The Furious Spinner

The following is a peek at depression. I tried to lay out the progress of it, the details. After I finished this essay, I took out some of the anecdotes because they seemed too personal and detailed, but then Mario said they showed how the seemingly trivial can become magnified when you're depressed. So I put them back in. See what you think. By the way, after Mario read this piece he said he hadn't noticed I was depressed. He said, "I knew you weren't on your game last night, but I just thought you'd had a tiring day." Also, for those who are new to this weblog I wanted to reiterate that Linda has given me permission to write about her and use her name.

How did I know that someday—. . . somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again? —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I feel my old friend descending like that bell jar Plath was so familiar with. It feels comfortable, fuzzy, and terrifying. Grab your surfboard, honey; this is gonna be quite a ride. Oooooeeeeeeee! Ain't we havin' fun!

Since I've talked about my familia's rough ride with depression before, I'll document this bout here, in the hopes that it will be of assistance to someone somewhere.

Last night I dreamed I was sleeping and I got up to go to the bathroom, in the dark as usual. I tried to push the bathroom door open but something blocked it. I knew it was a body, which meant someone else—some murderer—was in the house. I went back to bed terrified. Then I awakened terrified. Since everything was like it had been in my dream, I was momentarily disoriented. Was I sleeping or awake? I wanted to close and lock the bedroom door, but I knew that would make it worse. Trembling, I got up and went to the bathroom. Fortunately, the door was open. Still terrified, I went back to bed and fell to sleep. Dreamed my house was built quite precariously on a hill. As I was inside sleeping, it began to slip down the hill. Finally I noticed and stepped outside. I pulled the house from the brink, from the water, just in time.

Perhaps my nightmares are a form of self-abuse? Self-inflicted injury? How creative, darlin'.

Then I got up and knew I had a visitor. No, I hadn't started bleeding again. Depression was wrapping me up in its embrace. I'm not being melodramatic: that is what it feels like. And it's a relief. Oh, I knew this was coming. I was feeling so bad and didn't know how to cope with it and here you are. You'll wipe out those feelings. Thank you, thank you. You'll acknowledge what we all know: that I'm a worthless piece of shit but you love me. You'll never leave me.

I've learned over the years not to fight it at first. Just go with it. If I feel like curling up on the couch, then I curl up on the couch. I don't feel emotions and I don't press that. I feel bad. I feel sad. But mostly I feel like a zombie. I don't feel normal. But I also don't engage the Depression. I won't drop into that "I'm a piece of shit" mode. I'll allow myself to think it/say it once, and then I work secretly (while in Depression's embrace) to protect myself: I send my inner daycare to the shelter until this is over.

I should have guessed something was up when I wanted to stop writing FS. Then when I saw those documentaries about women being abused last week, I couldn't seem to snap out of how sad I felt about it. For one thing, if a person isn't a bit depressed about those kinds of things, they aren't very empathetic, are they? They aren’t really paying attention?

Then I spent all those days running around doing things for Linda and I wasn't taking care of myself physically. I know better. If one is feeling inadequate to a task, it really doesn't help matters to neglect oneself. Mostly I wasn't giving myself time to decompress each day. As with most people, once I am stressed and I am not doing enough to alleviate the stress, little things begin to bother me—or things begin to hurt me which ordinarily I could laugh off.

For instance when I dropped off the soup yesterday and was leaving Linda a note, I saw my name on a piece of paper on the table. I thought it was a note left for me, so I started reading it. It was an apology to her daughter for something I did—I didn’t really understand what I had done because I couldn’t read her handwriting and I didn’t think I should try to figure it out since it wasn’t meant for me. I left the house. I felt as though I had been slapped. She hadn’t really heard me about her eating; she had just tolerated me and then later apologized to her daughter about me. I should have kept my mouth shut. I had offered to do her laundry and instead she was having someone else who is in her eighties and has her own health problems do it. I wasn't good enough? That felt like a slap too.

My father used to slap me across the face, and I still feel its sting—all these years later. I’m not angry about it any more, and he doesn’t even remember doing it, but my body remembers. I was most often slapped when I was being most myself: expressing my opinion, arguing with him, not behaving as a good little daughter was supposed to behave. Smack! I have since learned that slapping a child on the face is one of the worst places to hit her because it's the heart, so to speak, of who we are: it's our public identity. So every time I feel the most like myself, I fully expect to be slapped down.

Who makes you feel the way I make you feel. Who loves you and knows you the way I do. Who touches you and holds you quite like I do.

Ahhh, Depression’s siren song.

I went home and Mario and I headed for Portland. I felt myself sinking, sinking, sinking fast.

Throw her a life preserver, friends. She's going down fast. Not the candy lifesavers, you twits. She needs something real, man, real.

I started thinking about how I fail all my friends who really need me. Look at Bill. Years before he died from complications from AIDS, he wanted to visit us with one of his friends. I'll call her Candy. She had been recently diagnosed with HIV after being gangbanged. Bill and Candy did a lot of drinking, drugging, and whoring together. I had just quit my job due to illness. I could barely walk around my own house, and I didn't think I could take Candy.

Mario told Bill he was welcome but not Candy. He had been my best friend since we attended Clarion together in 1980—he had spent our honeymoon with us and had visited us nearly every year since then—but after that he dropped out of our lives after that. And I hardly noticed. I hadn't liked the direction his life had taken once he and Candy had become friends. Finally several years later, I called him and asked him where the hell he'd been. "I almost died of AIDS," he said, "but I figured if you couldn't take Candy being at your house, you wouldn't want me around, you wouldn't be able to take the news of my diagnosis." I said, "What the hell are you talking about? I didn't want Candy around because she was obnoxious not because she was sick. And you're family. Of course I want you around." We connected again, but it was never the same. Sometimes he called me drunk or drugged out or just jazzed from some new medication and I had a difficult time listening to and engaging with him. He called a few weeks before he died, and I forgot to call him back. Then he was gone. I had failed him, too. I was such a judgmental little twit.

By the time we picked up our poet friend, I could barely talk I was so distraught. The bell jar had descended—the zombie was reborn. I tried to pay attention as the Poet and Mario talked while we continued on to Powell's. I wanted to really be with them. I love the Poet very much and listened while he briefly mentioned he had anemia from the chemo and what that entailed. He was upbeat as he showed us his newest poetry book. His one room apartment is so hot he walks down to the Fred Meyer's and sits on a bench inside to read and write until the day cools off.

When we got to Powell's I let the boys go upstairs without me, and I tried to stay away from them as long as possible, so I didn’t pollute them with my zombie presence. Finally I went up and sat next to my buddy, whom I've known for 25 years. I felt like I was inside this shell screaming, "Let me out so I can talk with my friend!!!!" But I sat next to him quietly. He was doing a review of Lisa See's book, so he had already read it. He talked to me about foot binding. The women with bound feet didn't need to work—it was status symbol for their husbands. It was analogous, he said, to growing long fingernails because you couldn't work with long nails. "If you cut off your fingernails you still have your fingers," I said, finding my voice. "Having your feet bound is more analogous to cutting off your hands." I could hear the anger in my voice and the Poet looked at me quizzically. He's a Westerner and looks at the world from a more neutral viewpoint than I do. "I know they say we shouldn't judge other cultures," I said, "but there are some things that are just plan wrong. And this was just plain wrong."

Lisa See came and began talking about her book. She's Chinese American and she looks like a tall thin Irish woman. I wondered what it was like to look so different from your family. Did she feel as though she had to walk around with photographs of her parents and grandparents and say, "See, I'm really one of you."

As she talked about the foot binding, I grew more and more uncomfortable. (You know about foot binding, right? The mother of a girl pulled the toes—I think the four smaller toes—beneath the foot and then bound up the foot. The girl was forced to walk like this day in and day out until her toes broke. Then she had to walk some more. They rewrapped the feet every four days, pulling the toes and then part of the foot more and more under the foot. The ideal was to have a foot about the size of the big toe. The poet said one out of four girls with foot binding died from blood poisoning. This practice went on for 1,000 years.) Just one more mother-fucking thing that women had to tolerate—that women actually did to one another. Jesus H. Christ. (If you've ever seen actual photographs of these feet, you know how revolting it looks.) See said that the men found these tiny feet erotic. I wanted to stand up and scream. "What kind of sick fuck would find this kind of mutilation erotic?" I felt even worse when she started taking questions. One woman said that the mothers did it to their daughters because then their daughters would have more advantages; it was a beneficial thing to do. I wanted to puke. You stupid fuck. That's like saying beating a slave so that he was more obedient was a good thing because he'd be sold to a "better" master.

See read from her book, and it was quite beautiful. Afterward, we drove to the food coop to shop before taking the poet home. My old friend kept trying to engage me in conversation, and I felt the bell jar lifting. As we waited at the checkout, he told me about haibun, which is a short essay explained by a haiku at the end. I was glad to have his company. The male checkers here always treat me like shit. They don't respond to me when I ask a question, they never look me in the eye. They treat me like I am nothing. When I'm feeling good, I don't care, but when I'm a bit fragile, it's hard to take. (Some of the guys at Trilogy, the video store down the block from the coop, are the same way.) They're all in their mid to late twenties. I figure they see me as this middle-aged vanilla woman who is worth nothing. That's the way they view woman. If they don't want to fuck 'em, they won't even look at 'em. Look me in the eyes, you motherfucker. I am a human being. Do you like being treated like shit? Well, neither do I. It cost nuthin' to be kind. Why do I tolerate it? I can be a whore just like anyone else: our grocery bill is cheaper when we shop here, and the women checkers are kind. Tonight, I could see the male checker was listening to the Poet. He even said something to him. I wanted to hit the checker. I swear I almost threw something at him. "Oh, he is worth talking to, but I'm not?"

Couldn't wait to get home. Once there, I took a bath. It suddenly occurred to me that I was having such a difficult time because this was all reminding me of when I visited my family right after 9/11 when my father was ill. It was one of the worst weeks of my life. I felt absolutely shredded. I went to their home and offered to do whatever they needed, and they didn't want my help, and it became clear they didn't want me anywhere near them. My parents love me, but they don't like me. This dislike became excruciatingly clear during this visit. When I finally got back to Washington, I wrote a novel about the experience—one of the very few times I've fictionalized any part of my life (as I've mentioned before).

I felt useless during that visit. I tried to do the dishes so they wouldn't have to. Had Mario vacuum so they wouldn't have to. Tried to cook. Everything I did bothered them. I had sent my father a rose quartz heart when he first got sick, and told him I was thinking of him. I loved that rose quartz heart; it was very special to me. One day during the visit, I was looking for tape and I opened the junk drawer: that rose quartz heart was nestled in amongst all the junk. I stared at it, my hand on the drawer. It seemed like such a symbolic moment in my life. I silently shut the junk drawer and continued looking for tape.

Anyway, I won't bore you with any more gruesome details of that trip. Last night I realized I was blending my experiences with my father with my experiences with Linda. Neither one of them would allow me to help them—they didn’t mean anything by it, but there is was. My body was remembering my trip to my parents and triggering symptoms, including depression.

I fell to sleep on the couch after eating too much, with the TV on. Geez. That hadn't happened in years...maybe ever. I awakened sick and stumbled upstairs and went to sleep again. That was when the nightmares found me.

In the morning, Depression waited for me. I forced myself to do my morning routine. I went outside and talked to the elements and directions. I checked out the pumpkins (or the nonexistent pumpkins) and said hello to the damselflies. In the house again, I started the laundry. I told Mario I felt a bout of depression coming on. I saw the fear in his eyes. I hugged him and said, “It’ll be all right. It won’t stay.” After he left, I turned on some music and danced around the living room a bit, crying. Then I drove to Linda’s and left some fliers we had made for her. (She wasn’t home.)

I saw Mario on his break. I held his hand, felt his skin next to my skin, as we walked around town. After I left him, I stopped at the Old Oak. I did a little ceremony for my friend Kevin in Hawaii. Then I asked the Old Oak for some help for me too.

Home again. I kept writing this post. Adding and then deleting some hurtful events in my past. I could feel the oak beneath my hand still—more than I felt the stings of those slaps. Who gives a shit about some cashier I don’t care about. It was just nice seeing the Poet. Linda has never meant to hurt me, and I've always known that. For now, I need to sleep and relax. As for Mr. Dee, he needs to hit the road.

Thanks for listening. It is a kindness I appreciate. 3 comments

3 Comments:

What, you mean you haven't had surgery to cut off a portion of your toes so that you can wear those Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choo shoes?!

How unfashionable you are! ;-)

See Ellen Goodman's article about that:

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=16125

By  Anonymous, at 3:37 PM  

The courage it takes for sharing this publicly is no small thing.

As a fellow frequent visitor to the bell jar myself, I remind you to remember that it does get better. This too shall pass. This is hard to remember in the moment but that is when it is imperative to challenge the irrational perceptions of your befuddled mind.

Seems like you were doing a pretty good job of that in this exercise. Wobble on and if you fall, don't roll over, reach up and grab a friend's hand. For that which you think you want the most in these times--isolation--is the most dangerous place to be.

Do take care of yourself

love joy peace

By  Joy Renee, at 4:48 AM  

Kali Ma! Tou-freaking-che. I'm going to go kiss that Old Oak.
Depression? You've got a sword woman.

By  VQ, at 12:18 AM  

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