There are many reasons why I hate writing about my depression, but the most glaring is that it sounds absolutely ridiculous when I describe what I’m experiencing out loud. When you get down to it, there is absolutely nothing wrong with me. I’m madly in love with my partner and we live a relatively easy, privileged life. I work at a place where I feel sincerely valued, in a position that could be accurately described as my dream job. I’m close to my parents and relatives and feel genuinely supported by them and my network of tight-knit, crazy talented and inspiring friends. On the surface and even below it, my life appears to be embarrassingly perfect.
And yet, I feel a deep and impervious sadness. And that sadness is real, however ridiculous I feel it might be. I carry it around like a heavy cloak that I can’t shrug off; one that becomes so oppressive that sometimes even my eyes seem to see the world a shade or two darker than it really is, as if I’m wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night. Sometimes it presses me down into my bed and makes me feel like I could sleep for weeks without ever feeling rested. Sometimes it sucks the joy out of the activities that I love most, making my greatest passions feel like unseemly chores. And sometimes it sneaks up on me at the strangest moments, like just now when I piled all the clean laundry on the bed and then burst into tears at the boring fact that all those demanding, unfolded clothes exist. They exist! And my arms can’t fold them because there I am, crying over nothing yet again.
I wear the cloak almost every day. It has become a normal and expected part of my day-to-day existence. The cloak has become such a reliable companion that my therapist (YES I’M IN THERAPY, and yes I hate the phrase “my therapist” almost as much as I hate having to have one) sometimes joins me in a laugh of relief when I fill out her mood survey and register as “moderately depressed” instead of “severely depressed.” “A good week!” we’ll both titter, because, ha. What other reaction are we supposed to have?
The heavier the cloak becomes, the fewer tears I shed. In my worst moments my brain completely unhinges from my body and floats above my head like a mylar balloon. “Get well soon,” the balloon brain says to the girl with nothing to cry about. The psycho-speak for this effect is something called depersonalization. Some days I’m so far away from my fingers and my gut and my heart that it’s a wonder I manage to write anything at all. Other days my brain only unhinges when I’m under a lot of direct stress, like when I’m about to go live on air. I’ve had moments where I snap back into reality the moment the green light flicks off of my microphone, and I have no idea what I’ve just said or done. “Good job!,” everyone always tells me. I nod my head, but their compliments never manage to penetrate the cloak. I have no way of knowing if I’m doing a good job or not. The velvet curtain keeps me clueless, and alone.
There are days when I can feel the sadness of the world pressing down on me. I think about the man who tried to jump off the bridge next to my house — he looked just like my dad — and all the lonely people whose cloaks have become so heavy and opaque that they’ll do anything to find a new source of light. I think about the fact that I will outlive both of my cats, whom I can’t fathom living without, and then wander on to the even more unfathomable idea of losing my grandparents or parents. I think about my friends with real, tangible, physical problems. Friends who are sick. Friends who have lost more than I can imagine. Friends who are dying. Friends who are so angry, or disappointed, or disgusted with the world that they’ve given up all hope.
I still have hope. Despite all of this seemingly melodramatic bullshit, I do have hope. Here’s a random story: when I was 18 and just figuring out what I wanted to do in this world, a sled dog racer came to my suburban hippie high school and delivered one simple, memorable message to the graduating class. Find your spark, and spend your whole life guarding it so it doesn’t burn out. Find your spark, and turn it into a fire. Some of my classmates laughed at how new agey the whole speech was, but I’ll never forget it. So many people lose sight of what they wanted to become. There are so many day-to-day worries that can distract us from pursuing our dreams. But I knew what I wanted to be, and then over the years somehow I became it. I’ve spent my entire adult life working toward a singular goal, at the expense of almost everything else. I left a whole entire marriage behind because my partner didn’t support my passion. I fought, and fought, and fought, and now here I am living my dream atop a fluffy whipped cream cloud. For the most part, I have become exactly who I wanted to be. What the hell do I have to complain about?
I can feel that I’m at a turning point in my life. And this time, for perhaps the first time in my life, that turning point doesn’t involve leaving anything behind. There is no unhappy romantic situation to flee from, or not-quite-right job to ditch. Everything that lies ahead is happy, and exciting, and real. A family. An enduring partnership. A promising and fulfilling career. All signs point to the notion that no matter how much I worry and no matter how far my head floats above my body, things are probably going to be ok.
I just need to find a place to hang up my cloak.
When I was two years old my parents made the wise decision to move out of the teeny tiny trailer they were renting in Barnum, Minnesota, and buy their first teeny tiny house in the neighboring town of Moose Lake.
I don’t really remember the move, of course, but my mom likes to tell the story of how I darted through the house during a walk-through frantically trying to flip on all the light switches before the electricity had been turned on and marveling at the fact that I’d have my own room. A few years later, my parents would let me choose the paint color for that room, and I would pick out a blaring Pepto Bismol pink. My bedroom was just large enough to fit a twin bed, desk, dresser, and shelf overflowing with toys, and was so poorly insulated that they would tuck me underneath six or seven blankets in the winter to keep me warm; to this day, I still sleep best in cool air, with a heavy weight pressing down upon me. But it was the first space that I remember having the privilege to call my own, and I lived there for 10 years—the longest stretch of time I’ve spent tied to a single residence so far in this life.
What the house lacked in square feet it made up for in property value, as it sat directly across the street from the shore of the town’s namesake Moosehead Lake. For a long stretch of my childhood I recall sitting out on the dock after dinner and watching the sun go down over the water. As I remember it, I was often alone on that dock, but the truth probably was that I was just far enough out of reach of my parents that it gave me my first taste of independence. As soon as I got permission to ride my bike without supervision I would take off down the street and pedal alongside the lake for a good mile, then pull my bike up under the Main Street bridge and sit cross-legged on the bank right where the Moose Head River bubbled into the lake. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that little lakeshore house and the hours spent communing with the water taught me the value of solitude and savoring the rare quiet moment; it’s something I still seek out to this day, especially now that I live in a much faster paced city.
I remember so many of the details of that house vividly. The wood-paneled walls; the drab brown carpet; the rotary dial telephone that hung in the hall outside my room; the three steps that led down from the dining room to the living room and were the site of so many dance performances and mini-plays. I remember when we got our first computer, and how the dot matrix printer clacked and sputtered so loudly that it would drown out the TV. I remember waking up in a fright and doing an army-crawl from my room to the edge of my parents’ waterbed, convinced that either a robber or a bear or perhaps an especially skilled robber-bear was going to apprehend me in the night. And I remember that there was always music, whether it was my dad playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” on his acoustic guitar to soothe a tantrum or my mom playing movie themes on the piano or the turntable spinning Linda Rondstandt, Paul Simon, and endless Beatles, Beatles, Beatles as we all sang along. It was just the three of us, and inside those walls we formed a unit that felt impenetrable.
When I was halfway through sixth grade my parents sat me down at our cramped dinner table — an arrangement so compact that I would have to stand up and move my chair in order for someone to access to the oven, which never seemed like an inconvenience but now feels ridiculous — and told me that it looked like we were going to have to move. The Moose Lake State Hospital, where my dad worked as a physical therapist for my entire childhood and where he had met my mother while she was working a summer job there during college, was going to close. My dad was being transferred to some faraway place named Faribault to help them close another state hospital, and my mom and I were going with him to find a house and live in a suburb called Apple Valley. The schools there were excellent, my parents said. I would have more opportunities, my parents said. But I didn’t care. It wasn’t Moose Lake. And I somehow knew that nothing would ever feel the same again.
Since that time, my roots have remained deeply planted in my hometown. All four of my grandparents still live in Moose Lake and Barnum, and each trip up north is accompanied by a nostalgic lap around the lake and a drive past my old house, which until this year had endured a couple of questionable exterior paint jobs and one particularly neglectful owner but otherwise remained exactly the same. There was something reassuring about driving past it and glimpsing, even for a moment, my old blissfully simple life.
But Moose Lake has also been a great source of sadness for me. In one particularly devastating year, I received a string of terrible updates from the homeland: A childhood friend who I had known since daycare had dropped dead of a brain aneurysm just days before graduating from high school. A young woman from my church who was just a year or two older than me was abducted from a gas station at the edge of town, went missing for quite some time, and eventually was discovered to have suffered a brutal and horrifying death. And another friend, this time an elementary school classmate, was struck and killed by a drunk driver while out on a dark farm road delivering a pizza.
I was 16 at the time of all those tragedies, and each update pricked another hole into my deflating psyche. Though I wouldn’t find a way to verbalize it until years later, those Moose Lake heartbreaks shoved me into my first throes of depression, and effectively shattered the illusion of bulletproof security and the innocence of my childhood.
So when I found out that the same river I used to flock to as a kid was overflowing and dumping incalculable gallons of extra water into my beloved Moosehead Lake, it felt like jumping up to try to sprint on a broken foot that’s never quite healed. The ache returned immediately as I watched video of an old neighbor — a boy I used to baby-sit when he was only one year old! — grapple with the fact that his own childhood home was filling with water. And it grew into a throbbing sadness when I saw an old fifth-grade teacher, who is now the superintendent of the entire district, stand atop the roof of my elementary school and look out at a playground and campus submerged with water, rendered powerless by the disaster.
Thankfully, my grandparents escaped the floodwaters and their house at the edge of town remains unharmed, but many old neighbors and friends did not fare as well. Today, news came that my old house suffered so much damage in the flood that it has been deemed uninhabitable and condemned. There’s a good chance that my next trip home will be my final chance to take a leisurely drive around the lakeshore and see that house standing. It seems illogical to mourn a building, but with this news I’ve suddenly found that a term I learned just this year, “ambiguous loss,” has taken on a profound meaning.
It’s not the first time Moose Lake has endured such grand devastation. In 1918, my great-grandmother was among the many residents who fled into the water and watched as a fire tore apart their town and burned their houses to the ground. The town persevered and rebuilt and eventually rejoiced, and they will do it again following this year’s flood. And as the town rises once again so will I, each of us spurned on by the defiant resilience of nature and community and human life.
So I suppose that in the midst of this ambiguous loss, there is solace: I know, now, how to ebb and flow. I learned it from the water.
This actually happened.
After a long day of panels at last month’s Pop Conference, the critic kittens continued their discussion of Prince and urbanity over numerous fish tacos.
What are Bon Iver and James Blake doing in Fall Creek? This might be the most absurd/best thing we’ve ever posted on Gimme Noise.
This is, like, the whole entire internet of 2011 summarized in one GIF.
Blast from the past. More pics on my Facebook.
Getting ready for the Ike Reilly show at First Avenue tonight, which marks the 10 year anniversary of the first time I saw live music at a bar, first time I met Jim, first time I got kicked in the teeth by rock ‘n’ roll. It’s all more than words can describe and it’s all been said already. I think I’ll just have some Jameson on the rocks and throw myself in.
