I Don’t Want to Sign This Book

Did I tell the truth in an inspirational memoir about my first depression?

Please don’t ask me

My ex-husband, the man who saw me through multiple, wretched depressions, hands me a memoir I wrote 30 years ago and asks me to inscribe it for a depressed friend who is in bad shape who is in her first episode. “Really?” I ask him. “Really?” “Something inspirational,” he prompts. It sits on the table, just waiting. Can’t he just put it in a gift bag, pristine and blank?

It is not a matter of time or selfishness. I don’t know this woman and still, I want to rush to her, to provide her with language depression has stolen from her. I want to validate her pain, and understand her loneliness. I want to tell her it’s not fair. Past that. It’s cruel. It is opportunistic. It is perhaps the most frightening thing she has known.

I want to hold her hard against the emptiness that steals her hope. To connect her to the people who could help her, and to protect the fragile threads that once bound her to life, but now threaten the great unraveling.

I would hold her hands with the promise, “I am with you.”

My first story

The memoir tells the story of my first relentless depression, my hospitalization, my treatment with electroconvulsive therapy, and my slow, but certain recovery. I was proud of the book. The theme was summed up in a quote from Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.

The book reviews held words like “brilliant,” “raw,” and “full of hope.” It was a good book. I had fallen down and gotten up again. I was well. Better than well. Ready to tell a tale that had a beginning, middle and end.

But the end of the book wasn't the end of the story.

The story isn’t over

Like half of the people who suffer their first major depression and have a recurrence, my book turned out to be only a chapter. Within several years, another episode overtook me, and often another after that. Treatments were not as effective. The symptoms are meaner.

Three years after the memoir’s release, I was shadowed by a familiar, but foreign danger. I awoke to gripping anxiety that threatened my well-being. All my words, those precious words, began to elude me, along with my memory and focus. The magic of the earlier years evaporated. I felt like a stranger among the people I loved the most. As I looked ahead, it was not to a life. It was to a life sentence. My mind screamed, “Oh God, please, not again.”

How could I write an optimistic message with my name beneath it? How could I address someone’s suffering with inspiration?

No “happily ever after's?”

I’m lucky. I’ve gotten good care and even better love. With age, depression has lost some of its bark, and I’ve developed a bag of tricks to put to work when I sense its onset. But I've paid dearly. For me, it is never “over.” I didn’t fight and win like it said on my book cover. Looking back, I began to register the “long haul” costs of this greedy illness.

Between then and now, I recognize the years of “depression fatigue” that have haunted my daughter, and my vigilance that she too, might succumb.

For two mental health professionals, my husband and I were profoundly stupid about the vulnerability of our marriage, until it was too late. Depression captured our lovely small family and trounced us.

It dragged our marriage under and didn’t let go until we ran out of air. We lost faith in the goodness of the future and were constantly on the lookout for trouble on the horizon.

With the publication of the book and all the goodies that went with it, numerous people exclaimed, “It was really worth it, wasn’t it?” I stared at them like, “What planet are you from?”

Who am I to tell you?

As I experienced more episodes, I was also asked to speak or write more. Standing in the wings of the stage, I heard myself introduced as having “beaten depression,” and I almost choked.

More than once, I finished my speech, got through the signing without crying and ran to my hotel room. As I dialed my doctor’s number, I repeatedly called myself a fraud. No longer could I emerge from one of my long dark tunnels and proclaim, “Well, that’s done!”

My doctor talked me down by saying, “You wrote your truth as it was then. It’s not that different now…maybe you’re a little sadder, maybe a little humbler, but more honest.”

I was relieved by his words. I was thankful for the reprieve.

I even felt a speck of pride in not giving up, not rolling over.

But now I am weary.

Finding my way

My days as a cheerleader are over. Now, I think of myself instead, as a tentative guide. Depression, like other serious, recurrent illnesses, needs to be seen as a formidable opponent. We need information, vigilant self-assessment, good professional care, and coping strategies for building strength and comfort. The basics.

Paramount for me is the nurturance of hope, which is the basis of my survival. I think that when we are plunged into depths from which we fear we will never emerge, we have got to find a way to believe in a confident future.

Whether we have had one episode or four, we need to hold on to the notion of possibility. We have to hold on by the skin of our teeth, in devious moments that scream for us to forget our hidden strengths.

Comfort makes hope possible. It is the very essence of depression that we hate ourselves. We feel weak and afraid. We are selfish failures. We deserve nothing.

And yet, I have learned that we must imagine that we have just come upon an injured child. That child is us. We would never treat that child as we treat ourselves. Because we know how desolate and agonizing the suffering that the child must feel, we would respond with active compassion.

We must do for ourselves whatever we do for the abandoned child. Nothing is too much. Nothing is too trivial if it calms the horrors, even for a moment.

My ex-husband reminds me to do the book’s inscription. I sit at the dining room table, empty of anything helpful I can share with the suffering stranger. I want to tell the truth, devoid of promises of stellar and long-standing outcomes. Sometimes those “truths” are so seductive. They promise relief if the person just tries hard enough. But the same amount of effort can also yield nothing.

What if you are perfect and you are still drowning? Maybe the most honest answer is that it is less about us and more about depression. We can at least let go of the twisting pain that captures us when we say, “I have caused this, I am failing.” This is depression, not me.

Disasters

When I have watched the catastrophes of the season — the hungry wildfires, the floods, and the hurricanes, I’ve found it hard to swallow. I feel myself anchored in the horror, trapped, maybe forever.

But it is more than watching a disaster. It is like watching my disaster, with my terror at how much harm can be done and how little rescue is possible with so much effort.

It is the nature of the beast, not the nature of the brave human beings that tells the story. Depression leaves a trail of destruction, despite how well people “cope.”

Learn courage

Before I sign the book, a memory from long ago returns to me. It has stayed with me all of this time and has evolved into different meanings.

In the first episode of depression, my doctor was growing more concerned at the way my depression was marching through, unabated. I was becoming untethered from my life. He recommended that I have ECT, (electroconvulsive therapy) which would necessitate my hospitalization on a locked psychiatric unit.

I was terrified.

A friend insisted I take a drive with her to visit a friend she wanted me to meet. I didn't want to, but she insisted. It was an early fall day and we said very little as we absorbed the sun and changing colors.

When we arrived, she introduced me to an older woman with flowing silver hair and a quiet smile. My friend disappeared quickly, and I could have killed her. But Naomi invited me to sit with her on a garden bench circled by clusters of black eyed Susans.

“I don't know what I'm doing here,” I blubbered. She was one of those people who exuded a quiet, almost spiritual presence. “What is happening to you?” she asked. I couldn’t stop myself. I told her everything. “I’m trying to do everything right. But I am dying. No one can help me.”

She nodded and sat silently. After a few minutes, she answered softly, “I think you were given this, so that you can learn courage.”

I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “I was given this? This disaster? I was given it?”

She was silent.

“Yes,” I thought, “this wasn't just some slip-up somewhere. I didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t an invitation to triumph. I was invited to learn courage. Courage isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. We don’t hit paydirt because we hit the exact, right level of blustering bravery.

But it is true. We learn courage. We stand up. We fall down. It hurts. But if we decide to get up, we will have to learn more courage. It’s not magic. It’s not free. But it’s invaluable with depression. It is a necessary wisdom.

We know the frightening terrain that stretches ominously in front of us. When I am confronting the onset of another episode, my prior experience does not reassure me. In fact, it is the devil I know, that challenges me.

Perhaps I became no more successful at quickly vanquishing the symptoms that threaten me. But for every time I struggle to preserve myself, I am entering the process. The process of learning courage.

Year after year, as we confront the adversity that has our name inscribed upon it, we have the chance to re-name it, describe it, give it what it needs to keep its distance. Courage will demand from us that we reach out to the deep scary places. Even if we are shaking in our shoes.

Courage becomes more than what we do to conquer depression. It becomes who we are. And with it comes a solitary wisdom and a generosity to ourselves and our fellow sufferers that will help us “keep on.”

So that is what I said. It was honest. I wished the book’s recipient refuge from the mean dangers of her depression.

Knowing I had limited power in the comings and goings of her adversity, I wished her courage. Whether it was her first episode, or a multiple, I believe she can come to know herself as brave, despite her fears.

I read the inscription several times. My eyes fill as I realize that all that time that it sat on the dining room table, my book challenged me to reach out for my own courage. Only then would I be able to share my deep wishes for her.

Only then am I able to sign my name.