What Depression Makes Us Forget

Recently, I had the pleasure of joining a call with the wonderful, warm, generous and kind Rick Lewis, whose work on writing I’ve been quietly following for a couple of years. I first came across him pm a webinar where he was sharing how he’d built a thriving community of writers. I duly subscribed to his Substack and have been lurking ever since, captivated by his stories and the way he uses language to evoke feeling.

So when he announced a Q&A session for aspiring memoir writers, I was in.

I arrived with a fairly clear idea of the memoir I wanted to write.

I assumed it would revolve around depression.

After all, depression has been a focal point of both my life and my work for some time now.

My business, Ditch the Black Dog, was born from my desire to help people feel less alone in their mental health struggles and to offer hope that life can be different.

But somewhere during that call, everything changed.

Rick was talking about different ways of uncovering memories so that you can write about them. One of those ways is through listening to the stories of others.

As he demonstrated this by sharing some of his own childhood experiences, I did indeed find myself transported into my own past.

One of his stories involved young children throwing crab apples at each other in a battle

A game that started off being fun, but suddenly turned against him.

A desperate scramble up a tree to escape the missiles.

Rick’s father arrived on the scene and the relief Rick felt thinking his Dad would save him, yet for some unknown reason, he didn’t intervene.

I felt empathy for the child that Rick was, and at first I assumed his story would lead me back to the familiar territory of my own experiences of childhood bullying and abuse.

Growing up in an abusive household has meant years of therapy, counselling, and retelling painful stories.

Some stories I’ve repeated so many times that they exhaust me, almost bore me even, and I’ve become immune to watching my therapists struggle to hide their shock.

I’ve revisited old wounds so often that, if I’m honest, the thought of building an entire memoir around them had begun fill me with a heavy feeling in my gut.

But Rick’s crab apple story led me somewhere I wasn’t expecting to go.

Not back into the darkness, the trauma, or the pain….

But towards the parts of myself that had survived it.

Crab apples reminded me of walking home from school along Marchwood Road, a suburban avenue of houses with ornamental trees planted all the way along it, one every six feet or so. Most of the trees were flowering cherries, beautiful in early Spring when they were covered in the palest pink blossom. But one of the trees at the bottom of the hill, just as the avenue started to turn the corner, was a crab apple.

Like the cherries, it also blossomed beautifully, and then the frothy flowers would be blown away by the spring winds to be followed in the summer by the tiny pinky yellow fruits.

These little apples fascinated me.

I would greedily pick and eat them. They were so sour, but I loved them anyway.

I used to worry a little bit that somebody might come out and shout at me for picking these little apples, but I don’t think anybody actually cared. They didn’t belong to anyone. Nobody else was going to eat them, maybe cos they feared a tummy ache more than I did!

I recalled the memory of walking home in the golden summer light that danced through those trees.

Remembering that feeling of never wanting to get home, cos it was a miserable place. My walk would end up being quite meandering, and I’d make it last as long as I could in the hope that, by the time I did finally arrive, I’d be able to sneak into my bedroom to relative safety.

If I timed it right and got home whilst my mother was watching afternoon tv and before she started cooking dinner, it meant I wouldn’t encounter anyone. That was a good thing, because encountering people meant trouble, especially if they were in a bad mood.

And so I would linger and I would pick the crab apples, and I’d feel this real, deep sense of connection to nature through the act of harvesting and eating the fruit.

I remembered I used to do this with other trees, too. I loved harvesting acorns and the helicopter seeds of ash trees. Something about it made me feel happy.

It woke something up in my blood, and interestingly, I still love harvesting and gathering today, but I tend to do it with things I’ve grown myself.

But those tiny moments…

Harvesting the acorns…

Picking the crab apples off the tree, and eating them…

Spending hours in the woods with my dog….

Playing in the Loxley river where I imagined my hero Robin Hood had played years before…

Gathering stones that I thought were pretty…

Making dens in the bracken in the forest…

…these memories are pleasant. A glimmer of joy in the dark world I inhabited. Yet I am never asked about them. I never speak about them.

I’m used to being asked to relive horrible, traumatic events and to be totally honest, doing that has never felt good to me. Talking about these things over and over with therapists only seems to make me feel more depressed.

And that’s when I understood that I am TIRED.

Tired of talking about depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder in the way that I have been so far.

The common causes, the symptoms, the myriad ways that we can ease our pain a tiny bit. You can get that from any old mental health blog.

During that call with Rick and the other brilliant attendees, I realised I don’t want to spend the rest of my life revisiting and regurgitating dark times.

Not because the darkness wasn’t real.

Not because I want to bypass my feelings.

Not because it didn’t shape who I became.

But because it’s not my whole story.

My whole story also contains flowering cherries, golden summer evenings, sour crab apples, and a little girl finding moments of freedom wherever she could, with her faithful dog Zena by her side.

Perhaps that’s what I’ve been missing all these years.

Not another way to talk about depression.

But a way to talk about the things depression makes us forget.

I want to talk about the golden moments that remind us who we are beneath the depression, anxiety, fear, and self-doubt.

I want to remember the things that make life worth waking up for and build my days around them.

Because perhaps healing isn’t just about understanding or healing our wounds.

Perhaps it’s also about remembering what makes us want to live.

With love and magick always, ‘

Maria.

PS: Come and join me in the Black Dog Cafe if you need support. It’s safe, inclusive and no cost to you. I look forward to meeting you,