Sylvia Plath @ MindSay 
I love the Cymbalta "depression hurts" commercial, as much as you can love a pharmaceutical ad, anyway, because it so perfectly captures the experience of depression -- living your life from a dark place, in a dark room, oblivious to those around you while everyone else lives their lives. It perfectly illustrates the sense of being completely hopeless and unable to engage, wandering aimlessly through the frozen foods section, completely overwhelmed by the effort of choosing between two types of Swanson dinners and not caring if you ever eat again. The commercial hits so close to home, in fact, that I find it hard not to cry every time it comes on.
Eventually the darkness lifts and I return to my own special version of normal, forgetting for a time what it was like to spiral down until the Black Dog, as someone famous (Winston Churchill?) once called it, comes around again. Just when I feel that I'm making real progress in my life it happens again, and I can't remember or imagine ever feeling well. Apparently I talk a great game, because I'm constantly told how incredibly "perky" and "happy" I am, a great source of confusion when you feel awful but question your judgement because everyone assures you you're a bleeding beacon of sunshine. I decided that it might help to keep a written record of my "episodes," both to validate my experience in my own mind and perhaps offer patterns and clues that might help the next time around. I thought that I would post one of these accounts, my own little Cymbalta commercial, to try to capture the nature of depression. I have also realized how much I have kept this part of myself to myself, lived alone with it, and thought that releasing it into the blog-world might help dilute its power.
I tried Cymbalta, incidentally, until my samples ran out and it wasn't among the antidepressants my insurance would approve; since moving to the US a year ago, I've switched medications four times trying to find one that is covered by insurance and lifts my mood without destroying my guts, libido and figure.
Sept 5th
Even when I am depressed, or maybe especially when I am depressed, I can eat my weight in breakfast. I had the Spacetown Breakfast at the Derry Diner, and the waitress applauded me for finishing everything, right down to the enormous waffle that she said is most people’s undoing. I grinned shyly, acknowledging her praise, and felt actual pride. I am 30 going on 6.
Between being unable to find any decent clothes due to the move and the apathy with which I awoke, I am dressed like a tragic soccer mom. My hair is scraggled back in an elastic. These are the most attractive years of my life, and this is all I have to offer.
This morning I woke up afraid. My dehydration headache was a reminder of last night’s cryfest. I told Eric that he shouldn’t have to babysit me, but he worked from home to keep me company because I was afraid to be alone and sad. Usually, I am just afraid to be alone in a house with crappy locks. Today, I didn’t really care if anyone broke in.
I don’t think Eric got much work done. We went to Home Depot for screws, and I picked out some tulip bulbs that caught my eye, while simultaneously telling myself that I would never be organized enough to get them planted.
At suppertime I almost cried when I couldn’t find cayenne pepper and a baking pan for hot wings. I ended up using a turkey roaster placed in an oven full of ashes I didn’t have the strength of body or mind to remove following the self-cleaning we had done earlier in the day. The oven wouldn’t work. We had takeout. I ordered some cabinet knobs online that made me happy until the happiness was drowned by the knowledge that I’d never get the house together and didn’t deserve nice things anyway.
Today I took my first walk around the neighborhood (it started as a run, but quickly degraded). I tried to focus on foliage and houses but mostly thought about all the things in life I can’t keep up with. I showered and shaved my legs and armpits with a razor too dull to cut butter.
I am sad because I am invisible.
I am convinced that life is a constant series of disappointments.
I am sad because I feel like the friends I had have forgotten me.
I am sad because I am scared of everything.
I am sad because the entryway smells like pee.
I am sad because I cannot seem to get past sad.
I am sad because everything is an obstacle, and I cannot see it any other way.
I am sad because I once thought I would run with the poets. Now, I run with the bottle of all-purpose cleaner and still manage to live in a dump of my own creation.
I cannot call myself a writer, because writers write, and I do not. I clean and stew.
I am bitter because people with full-time jobs manage to keep shiny, clean-scrubbed houses, and I clean obsessively with nothing to show for it.
I feel guilty because I have no 9-5 job to go to, yet still can’t find time to do anything and completely throw away the opportunity I’m given.
I am angry that there is not enough time for anything, let alone slowing down and enjoying it.
I am convinced that others see me as nothing more than a housewife sponging off of Eric, and fear that this is true.
I walk with the constant pain of so much wasted potential, and the conviction that life and time have passed me by.
I am crushed by the knowledge that nothing ever changes.
I am drowning in the past, and see nothing of pleasure or success in the future.
I am isolated, with no one reaching in and no me reaching out, falling in on myself. I know that I need to spend more time out in the world, but every fiber fears and resists.
I am angry that I try so hard and have been doing it all wrong, all along. I have learned nothing.
I want but fear children, both for the demands they will impose on my already beyond-control life and the things I will impose on them.
I am sad that I cannot get in a car and drive without being paralyzed by the conviction of an intrinsic lack of skill and fear of hurting someone else or myself.
I am sad because my way always seems to be the wrong way.
I am angry for staying quiet while others put me down, then turning around and giving myself the same treatment.
I did not like Sylvia Plath's journals, particularly her description of the pleasures of picking her nose, but one thing stayed with me -- her description of how she couldn't find the strength or motivation to wash her hair, paralyzed by the prospect of having to do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, wondering what's the point of ever doing it at all.
Well, I suppose I should report the Christmas yield.
Books:
Collected Poems - Sylvia Plath(finally, Jesus, I've been pining after this book for ages.)
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
I also received sixty five dollars in bookstore gift certificates. The results of which, so far are...
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
Cds:
Sisters of the Red Death - Vendetta Red
Hail to the Thief - Radiohead
The Bends - Radiohead
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill - Lauryn Hill
The Doors - The Doors
Morrison Hotel - The Doors
L.A. Women - The Doors; and I bought
Lifted - Bright Eyes
Well, that pretty much was my Christmas gifts. Oh! I nearly forgot to mention the first season of (the American) The Office (with Steve Carell). If you've never seen the show, go find it and watch it. I swear to god that show is perfectly crafted to fit my sense of humor. Absolutely hilarious.
I had a satisfying Christmas. I should enjoy it, chances are it's my last. I'm not lamenting, merely stating. I'll probably come back and visit my parents next year, but I really don't even want gifts. I didn't really want them this year, but who could say no to eighty dollars worth of new books? Certainly not me.
After momentary contemplation I've come to the realization I am not a Christian because I don't want help. I don't want any assistance from some sort of preternatural being in my life. I want to keep the rights to what I win, not give credit to something that could very well be merely dwelling in my imagination.
With the wick of a cherry scented candle
Dwindling like the rays of a forlorn eclipse,
I don't want anything but to twist these
Blankets around my torso/legs and rest.
I crave nothing more than soft light and
Strange expressions of how I feel. That
Is mine, the ability of flowing poetry into
Motions both clandestine and glimmering
With cheek. I can only give you the same.
Sorry, that just popped out of me. I haven't written a poem in a few days, so I can hardly expect them not to begin catching up soon. In my mind, all commodities are limited.
Wow, until I began writing this entry I hadn't realized how much I missed words. Well, I have nothing else to say and I want a cigarette, so I'll leave you with this quote.
"Well, she's fashionably lean
And she's fashionably late
She'll never rank a scene
She'll never break a date
But she's no drag
Just watch the way she walks."
I've been listening a lot to Tori Amos' Beekeeper album which is absolutely beautiful. I highly recommend it. The album title is inspired by Tori Amos' favourite poem by Sylvia Plath called The Beekeeper's Daughter. It's lovely...
A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,
My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.
Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest —-
A fruit that’s death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.
In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses
The queen bee marries the winter of your year.
