The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Depression Is Crazy

12 Diagnosis DepressionIsCrazy For an academic to admit to being clinically depressed can be tricky, because to disclose that your mind isn’t functioning as it should is to disqualify yourself, to risk rendering irrelevant everything you do or say as a professional thinker. Depression, in fact, often feels like being raped by thoughts, monstrous, deformed thoughts. They force themselves on your mind and leave you shattered and ashamed. It’s simpler, at times, to give in to your attackers than to resist them, but you know that once they’re done, the respite will be short-­lived, and they’re going to come for you again.Your thoughts are smarter than you when you’re depressed, and you can’t fool them very long. Sometimes depression feels as though no thought were involved whatever—­ like an effect without a cause. It happens and you don’t know why. There may be warnings or there may be no warnings. There are, at times, signs that, like a prophecy, you can decipher only in hindsight, but nothing you can act on in any case. Even though depression is a madness that you are aware of, you read its signs but can learn nothing from them. You may find the strength to run for cover or you may not. Some mornings, you wake up and the nightmares begin.You can tell right away that your entire day will be pure hell, and because you can’t just skip a day you only wait for it to end.Evenings feel like torture,mornings like death.Even when feelings remain under control, that is to say, kept under wraps, you know that, every morning, you open your eyes to find that one more little chunk of you has come off during the night, one more shaving has fallen under the plane, until, one day, the end ceases to feel tragic to you and more like a simple matter of making the state of things official—­as easy as blowing out the last candle when you leave the room,because there’s no one left in it.Depression doesn’t make you a different person exactly, it makes you disappear little by little until nothing of you remains. It is therefore misleading to lament the high suicide rate among sufferers because, in truth, they have died long before they kill themselves.What is odd, though, is that, as you feel yourself gradually cease to exist, the force of the madness—­ this complete lack of discernment—­ overcomes your body. First inside. For a second or two, your eyes just stare blankly at familiar surroundings but do not quite make out what they see.Your hands hold objects whose purpose momentarily escapes them. The destination of a pen or a glass of water, once obvious, now seems baffling or obscured by clouds and cannot be recollected without time and efforts. Your legs can no longer carry the rest of you, and they slowly give Diagnosis 13 way under the crushing weight. This is what, as a kid, I imagined it felt like to walk on Jupiter.And then the madness begins to push through your skin, stretching it so it makes you want to holler in pain. You could tear at the gentlest touch and find yourself exposed to the humiliation of inappropriate leaking. But then it starts oozing out. You’re turning into some kind of werewolf. When that happens you’re lucky to be home and alone. If not, as if drunk or high and desperate to appear sober, you can only hope that you will be able to walk undetected among the others, the living, the normal people, just long enough to pass the old, gray church, the first bridge, the second bridge,the Korean grocery store,the usual,the casual,the incomprehensibly banal,all these places you once barely saw but stand out as ominous landmarks today, one more block, almost there, a few more steps, just a few more steps until, finally, you can close the door behind you, lean against it, and stare at nothing, beaten, breathless, relieved at last to let the pain have its way with you because it’s just easier that way and because, sometimes, the only relief you can expect to bring to your pain is pain of a different sort. It is astounding the amount of strength weakness requires, and the control and sharpness of thought that madness demands of the mad—­ and none of...