If you're a woman in her mid-20s who's being medicated for depression -- in other words, if you're in a situation like mine -- you've probably wondered about the possibility of a healthy, drug-free pregnancy.
You'll wonder even more after reading Lauren Slater's essay, "Noontime," from Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression. It's one of the most harrowing, precise accounts of depression I've read in a long, long time.
I recommend buying Unholy Ghosts and reading the essay in its entirity, but an abridged version of "Noontime" is also available online, here.
A short excerpt:
Because I am a psychologist, I know all the signs. Disturbed sleep. Disturbed appetite. Neurovegetative symptoms. Psychomotor retardation. It is difficult to move; my limbs say no. I stand at the stop of the stairs, holding with one hand the newel post, looking down the slant and considering. I spend a long time weighing the pros and cons of staying put, or descending. The decision feels tricky and enormous.All the signs above are symptoms of depression. They are also, however, symptoms of pregnancy, so maybe I'm not depressed. Maybe I'm just pregnant. Maybe to be pregnant is to be depressed. Then would the converse also be true, that to be depressed is to be pregnant? Of course not!... My brain swims in my head, the questions are overwhelming, my heart flaps.
I make a decision. I get to the bottom of the stairs. Musashi [my dog] comes over and licks my knee. He keeps licking and licking my knee in one specific spot and at last I see why; I have a skinned knee, with blood and all, I don't know how this happened. Perhaps I fell down the stairs, although I highly doubt it. In any case, the hows do not matter, only the whys. Why Musashi licks my knee is because there's blood on it, I have an answer. I have an answer! His tongue looks pretty, a flickering red, but I know it's crawling with bacteria, that I should push him away from the cut, but I don't. I cannot find it in myself to care.
What I find in myself is a fatigue that flees during the night so I am wide-awake and blinking, and descends during the day, without warning, each nap a small delectable death. I nap at all the wrong times, in staff meetings, on the phone with a social worker, please God not with a patient, of course I am with a patient, she being me, napping and then jerked away, my heart's rhythm all wrong. "What's wrong?" Benjamin says each evening when he comes home from work. I say, "It's back, depression's a real mental illness you know," and he nods. He doesn't know. He brings me food, all of it very unappealing, especially the texture of toast. He brings me sliced tomatoes and I am nauseated by the way they look, like fresh peeled scabs on a white platter.
From The New Yorker:
The reputed existence of a “suicide poem” has lurked in the background of Lincoln scholarship since shortly after the President’s death, in 1865, when his close friend Joshua Speed mentioned it to Lincoln’s law partner and biographer William Herndon. At least twice, at the ages of twenty-six and thirty-one, Lincoln had expressed thoughts of suicide seriously enough to alarm his friends. Speed was certain that Lincoln had published the poem in [the Sangamo Journal], but he wasn’t sure about the date.But, finally, it seems the poem has been found. The NYer comments,
The poem is written in the voice of a tortured, lonely soul who comes to the bank of the Sangamon River:Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,Even if one takes into account the appetite for melodrama in Lincoln’s day, the last two stanzas of the poem are startling:
And this the place to do it:
This heart I’ll rush a dagger through
Though I in hell should rue it!Sweet steel! Come forth from out your sheath,
And glist’ning, speak your powers;
Rip up the organs of my breath,
And draw my blood in showers!
I strike! It quivers in that heart
Which drives me to this end;
I draw and kiss the bloody dart,
My last—my only friend!
I've mentioned on my other blog that when I'm depressed, my "comfort reads" become books about depression. Identification might be the only pleasure my depression can't obstruct, and while that might make others suspicious of it -- as depression's reinforcement or, worse, a trusted double-agent -- I tend to take any pleasures I can when I'm feeling so-not-well.
Here's a passage I recently liked from Chase Twichell's essay, "Toys in the Attic: An Ars Poetica Under the Influence," from Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression. Ideally, I'd like this blog to do something similar to what Twichell does in her brief discussion of antidepressants' effects on writing: use depression to reconsider language, and use language to resist depression.
In my mid-thirties, which happens to be the average age of onset for clinical depression, I began shooting in the dark, as my doctor put it: searching through trial and error for a drug that would cure what ailed me with as few side effects as possible. Some of them make you dream, every night, the kind of dream you hate to wake from, rich and important feeling. Others keep you skittering along the surface of sleep as if a car alarm were going off somewhere in the neighborhood, but not on your street. Some make you black out if you stand up too fast, or glue your tongue to the roof of your mouth. One cures migraines, another exacerbates them. All of them affect the way in which the brain processes language. It's not something a person uninterested in words might notice, except for maybe a bit of tip-of-the tongue syndrome, but to me it's obvious that my relation to language has been subtly affected. Before the long parade of drugs, words were like water -- all I had to do was dip my mind and it would come up brimming with new excitements. I always thought of this ability as a "gift," a part of my being. Now the river of words flows around me as it always has, but I write as a translator trespassing outside the boundaries of my original language, fluent but no longer a native speaker. It's hard to explain. It feels like a new part of my brain has learned language, and the old part has atrophied. Maybe this sensation is just a physical metaphor for what the antidepressants do, I don't know, but I've come to see that this death of imaginary self (along with its language) is not necessarily a hindrance to my work, though it took me years to stop trying to call my "gift" back from its grave. Its loss functions exactly as form does in poetry: if the door's locked, try a window.
"Materials required [for reading Parker's poems]: A French cigarette, an ivory cigarette holder. Cloche optional. … Read in a sarcastic contralto, with eyebrows arched, rolling the r’s in Balkan fashion."
Symptom Recital.
I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men....
I'm due to fall in love again.