WHERE I AM HEALED AND SUFFER NO MORE

by Miko Veldkamp

A kind question from our Office Hours: You write engagingly about depression. How do you do that? Depression is brutally BORING to experience and hardly leaves one with much to report when in the grip of it, but when I read your descriptions of depression in fiction or nonfiction I feel engaged. Is there a secret to writing depression in a way that leaves readers with something to grasp?

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I didn’t start out being able to write about depression. For most of my early writing career I avoided anything to do with mental health, having grown up in a family and a community that really discouraged any understanding at a psychological level. People who were loca were abominated and I was desperate not to be one of them. Desperate not to be because I feared that I already was, given the bouts of severe depression I began to experience from sixth grade on — coinciding with my father’s abandonment and my brother’s cancer diagnosis and transferring into a very white, very competitive middle-school.

When I’m depressed, and I’m depressed a lot — by my nearest estimate I’ve lost two-thirds of my writing career to depression — I can’t so much as put together a single sentence of fiction. Depression for me is the end of words, of meaning.

I’ve always resonated with Andrew Solomon’s description: When you are depressed, the past and the future are absorbed entirely by the present, as in the world of a three-year-old. You can neither remember feeling better nor imagine that you will feel better. Being upset, even profoundly upset, is a temporal experience, whereas depression is atemporal. Depression means that you have no point of view.

And if I know anything about my craft, I know that you can’t write if you don’t have a point of view.

For me depression is not boring per se, though there are long bouts of listlessness and despondency. For me, depression is agony — purposelessness — despair.

Agony — purposelessness — despair without limit or pity.

When I’m depressed I contemplate suicide a lot, precisely because the pain triad is so all-consuming, because I’m convinced it will never end or improve. Solomon observes that The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge. The present tense of my depression feels less like knowledge and more like prophecy. We’re all the Kwisatz Haderach when we’re depressed — we believe we see the future, see the end beyond all doubt.

How many times has my depressive precognition led me to the roof of my house or to the edge of a train platform; how many times has my seemingly incontrovertible sense of an ending tried to will my feet to take two little steps. Just two.

Just two and all the pain will be over.

Fortunately, there is an invincible child within who up to now has refused the call of prophecy.

I would prefer not to.

In my early years when I would finally break free from depression I tried to avoid thinking about the abyss at all for fear that it would bring it back all the quicker. I wouldn’t write about it either for the very same reason. And so I would go on my merry way trying to write fiction until the ground would suddenly crack open under my feet and everything would go bye-bye again.

But I’ve now had enough therapy to know that avoidance brings only more suffering — and that the only way out is in.

These days I will write occasionally about my depression. Still not easy, but when I find myself returning mindfully to that hideous strength I try to have the perspective I lacked during the darkness. I try to have all the compassion and understanding and curiosity that the time of prophecy denied me. I try to have pity — Catholic pity — for my wounded haunted self and not judgment. I try not to view the months and years I lost to depression from the point of view of the banker or the foreman, from the point of view of the whip or the ambitious young writer who always wanted to publish a dozen books by the time he was 40. I try to look at it from the point of view of the survivor, of someone who is alive despite all the odds, someone who still has a chance to be of worth, of service, and is grateful for the opportunity.

Most specifically, I try to anchor my point of telling as far away from the depression and its prophetic impulse as I can. I don’t attempt “to tell” from within the depression — that hasn’t worked for me at all (perhaps because in my experience depression does not simply resist language but actively destroys it). I try to imagine that I’m writing these accounts at a moment in the soon-to-be where my heart is, if not full, at least at peace, where I am healed and suffer no more.

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