Pressed and Depressed

We talk about depression in the psychological sense, but never in the etymological sense. Depress. To push down. To press lower. To make drop or sink. The definition of the word does more to describe the feeling than a laundry list of symptoms you found online. On good days, you feel like a normal human scurrying about your daily tasks, wondering where the weight gain or weight loss came from, wishing you still had energy and scrolling Amazon for vitamins that will help you sleep well. Of course, you won’t actually finish any of those thoughts or remember what your tasks were because your memory and concentration are as useless as a…thing that’s useless. See, I can’t even come up with a witty quip to cap a description of depression. Because of depression.

Depress. Press down. Pressure. Down. This is what it feels like on bad days. Depression is not mental in the sense that it’s only in your mind. It’s physical. It reaches into every system. Muscular. Nervous. Digestive. Respiratory. For me, unfortunately, endocrine. Depression is physical. You feel like the sky split and the clouds parted and the hand of god reached down, his mighty thumb extended, and casually, absentmindedly, crushed you like a bug.

But humans are nothing if not adaptive. That’s sorta our thing. We adapt to the New Normal™ and we get up and go to the Home Depot for mulch and we grocery shop with sound cancelling headphones to avoid human contact and we drag ourselves to work and muddle through tasks and eat mindlessly and stare at our phones, always studiously ignoring the approaching Thumb Of God for his daily bug squashing ritual. You don’t know what others are going through. They may be good at hiding the emptiness and hopelessness they feel. They may wear their anxiety and sadness on their guileless face. They may mask their withdrawal from society with anger, their retreat looking for all the world like you leaving them. They may focus their emotions on a task. Or on a victim. Or on good ol’ self-loathing. They will smile when a situation calls for smiling, but watch the eyes. The eyes don’t smile.

Grief and Depression are fraternal twins. They may look alike, but they’re not identical, and they’re often never far from each other. For whatever reason, our culture is bereft of tools and systems to deal with depression and grief. Perhaps it’s our fetishization of youth and vitality. Perhaps it’s our pathological denial of death or loss. Perhaps it’s our cowboy hero mythos where the good guy always wins in the end, which is laughable because death always wins in the end. Always. There is no tale or fable or mythology where death doesn’t win in the end. There is no happily ever after. That’s just what we tell children to put them to sleep.

Depress. To press down. Pressure. When your deity of choice has their thumb on you, arm extending down from a crack in the sky disrupting air traffic and weather patterns, when they grind you through the crust of the world and press you into the mantle, past geological striations. When your broken body is being pressed into the earth, you will inevitably pass some vapid, smiling face of a well-meaning person who says something like, “well, have you tried yoga?” as you break through another layer of silicate rock. You’ll see a face slide by shouting, “Just pull yourself up! Tomorrow’s a new day! Smile!” and you’ll hear “What you need is a good workout plan.” and you’ll hear “My aunt sells Essential Oils and her depression was cured with lavender and caterpillar sperm” and you’ll hear “Well, he’s in a better place. You need to put everything in God’s Hands.” And you may even laugh at that as god’s thumb depresses you further through a ribbon of iron ore and into igneous sediment, the heat from the approaching magma making the lavender oils and expensive yoga pants melt onto your shattered body.

And as the heat of the center of the world increases to the point where everything glows with a pure white light, among the sounds of cracking magmatic rock, you may hear “This too shall pass” shouted by a passing face, contented with the certainty that they surely helped someone in need with their sage advice.

Sadness. Anxiety. Emptiness. Hopelessness. Nihilistic pessimism. Fatigue. Foggy. Hazy. Achy. Cramped. Alone. Memories and cognition slipping away. These are things that orbit around depression like planets around a star, locked in ellipses, spinning on their own axis and spinning around the sun of grief. And when that Almighty Thumb pauses it’s ceaseless pressing and you can catch your breath, your body numb and your mind exhausted, listen hard. You may catch the voice of god saying “Have you tried yoga? I hear that helps people with depression.”

Be kind. Be kind to yourself. You’re doing the best that you can under the circumstance. Under the pressure. Be kind to others. They may not know that their words and actions cause pain, even if they believe they’re doing you a favor. Even if they believe they’re saving you. Especially if they believe they’re saving you. Be kind, but don’t suffer fools. You’re suffering enough to deal with inanity. It’s okay to nod and walk away. You don’t owe anyone an explanation. Depression may be an evolutionary response, but it isn’t “mental.” It’s a full-body immersive experience. It’s a virtual reality. It’s kinetic. It’s real and physical. And no, it’s not fair that you have to deal with it, but here we are. Remember, “Happily ever after” is just something we tell children to let them drift off to sleep in comfort. So, instead, be kind to yourself. Give yourself patience and understanding. Treat yourself with the dignity and respect you bestow on strangers. Sometimes there’s no bright side to look on. Sometimes the only bright side is the incandescent glow of the electromagnetic heat of the center of the earth you were pressed into by the callous and calloused thumb of god and sometimes there’s no lesson to be learned other than life isn’t fair. That’s not a silver lining you see. It’s the Holy Thumbnail of the divine hand coming back for another depressing press. And no, it’s not fair, but only children’s books promise a happily ever after. It’s on us to spread the kindness and empathy that isn’t inherent in existence. Sometimes it takes looking up through the strata of the world from the hole you were pressed down into that you can see how fragile and unstructured this all is. Sometimes the distance you need for perspective is the distance back to the surface.

Now get to work. It’s a long climb out of that hole. And those yoga pants are flammable.