital. I was suicidal.  Its not easy for me to say that word.  Its much like Valdemort in my house. I can't bare to imagine committing an act that would leave others with so much guilt and pain. I did not want to die necessarily, but I genuinely could not think of any other way out.  The nerves inside my body were twisting and mangling my pelvis so much that I could not quiet them down with extremely powerful pain killers. I could not sleep, eat, think, run or even sit.  I laid down in my room with ice packs on my privates and stared into a vortex of loneliness. I didn't want to tell anyone because I was afraid I had tapped my friends dry of their good will.  I was seriously broke. I owed my specialist thousands of dollars for procedures that did NOT work and were painful. I was exhausted. I just wanted the pain to stop.  I had this awful crystal clear window into what suicide is about.  I was ashamed to feel it.  I was ashamed to have judged others. So many layers of misguided perceptions standing firmly in my way to any form of relief.

 I broke down- I told my mom. We went to the specialist. She paid.  (more guilt, more shame) The Dr spoke plainly. She was tired of me. I could tell.  "Can you please let me drug you?" She gave me a script.  I took it to the pharmacist. He looked sternly at it and then up and down at me.  (more guilt, more shame) "Beware of drinking with this and watch your thoughts."  What the fuck does that mean? Listen buddy you have no idea how much I watch my thoughts- this head is in permanent dress rehearsal; constantly rewinding and examining! Don't pour oil on this fire! But all I did was nod and take the bottle with the pretty green pills.  Within days the primordial pains shrunk down like a loud bass note slowly moving farther and farther away.  As it dissipated, I could feel myself searching for it, clinging to it, afraid of being duped.  At first the medication truly made it all go away.  Within two weeks I was celebrating my birthday, dancing around, drinking, no dark thoughts, no pain.  But within a month a distant relative of the pain returned. A scowling irritable cousin who has made camp and stayed with me since. She's not horrible. She's a 2 on a scale of 1-10.  I don't have the bandwidth or money to pursue "a cure."  There is no "willing" my self out of this.  The best that I could hope for is to live a healthy life and be as honest and self preserving as possible.  And so I live with my dirty secret.  I have a broken body. I have depression. I take medication so that I can stand my life.  It numbs me. It creates a cognitive dissonance that makes it hard for me to retrieve words and collect my thoughts. It make me less smart.  (more guilt, more shame) The alternative is to want to die.  I chose degradation of the one thing I alway had and felt confident about: my brain. But perhaps I can will myself out of this emotional dissonance. Perhaps.
Still, to be fair, I sometimes feel like I suffer from oppositional defiance disorder the minute I set foot on the ugly green carpet in my parents' overly dressed living room.  Immediately I feel compounded by my differences, and by all the ways in which I have come up short in facilitating other people's pipe dreams for me.  Sure they said, "be whatever you wanna be Danielle...don't ever get married until you can take care of yourself...you are a genius." But in the tiny microscopic minutia laid bare deep in the semantics of my parents' language was, "why aren't you making money? What is it you do? Don't you like men? Who is going to love you when I am gone?" Recently my mom told me, minus any compunction or awareness of its detriment to me, "your father is truly depressed because he feels he failed you in making you so dysfunctional in relationships."  At first I felt really angry, but this tiny insidious grin quickly shone across my face. "Yeah, he probably should- but that's his problem Mamma, not mine at all. Can you pass the wine?" 

And like that, I burried it in the complaint department.  I mean fuck, at least we're talking about it. No?








Phaedra

She lives in a wispy loft in Jersey City, above a cobble stoned street in a building filled with ambient sounds of artists and hopeful startups.
Its a neighborhood that housed hedge funders who didn't have daddy's money, nor the misfortune to mourn a Brooklyn of later's past.
I remember Bill, and John and Amy, they had cool jobs like designing album covers, fixing cameras and lighting exhibits.
I was jealous, but only in a temporary way - the future was still bright.

As  I walk towards her industrially refined complex, the sun hits the side of the building in such a way, I'm reminded of the east village of my youth, when things were happening that my wiser self would have loved.

Her body and face are quite lithe, as if all the flesh on her body is consumed by the energy it takes to be her.
She glides about the loft in frenetic bursts to an fro, every turn and twist unveils a new page in her history.
With each new nook and cavern or her lair I feel as If I have just arrived and yet never a feeling of De Ja Vous
I leave her my unfinished business card and make promises that I still have yet to keep.

Chapter 4 (Dysphasia)

My heart is always for sale. 
I lurch outward through my eyes and stare,
hoping you'll feel the embers that have not yet gone to ash. 
It's a witless challenge built on fleeting hope and familiar afflictions.
I tell my self that I will make you feel safe and real. 
I can not.

I bare down and give you everything,
thinking there is power in my shameless abandonment of touch and adoration. 
But in the morning you retract;
you are scared that I want you to feel something for me.
And what you feel is not for sale.

My love is for sale.
At the first kind word I release all boundaries, letting you in, hoping you'll tell me how beautiful I am. 
Yet, angry when you don't embolden me like a man. 
My hunger is for sale. 
Its presence so tangible that you can wrap yourself in it and shield yourself from every doubt you ever had.
My love is a currency, easily amortized with every kiss and stroke.
But that's not love. At its best it's curiosity and at its worst it's relief.  

I am not satisfied. 
I am not safe.  
I am not really for sale.