a preface of sorts
Before I invite you into my head, I must preface the prose with a more direct conversation about its subject. It isn’t an easy one to discuss at all. In any space. Especially within certain societies and communities — my image-conscious one, for instance. No matter how educated, aware, open-minded, empathetic, or progressive we profess to be, when the chips fall everyone runs for cover — spilling all variety of tea. But isn’t that the nature of depression?1
Unease?
When I searched for its etymology, I veered in multiple directions that led to the same road — “away from” someone or something. From the Latin prefix “de” to the French and English roots “press” “lower” “subjugate,” the modern-day evolution of “depression” is practically poetic. There’s certainly nothing easy about being pushed down or spirited away from someone or something — especially when that someone is you and that something, your life.
But I’ve long reasoned that depression is a very human and normal response to harrowing life experiences. Exhibiting anything less, I think, is unnatural. It makes me question a person’s sanity. And humanity.
When not dismissed as theatrics or plain madness, too often I’ve heard the depressive mentation being chalked up to predisposition — “can’t help it, runs in the family, just the way they are/I am.”
Though I’ve used predisposition to explain my own struggles before, I now see the term as a misnomer. A red herring to shift the focus from what actually creates the trauma, and our families’/communities’ irresponsibility towards trauma’s subjects. Through the usual suspects — abandonment, blame and shame, willful ignorance.
(Barring, obviously, individual ownership, responsibility, and accountability for our own behaviors and patterns in adulthood.)
I know genetics plays a role in our emotional and mental responses to difficult events. But I’m hard-pressed to accept that it alone can be faulted for the effect trauma has on any human being.
Because no one is ever born depressed.
Our mental health (a term I now find suspect for all its baggage) is a pretty direct result of nurture and nature. Or nature and nurture. Whichever comes first. There’s a reason some people experience tough things and come out to the other side in tact. I’d wager environment (lack of protection/security), company (lack of support/trust), upbringing (lack of foundation/guidance), consequent life track, and sometimes even plain luck — all that external stimuli — have as much input as belief systems, worldviews, choice and will. Along with that gnarly (check me out) deoxyribonucleic acid sequence that shapes us. As much as we love to pass the buck, predisposition — another layer in the coping mechanism of a painful aftermath — doesn’t get to be society’s hall pass for ignorance or irreverence.
What I’ve found most compelling in all my readings — considering the science, bare observation, and direct experience — is that childhood trauma is possibly the greatest offender. The original sin, if you will.
It does two extremely damaging things to a growing mind, which lead to the emotional and mental fatigue we call “depression.”
First, it sets us up way too early in life to handle what we aren’t equipped for in childhood. And second, it creates cause/effect patterns in thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that go haywire with triggers. Contextualize that into an ill-informed and unaware society, and what a spectacle it makes. More pressingly, what an added injustice and disservice to the once-traumatized child who remains locked in the adult shell — fragile, hollow, susceptible. And forever running to or away from the same things.
(I could add — also incredibly resilient, compassionate, empathetic, deep-thinking, and often artistic. But if you’re a substack reader, you already know your superheroes.)
All of this may sound like conjecture if not for the hard science behind it (that’s so fascinating in its evidence). Studies already confirm that negative life-altering events and experiences in childhood actively disrupt the child’s physiological, psychological, and social-emotional trajectory before the full bloom.2 The brain structure and function itself changes — creating different neural pathways than intended, and weakening and strengthening parts of itself in correlation with the trauma.3 Think along the lines of emotional regulation and survival instinct. The wires quite literally get crossed.4 And the child is hardwired in his/her views, approaches, and responses to life and relationships — which follows the child into adulthood where he/she remains caught in the same cycles of thoughts, emotions, and behavior. None of which resolves the mental, emotional, and possibly physical wreckage left behind.
So why then do we expect anything less than a depressed state of being in those who’ve endured so much for so long? Why is society so prickly about the idea of depression? As if it were an anomaly left to “negative” folk (another decidedly daft term I’m want to loathe). Or worse, weaker than those whose ability to walk the dark and empty road has never been tried or tested. Isn’t being depressed in the face of such trials not the most normal effect of, sometimes, unspeakable cause?
I could wax on about what happens to a child’s brain when it encounters frightening events like neglect, abuse, mistreatment, death, natural disasters, war, poverty, illness, accidents, displacement, and such. Or trauma’s impact on the growing child’s growing (body and) mind, fraught with fear and question. Or what an undertaking it is to shake off in adulthood the monsters that have since childhood followed so closely behind. But I’ll return to it in subsequent pieces.
(And if this conversation bores you, brace yourself. There’s more coming.)
But why lead with this “doom and gloom” subject upon re-entering The ‘Stack — a place where readers may want to just escape in fissures of time?
Because it’s what kept me away from it in the first place.
I struggled to write and publish or post for months not because I didn’t want to or couldn’t nor because I was negative or weak or lazy or inept — but because I stopped believing my words carried drive or meaning anymore. So overpowered was I by the magnitude of this relentless grief — that has been so very long in the making. I couldn’t see the point in anything anymore. Especially life. Mine particularly.
As I spiraled into my head, finding only devastation and ruin, it became harder to exist outside it. All attempts to write yielded content that felt much too personal to publicize. Making it virtually impossible to eventually communicate. For the record, even the most literary of writers — the ones who feel obligated to bleed all over the page in public — keep some things to themselves. I knew it was bad when friends began checking in. Especially when I stopped using the safe spaces they created for my cursory word dumps. But my writing, I rationalized, couldn’t simply serve as a conveyor belt for heavy emotions — circling aimlessly with no reason nor claimant. Offering little more than empty consumption or emotional validation. There had to be a point to it all — my raison d’être.
So I decided to take an official break from the public writing life.
Then I turned inward and succumbed to my inner gremlins. In private.
The instinct to survive in all living things, however, is truly a marvel. It’s almost involuntary. No matter how much we want to sink sometimes, our bodies and minds refuse to acquiesce. I admit, the absurdity of not wanting to exist has entered my mind too. Only to meet its own rather timely demise — being no match for my critical thinking muscles. As grim as it sounds, I sometimes wonder if people who carry out their ideations experience nth hour regrets as their minds and bodies resist the pull of madness. What an impossible quandary — to think of oneself being stuck in a run-on sentence with no breaks and no end — and dangerous paradox.
Though I was nowhere near gestating such possibilities, I let myself surrender to whatever I felt. When I suddenly gasped for breath after an entire summer, I realized I’d been under too long. It was time to swim back up. And fill my lungs with something cooler, crisper, cleaner, and crystalline again. My personal brand of oxygen — writing.
Of course when I faced the page, I inevitably wavered. I had nothing to report back. Nothing had really changed. All the problems that needed solving weren’t just stacked in the same intractable position, they’d somehow grown indiscriminately larger. My body recoiled. My brain drew blanks. But just as I closed my iPad, I heard my own voice — unmistakable, steady, controlled, confident, so acutely self-aware. And oh-so-loud.
Write… now. Stupid.
That’s all it took.
I flipped through the rotary of possibilities in my mind — each subject looming over the next. I looked around and down to the ratty state of my affairs — which didn’t look too hot. I took in the disproportionally drawn string of my favored black pajamas — with one end hanging over the top of my comforter, the other disappearing into the band. Then without apology or explanation, shame or regret, any pressing need for validation, (mock) sympathy, or much ado, after months of probing syndromes with wily imposters, I wrote my first public line.
“I sit on my bed in my black drawstring pajamas.”
For what it’s worth, as the air rushed back into me, I saw through the sum of my afflictions, the insatiable sadness, and this hungering pain, a strange and incurable inclination in me — to drift as far down to the rocky bottom as I could without actually drowning. And retrieve, on my own, what I think will always remain the point of it all — my ability to write with purpose. A thing that cannot push me away or lower or subjugate me in any way. A thing that has always been and will remain irrefutably mine.
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