By Theresa Williams
A Journey in and out of Depression
I fell into depression in the summer of 2002. It started after I had surgery, and it lasted many months. My body healed, but my mind lagged behind. One day I told my husband Allen: “I’m so unhappy.” I’d never said that before.
"Touch of Fall" © Christopher Woods
I wasn’t down in the dumps. A dump might be smelly, the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart, but at least it’s on solid ground.
I was hurtling at high speed. Falling. My life was falling in around me. I was falling apart. We hear “fall” so often in this context that it’s lost its sense of peril. But as anyone who’s been there knows, falling is terrifying.
Depression was new to me. Melancholy, I’m used to. Lots of writers are melancholics. For us, all life’s tinged with sadness, and it’s just fine that way.
When I was nine, a favorite activity of mine was finding dead birds and burying them in graves with Popsicle crosses. As an adult, I’ve come to love the elegies of D. H. Lawrence. His 1929 poem “The Ship of Death,” one of my favorite poems of all, expresses a kind of sadness that’s nourishing:
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.”
Lawrence was sick and dying. He knew he was about to enter his last transformation and he was preparing himself for it:
We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.”
• • •
My depression had been hanging on since July and now it was Christmas Eve. Allen was driving me all over Northwest Ohio, trying to find an open store so I could buy a turkey for Christmas dinner. I had no turkey to feed my family.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I hadn’t even had the stamina to turn on a light in the evening. But I was surprised—sorely surprised. Sore in spirit, too. I was a failure, and everyone would know, come dinnertime.
One of the worst aspects of the depression was the sense of alienation, of being removed from your own self. Not only was I useless to my family, I was unable to write, since my writing is connected to my ability to plumb the depths of my emotions and experience, a descent worthy of Persephone’s.
My writing also depends on what I’ve come to think of as my gift to the world: my empathy for others. But depression robbed me of this, too. I’d completely lost my ability to connect with anyone or anything. All of this struck at the heart of my whole sense of who I was.
As our car purred along on snowy, nearly empty streets, I thought of the family in A Christmas Story going to a Chinese restaurant for Christmas dinner. “Deck the halls with boughs of horry,” the actors sang. I thought, We could do that. It’d be a new tradition: Chinese for Christmas. My family won’t mind. It’ll be something to laugh about.
But as Allen pulled into empty lot after empty lot, neither of us was laughing.
• • •
January 2003: the depression subsided, and I found solid ground again. It wasn’t sudden, but it was palpable. For so many months I’d been wearing a coat made of lead. The weight of the coat made it nearly impossible to hold myself upright; it was easier just to fall.
One day, I literally felt the coat lift from my shoulders. It was a gray afternoon, but everything looked brighter. I realized that I cared again.
I filled page after page with words, writing mostly with a notebook and pen in the bathtub, where I felt warm and safe. Once, I accidentally dropped my notebook into the water; I ran dripping to my computer to record the words before they disappeared. The more I wrote, the better I felt. The stories were helping me to see what had happened to me.
I ended up writing five short stories that took my character Nora Walker on a journey through the underworld and back to the surface again. In what turned out to be an extraordinary outcome, all five were subsequently published—four in The Sun and one in Hunger Mountain.
In “The Falls,” Nora describes her first medical checkup after surgery:
The receptionist said, ‘Do you still live at so-and-so?’ And I told her, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘Is your home phone still such-and-such?’ And I said it was. And she said, ‘Is your work number still the same?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘Then everything’s the same, right?’ And I hesitated a second and swallowed hard before saying, ‘Yes, everything’s just the same.’”
My protagonist was falling, but she wasn’t falling into a void. She was falling toward a new life, and so was I. Trials and transformations evoke an essential truth about life: You don’t get a new life unless the old one dies. Melancholics know this better than anyone, but it’s a hard truth. So I kept writing. And what kept me writing was the desire to know how it would all turn out.
The five short stories were fiction, but in them, I found the truth of my experience.
• • •
I can’t remember when I bought my first book on writing and healing, though I know it was a long time after my depression was over and done with. The one that sticks with me still is Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo.
DeSalvo quotes D. H. Lawrence, who once wrote in a letter: One sheds one’s sickness in books—repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.
Mastering emotions, clarifying and explaining experience: If a writer can reach such goals, he or she may come close to a healing. It’s like one of Lawrence’s apples falling on the ground, nourishing the tree from which it came.
The stories I wrote about my experience with depression were not just for myself but also for others who might need them. I knew then that this is why we must be fearless about sharing our experiences.
It was a big revelation: None of this is about you; it’s about your connection to others. That’s when I realized my relationship to the reader: love.
Theresa Williams
Theresa Williams is the recipient of an Individual Excellence Grant from the Ohio Arts Council and was recently selected for a summer writing residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Her novel, The Secret of Hurricanes (MacAdam/Cage 2002), was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize. Her short fiction and poems have appeared in a number of magazines, including The Sun, Chattahoochee Review, Hunger Mountain, Haibun Today, Barnwood International Poetry Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, Riverwind, and Visions International.
Theresa is a regular contributor to Talking Writing.
“It’s about letting experience and memory accumulate so that it spills over into story.”
— “On Writing“
Coincidentally, just ten minutes before reading your beautiful, unselfish essay I had been wondering how writers arrive at that place where they are ready to share the private torments and joys that lie locked in their souls.
This reader plunged into momentary depression while reading your image-rich essay and emerged from it when you “ran dripping to [your] computer to record the words before they disappeared.”
Thanks for the answer: “It’s not about you. It’s your connection to others.”
As usual, Theresa, your essay has inspired me. This time, I’ve been trying to write (for an assignment in my MFA program) from the perspective of someone I can’t identify with; someone who is mentally ill. I feel like the most selfish person in the world, not being able to ‘go there’, despite the fact that mental illness is not completely foreign to me. Depression as well. I realized a little while ago while writing, but forgot, until reading your essay, that it’s not at all about ME; it’s about caring about what happens to others, about describing the world and inhabiting it the best I can in order to convey it in writing to others. If I could just for one moment get outside myself and find that place inside me that knows I give a darn, maybe I could be as inspiring a writer as you. Thanks again.
Sally, I remember how badly I wanted to read stories that touched on my experience. I couldn’t find them, so I decided to write the stories I would have most wanted to read when all this was happening to me. Writing about personal torments always carries with it the danger of becoming self-absorbed, of falling into the dangerous loop of our own misery. In my own writing, I just know that I have to find a connection to something outside of myself. I also must gain some distance from the event, the ability to look at it somewhat objectively. And indeed, the act of writing helps me to be to achieve this objectivity.
Theresa, Your essay and comments have reminded me of why I ever wanted to write– to create stories that offer hope and insight to others. It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture when concentrating on academic tasks and technical nuances. Thanks for bringing the reason for the art back into focus.
Sally, every story will create its own demands. I needed to write the five stories after my depression to give myself insight into what had happened to me. I also couldn’t stand the thought of others suffering. I thought maybe my stories could help. It made me feel better to think that they might, and I needed to feel better. I needed to think my stories might serve a greater purpose than my own edification. At the same time, I know that I don’t have to make hope a goal for every story that I write.
I hope you will create all kinds of stories, Sally. Ones that will offer hope and insight to others but also stories that might make readers uncomfortable. Sometimes a reader needs that, too. Sometimes a reader needs to be put into a difficult situation in order to wake up.
Listen to your own stories. They will tell you what to do.
Carla, I wish you luck on your writing project! You might try thinking of mental instability as a place. (I think of it as liminal space.) It is a territory where anything can happen and often does. It is the dark wood, the wolf on the path, the terrifying fall, the night sea and so many other “places.” If you think of it as a place and not a condition, your story may have more force.
Theresa,
What a lovely, heart-wrenching story you’ve shared with us. I feel so privileged to have a glimpse into your own ‘dark nights of the soul’, as we call them. Once again, your stories have helped me connect to my own experience. I’ve come to realize that melancholy will always be a part of my existence; it is simply how I taste the world. Thank you for the reminder that for some writers, this is the way life is–and it is a fine, beautiful way to view the world.
Luda, your thoughts are a wonderful complement to Theresa’s story. We’re all writing from our individual perspectives, and each has validity.
Sometimes I am afraid to write about my depression because then I will know that it is real. This story pulls at my heart-strings, and has inspired me to write the truth in hopes of digging up a ‘new life.’
“You don’t get a new life, until the old one dies.” Thank you for this.
Theresa,
It is amazing how life’s journey seems to be panned out before us. Not long before I read this essay, I was working on my first letter to you for our own writing project. I brought up the subject of the dark places we writers need to go to in order to create honest stories and poetry; how even though we are afraid to go to these places, we have to if we want to create pieces that will inspire readers who may even relate to what we ourselves are experiencing.
As you know I’ve had my own bouts of depression over the last few years, and sometimes I’ve had to really struggle to come back into the light. I find it fascinating that when we are given the opportunity to go to the darkest recesses of our minds we fight it; but when we are thrown into a depression, the darkness is comforting…and then the LIGHT becomes scary. It’s mind boggling!
I love how honest you are when you speak of your experiences of depression and how it has affected your writing. You always told us in class that it’s these experiences that allow us to become “good writers” because we create characters that are real; an extension of us, so to speak.
Thank you for sharing this part of your soul with us!
Luda, Lauren, and Melanie, I appreciate your comments. And I’m glad you found something in the essay that rings true. I remember what a revelation it was to be able to differentiate between melancholy and depression. Melancholy is actually a beautiful condition, even though it does leave everything tinged with sadness. I saw a comment recently on Facebook, it said, “Sadness isn’t the opposite of happiness, depression is.” I thought, how true. Sadness has its vivifying (nourishing) aspect, but depression is just a dead end, a struggle against a void.
Lawrence knew he was dying, and yet he remained curious and engaged with the world. I read an essay by Edward Thomas’s wife describing Lawrence, and the careful attention he gave to plants in her garden and also to her daughter, with whom he conversed and with whom he spoke seriously, not in that condescending way that many adults speak to children. Her daughter responded with her full attention and love. These aspects of Lawrence were fascinating to me!
I find this discussion of the uses of melancholy—versus depression—hugely illuminating. Sometimes I think we don’t do “moods” in the United States. Everyone is either happy or sad—or sick—and there’s little room for thinking about what the many shades of sadness yield in terms of self-knowledge and compassion.
Theresa, I’ve felt all along that your evocation of Lawrence in his last days is just perfect. I like hearing more details about how he came to grips with the knowledge that he was dying, both as a fellow human and as an artist.
Theresa, Your remarks about people needing stories to make them uncomfortable reminds me of what Robert Bly said about James Wright in REMEMBERING JAMES WRIGHT: “And Jim learned from Trakl that poems need ugliness in them.” Bly added that when Ohioans read Wright’s poem, “At the Executed Murderers Grave,” they should not be offended.
I will take your remarks and Robert Bly’s remarks as an invitation to invoke the duende of Lorca! As you said, sometimes readers need to be put into a situation to wake up.
I have read your novel, THE SECRET OF HURRICANES. I love the conflict of the mother telling her darkest secrets to her innocent, unborn child. Your remarks and writing inspire me to try to make readers as uncomfortable as you artfully have done, not to make them uncomfortable, but to give them insight into their own lives and life itself.
And thank you for the bits of Lawrence. He’s too often overlooked and yet has sometime or other said exactly the right thing, whether about love, or writing, or death. Beautiful essay.
Theresa,
Those quotes were the perfect ones to set the tone of exactly what you wanted to say, something I struggle with doing daily. I look forward to reading more.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s something deeper than a conversation, something that shares a part of your soul with other people. Perhaps even shameless
Janice, the phrase: “It’s something deeper than a conversation” keeps sticking in my mind. The soul does crave that. I’ve come to think of Art (visual, written, dance, all) as a deep conversation.
Jane, I agree, D. H. is often overlooked, perhaps better known for his novels than for his poetry. He’s an interesting subject. I’m looking forward to getting back into his letters soon.
Sally, the notion of the confessional is strong in much of my work. It feels natural to express myself that way. (No, I’m not Catholic). But I do have very fond memories of confessing my deepest secrets to my stuffed animal toys when I was small.
Martha, your comment makes me think of the beginning of Brautigan’s _Trout Fishing in America_ where he describes America as “healthy and optimistic.” This coming from a writer who struggled mightily with depression. Or we might recall the mother in Tennessee Williams’s _Glass Menagerie_. It can be hard to live daily with people who don’t understand depression or even ordinary sadness.
Thank you, everyone, for the thoughtful comments.
In what issues of The Sun did your stories appear? I would love to read them.
Hi Inez,
Sorry to be getting back to you late. You can find my sun publications at their site here: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/en/search/results/?q=theresa%20williams
That link should take you to a list of my pubs with them. Thank you for asking.