Nay

Against Depression:

Like rheumatoid arthritis, depression turns your own body against itself. It chews not on your cartilage, but on your brain cells and your sense of reality. It’s as seductive as a wife-beater, shutting out other voices to turn itself into your only friend. The only one who tells the truth about the bleakness of the world. All your energy goes towards getting through whatever stands in your way – struggling, slogging, pushing, through work and small talk and getting food – whatever it is you have to get through until you can be alone again with the voice who can be trusted.

And the last thing it feels like is an illness. No, this monumental, world-swallowing suckage sits outside you: it comes from the project, the job, the love affair, the city, the family, or the decade. For me, these low cycles have always led me to abrupt life changes. It’s a kind of shock therapy: uprooting jobs, careers, relationships, and countries. Those shifts feed the craving for anonymity and reinvention, and they leave behind the shame of a condition that breeds shame.

If you asked me why I move to a different continent every year, I'd tell you it's because I couldn't stay where I was. Why couldn't I stay? I would give you a list of legitimate external motivations for each move, but reading this, I realize the whispering portents of depression were probably playing a role before I really acknowledged they were. Of course, one could also argue that those external tensions upended the internal ones. Either way.

I appreciate so much having been able to live abroad, but, too, the idea of being condemned to the life of the inveterate nomad breaks my heart. Shocks the moves indeed were, but therapy? Ha. I had more than a few people tell me the move/change/blah here would be good, while in my head, though, I'd be snarling, How on earth is this going to help? Don't you see how this only exacerbates all the feeling of precariousness and arbitrariness? No one needs you anywhere because no one anywhere needs you.

And still to see that sentence written there pains me to think of all those times I lay in my bed or sat on my floor, rocking back and forth, shaking as that damn thought terrified me, and how utterly defenseless I was to convince myself of something I knew in theory to be untrue, and yet could not eradicate from my heart or head. But mercifully it doesn't hold sway over me now, and I can correctly identify it as a lie.

Some of the details she describes above hit home, others not quite. But I posted it up there because I love how she so categorically dismisses the idea that being sad is just some thing we accept. Some people will tell you it's just a part of life, although more often I think those people just want an excuse for their own malaise, to indulge their indie street cred, or worse still, have some artistic/writing material, because if you do it prettily enough, giving up is noble, as if faint hearts ever won fair maidens or something like that. (This is why businesspeople aren't (often) artists: They're far too bold to succumb to some silly ironic conviction that success is only found in tragedy. I respect them very much for this.) And I do know being sad is an inherent part of things, but it's not one I want to resign myself to. This is not how I want to be. And it won't be.

If anything brought me out of last year, it has been finally being able to identify that infernal mantra above as a lie; I don't trust depression's intentions anymore. Not that that means it goes away, and batting down that vertiginous existential reeling still takes its daily toll, on my energies, my memory, my patience. But as long as I can dismiss the lie's insistence, which I do thanks in almost exclusive part to support from you all, it's ok.

And by 'ok,' I don't mean in the nonchalant sense, but in the sense of "not dramatic." A steady sort of ok. A state that gets challenged and threatened daily, but one that holds.

foto courtesy of the rrs

that stubborn darkness

for the most part, it takes a lot for a question posed of me to make me uncomfortable. i try to be thoughtful and forthright answering any question, and don't often have qualms about it.

i also cannot lie. and when i say "can't," i actually mean "not physically able." (really, i lose to 7 year olds in games of BS.) it's not a convenient trait. there are a lot of times we need to oblige people, and even when i deliberately make myself do that, i get this deer-in-the-headlights look plastered across my face that reads "SCRIPT ERROR," and it's awkwardly obvious that i don't believe what i'm saying.

by far, the question that has made me the most uncomfortable of late has been, "so how do you like costa rica?" except there is usually an implied (or sometimes explicit) exclamation point after that question mark, coming from someone sitting, like me any other time i'm not abroad, at a computer in a house with cottage cheese in the refrigerator, Lou Dobbs on the television, poorly-maneuvered SUVs on the roads outside, and that damn 45˚N latitude sunlight slipping through the slats in the blinds before you've hardly had time to kick off your shoes after work.

i sit and try to summon any latent powers for mendacity, but i realize i might as well be trying to make myself sprout chest hair. those carefully culled skills in diplomacy fail me. the truth? i don't like costa rica. i'm thankful for the job. actually, not many people like san josé, and i'm probably one of the more optimistic ones about the job. most gringos don't stay long-term, and if they do, it's often because there aren't any better job prospects in the crumbling economies to the north. but that's not the point.

i spent much of the last year in depression, something that makes it nearly impossible to appreciate anything, let alone moving to central america with a job in my profession of choice. the depression is something that's danced around the periphery for a few years, only touching down for a few fleeting moments at a time in the past. but last year, i was no match for it. i got obliterated.

there was a small group of people who knew what was up, but mostly, i was hesitant to discuss it because what general understanding there is of depression is clinical, and i am quite convinced, and others have confirmed, that this was not a chemical depression, although it did have very chemical-physical effects. (that was another awkward comment i wished i could fib a response to: "you look great!" thinking: this is no diet i would ever wish upon anybody.) i also decided very specifically in one moment that i did not want to write about depression, because i wanted no one to empathize with what i was in. (writing = poignant articulation of empathy) i still don't. i don't ever want to empathize with myself and revisit those places. at least not right now.

lastly, i avoided bringing it up because there was this small part of me that really wanted to think that if i moved, even if the move wasn't going to address any of the core issues, the depression would just go away.

but it didn't. i didn't think it could, but the depression got a lot worse when i got down here, a functional depression in only the most rudimentary way. everybody in the states (innocently enough) wanted to know how awesome it was here, and all i wanted to say that the clouds and i both rained all day. not being able to go to the wedding in july was hard, hard, hard (mostly because i try not to ask a lot of Money, not demand too much, but when it excludes me from attending my own kin's wedding, then i get resentful). but the thought had crossed my mind that if i went up to seattle, i wouldn't come back down to costa rica. except no one would understand why i'd given up on costa rica and this picture-perfect job so quickly, and i'd come out looking like some ungrateful, insufferably morose 20-something who couldn't buck up and buckle down and get it done. oh, and i'd be jobless, too.

(and no, this thought and others did not develop out of conversations with anybody. it was nothing anybody planted or insinuated, just an example of what happens when these ideas would get masticated ad nauseam in my head and snowball to fantastic lengths, and i knew of no way to stop or extract them.)

along the way, small things helped immeasurably: impromptu emails from heidi or emily, a skype call with lily or nana over a poor connection in a café, even the chance to clumsily take back up skills that had been on hiatus and tell a story to adena. little emails from people saying how much they liked this post or that one. (wait, really? you really like what i write and weren't just obliging me in saying you wanted my rambling emails from afar and now aren't just politely responding? cool!) i'd prop my computer up on the ledge of my window to grasp some waft of an internet signal from across the street and load pages of dooce, sit back down and read about someone bravely facing an even more serious depression. music, of course, helped, too, some say too much, but all i know is it was the one thing that could make me stop crying. that and french fries.

and then, the gnawing stopped at the end of july, and those acids slowly dissipated and drained out of my spinal chord and stomach over the month of august. why, i don't know. nothing materially changed, but the depression is gone for now, and for that, i am grateful. there's a part of me that's wary, or feels it'd be naïve, to claim victory. since i don't know how/why it ended, i don't see how i can assert it won't come back. and in that sense, trying to keep yourself from falling into depression feels like trying not to dream a nightmare. you can try to follow as many old wives' tales as you want and not eat right before you go to bed and think happy thoughts or better yet listen to sweet lullabies or soothing voices as you doze off, but you could have a happy or nonsensical dream, or a nightmare all the same. but i am attending to it, rest assured.

not that anything goes back to the same, not that it ever does, although i wish it could for reasons i tell myself are silly to hope for. (if things went back to before, it'd mean we didn't grow or learn. not that we always ask to be so knowing.) i mostly wish i didn't feel like i'd changed so much. i feel more eroded or raw now. i find myself scared to cry, and have to dutifully remind myself that healthy people cry from time to time, and just because i do now doesn't mean i'm depressed again. some of the weight's back and i sleep better, although i am being woken up a couple nights a week with allergy attacks. (wrote lots of this post at about 4 am. thanks mold!)

yes, there are times, mostly on the highways out to the coast, watching the litany of billboards in english selling condo developments, when it's hard to enjoy living here because i can't get past the notion that costa rica has whored herself and culture to the first world, that her only identity is in being eco/gringo-social-conscious-friendly. both other foreign countries i've lived in had such distinct national heritage, albeit one was obnoxiously arrogant about theirs and the other painfully meek, it's hard to grapple with a country whose national motto, pura vida, was first coined by foreigners in the '50s, and then turned into a tourism ministry campaign a couple decades later. there are times when i resent the idea that i abet hordes of people in their criminal failure to engage in their host country as we inoculate them against learning spanish under the guise of our benign little paper and its chipper sun logo. but that admittedly is me being cynical.

all this to say, yes, it has been hard here, and the idyllic image of life in the tropics is hard for me to know how to promote. but it's not costa rica's fault. if anything, the beaches are an incomparable antidote.