Not Me
I feel physically sick. My head aches. I have no appetite for the shrimp pasta for dinner tonight. I’ve been on the verge of tears all day. I picked up my 6-year-old son from school and he asked me if he could make a bomb out of Lego at the robot camp he’s going to this summer. I calmly explained why he couldn’t make anything that resembled a bomb or was called a bomb. He got mad at me and said, “You’re not me! I get to name it whatever I want!”
Depression manifests itself in different ways for different people. For me, it’s like being held down by something really heavy, that I can’t get out from underneath of, no matter how hard I try. Darkness settles in around me and I can’t see beyond it. My face goes expressionless. I want to cry, but I cannot. You know how doctors take a tongue depressor and stick it in your mouth and hold down your tongue so they can see your throat? They hold down your tongue and you can’t move it and that’s what depression is like for me. I can’t move. I become depression and depression becomes me. My name is no longer Rachel for I have disappeared into the darkness. I’m not me.
All I want to do now is curl up in bed, go to sleep, and not get up again. I think about the different ways I could go. I think about pills. I’ve tried that before. I think about sharp objects. I think about swerving my car off the road. I think about stepping into oncoming traffic. Then I think about my sweet son and what he would do without his mama. And I stop myself.
I never know when it’s going to come over me. The change of seasons is usually a good indicator, but winter is just plain hard. I long for the warm summer months, especially last summer. Boundless energy and creativity. Working long hours for a purpose, a goal. Needing less sleep. Feeling all the range of emotions. I milk those times for all they are worth, knowing that they won’t last. What goes up must come down.
These days, I survive on music.
“Without music I should wish to die,” the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in a 1920 letter to a friend.
I read that quote in a recent Brainpickings newsletter by Maria Popova. Popova then goes on to relay Dr. Oliver Sacks’ experience with surviving a harrowing event through the power of music.
Dr. Sacks writes:
“It was (and remains) a matter of amazement to me that this charming, trifling piece of music should have had such a profound and, as it turned out, decisive effect on me. From the moment the tape started, from the first bars of the Concerto, something happened, something of the sort I had been panting and thirsting for, something that I had been seeking more and more frenziedly with each passing day, but which had eluded me. Suddenly, wonderfully, I was moved by the music. The music seemed passionately, wonderfully, quiveringly alive — and conveyed to me a sweet feeling of life. I felt, with the first bars of the music, a hope and an intimation that life would return to my leg — that it would be stirred, and stir, with original movement, and recollect or recreate its forgotten motor melody. I felt, in those first heavenly bars of music, as if the animating and creative principle of the whole world was revealed, that life itself was music, or consubstantial with music; that our living moving flesh, itself, was “solid” music — music made fleshy, substantial, corporeal.
[…]
The sense of hopelessness, of interminable darkness, lifted… A sense of renewal grew upon me.”
When depression hits me, I need to fight it and say, “You’re not me! I get to name it whatever I want!” And detonate the bomb of music within to destroy the darkness. To explode into light and fire and spark. To sing once more and bring to life the notes on the page until the chorus upholds me and the music lifts me out of the abyss.
I follow the writer Amber Sparks on Twitter and her tweet today caught my eye. “You have five minutes until the world ends and you can put anything on speaker or headphones. What do you want to go out listening to? Think fast.”
I don’t even have to think about it. This song, ever since I was a teenager, is THE song: Tear in Your Hand by Tori Amos.
Tonight I’m going to turn out the lights, shut my eyes, and listen to the music. It’s all I can do right now.