“She was finally acknowledging that what I was going through – what I had always gone through – was real.”
“Everyone’s depressed,” my mother said when I confided in her about the sickening dread and heavy lead in my legs that made even the thought of going for a walk unbearable. At 32, I was living in the ice-covered city of Buffalo, New York, surrounded by varying shades of gray, struggling through a gloomy English Ph.D. program. My bed had become my world, the only place where I could slip into the temporary escape of sleep.
“No, Mom,” I said. “I don’t believe that everyone is depressed.”
I had seen evidence of this during a winter street fair: a man wearing a front holster with a baby snuggled close to his heart, the baby dressed in a white snowsuit like a winter starfish, and the way the man lovingly cradled and kissed the top of the baby’s head. In that moment, on that day, in that world, it was clear to me that the man was truly happy. He was content with his life.
“They’re depressed,” my mother insisted. “They just hide it.”
My mother, a high-strung Irish Bostonian, firmly believed that life’s troubles should be endured without complaint. She had survived a bitter childhood where her stepfather would visit her room at night, and when she told my grandmother, she was told: “You imagined it.” As an adult, my mother reasoned that it was nothing to dwell on.
But with me, she was softer. When I was feeling down as a child, she would pour me a cup of milky tea in a delicate china cup and encourage me to share my worries. The taste of her love would soothe me. However, even then, her instinct was to push aside feelings and move on. Nothing was ever as bad as it seemed, was it? Once tea time was over, it was expected that I would just get on with my life.
“I don’t want to believe that everyone is depressed,” I protested.
“Well, it’s the truth,” she insisted.
But I shook my head. Hope was like an amulet in my life, something I clung to in order to survive.
My troubles began during my college years at the University of Vermont. It hit me like the flu. One minute, I was trudging through the crisp snow to classes and chatting easily with friends. The next minute, I was lying in bed in the fetal position, unable to speak. I would sleep for 20 hours at a time, only getting up to raid my roommate’s stash of Cheetos and Ring Dings. My mother was so worried that she called the dean of my college and demanded that something be done. That’s when I began counseling.
The sorrow returned in my twenties as a constant low-grade haze of numbness. One day, my mother and I were sitting in a car, watching a sunset over Lake Champlain. I stared at the streaks of pink and gold as if they were trapped behind a sheet of glass.
“I’m sure it’s beautiful,” I said. “But I can’t feel it.”
She sipped her tea from a thermos. “You can choose to feel it,” she responded.
When I moved to Buffalo, it followed me. During the sunless days of trying to write my dissertation in a drafty apartment, a voice inside my head would berate me: You’re a failure, and you’ve always been a failure. You’re so fat and hideous. You’ll never be able to do it. You’ll be publicly humiliated if you even try.
These thoughts were like tiny scorpions, stinging my mind constantly. I would fantasize about opening up my skull and applying a soothing balm to my brain. With the lows came periods of extreme anxiety – a constant electric hum – warning me that something catastrophic was about to happen. Thoughts of death were always present in my mind. I would carefully consider my options, finding bleak solace in the planning.
But what about my mother?
“You are my everything,” she had told me when I was just three years old, and she repeated it so often that it became ingrained in me. As an only child, I understood that it was my duty to stay alive for her. I was meant to be the bearer of happiness.
“Maybe it’s just
