An Imperfect Metaphor

There is a commonly held belief that there is a link between creativity and mental illness. Even more specifically, there's something called the Sylvia Plath effect suggesting a correlation between poets and suicide. The romanticization of depression: a lovely, sad, quiet girl who dies by her own delicate hands.

Fuck that. Depression sucks. It isn't lovely. It is an ugly, crippling, all-consuming emptiness that steals the color from your life. Suicide is heartbreaking and the statistics around it are staggering, especially among certain groups. Depression is a monster, and it lies.

For me, anyway. To me, anyway.

I can't write when I am busy wanting to die. I sit and I try. The words don't come. I sit and I type and I type. Nothing. I'm not waiting for some writerly lightning strike (I can hear advice echoing in my head now ... ), just hoping for something other than "I'm sad, I'm sad, I'm sad," to find its way out of my mind and through my fingertips.

There's a story about a knot. Gordian's knot. One with no visible ends, no easy access. A puzzle with no solution, hooking an old wagon to an old pole. Until Alexander comes along -- who, just like everyone else, cannot simply untie this knot. So he does what no one else has thought to do: he slices it in two with his sword and he becomes king.

But you can't do that if you want to survive depression. Anxiety. All of these invisible illnesses that rage and quake within our hearts. The Gordian knot of clinical depression cannot be cut in half. The Alexander way does exist. But, well, like I said -- I'm talking about coping, living through it, learning, healing, surviving.

You can only pluck here and pull there. Try something new. Meditate. Work on mindfulness. Eat better. Exercise. Take medicine. Go to therapy.

This metaphor isn't quite right, because most days, there is an eclipse of hope.

It's not quite right.

Yet, in "not quite right" there remains a tiny sliver of right.

There are days. There are days I twist and tug and yank and struggle and bite and weep over this knot. There are days when I get rope burn from trying so, so hard to unravel it. My mind works to untie this knot, for days, for weeks, for months. Maybe I will be working to untie it for the rest of my life.

It's not quite right but it is the best I can do to describe what it feels like to have depression, when chemicals in my brain shoot like stuttering fireworks. They're not quite right, either.

There are those who have told me to my face that I don't deserve to be depressed. That my life is great. And there's a kernel of truth, you know? I have lots of great things in my life. I feel joy, I can give love and am given love freely. I am smart. I am skilled in certain things. I have passions and ambitions and family and cats. I have an eclipse of hope. Some days there is even sun.

But when this condition I have -- this depression -- creeps in like an unearthly, choking fog? All I can do is try to untie the knot.

And that's the best I can do.