Drinking from Hope’s Fountain
When I think of the word “depression”, I often picture a sort of living corpse–a body, lying sideways on a couch with the tv on. Not watching, but looking past the screen, their world mired in a dense fog of either apathy, or sadness, or heartache or any melancholy emotion. Eyes swollen, their thoughts either drifting through an alternate world where things are better or hyper focused on their life. But that’s just one type of depression. There’s another, more insidious depression that lingers behind the trees, sneaks through sad and angry moments where you assume it’s a temporary, minor thing. “It’s hard now, but it’ll pass”, you think to yourself. But this depression is cunning in that it remains in the background, a squatter who takes over your attic and never leaves. You get accustomed to its presence, thinking that it’s all minor or ephemeral. But the longer it dwells within you, the more it takes a foothold in your heart, the weight growing while you move and feel ever more slowly.
The past two years have been trying, to say the least. From spending a year applying for jobs, to a dragged out promotion process, to a miscarriage and a death in the family…I look back at all of it and am sitting here just in awe at the sheer enormity of it all and more recently, thanks to therapy and my family, I’ve discovered that I’ve been far more depressed for far longer than I was aware of. For me, it manifests itself by turning inward: having trouble checking in on friends and family, anxiety about making any kind of plans, difficulty doing active things with my loved ones. What this means is that the people around me suffer–it seems like I don’t care about them or that being in proximity to them is work.
Maybe I’m a contrarian, but I like the most recent Star Trek movies. What I like about them is specifically how they portray Spock: you gain insight into how he became the Vullcan he was in the original series. Those flashbacks to him with his human mother, the moment he tells the Vulcan science academy to go fuck themselves, and when, having been relieved of his command after attacking Kirk, Uhura asks him what he needs. In typical Spock fashion, he says, “I need everyone to continue performing admirably”. I get how that can be seen as cold or heartless, especially given that you’re saying that to a significant other, but it makes more sense when you see this scene in “Star Trek: Into Darkness”. For Spock, he’s lived his entire life surrounded by Vulcans, who are basically biologically engineered to live by a strict belief in logic. The fact that he’s human means that not only does he see himself as not “fully” Vulcan, but he beats himself up for the fact that his humanity continues to show itself. For Spock, the feelings are so overwhelming that he doesn’t know what to do with them. Thus, his natural instinct is to shut down. It’s a defense mechanism against the sheer enormity of emotions and their weight.
I align with Spock in that moment: feelings take up so much space and it’s much easier for me to avoid them than to just feel them. It’s the reason I started even going to therapy back in 2016: I was working my academic, tenure track job, trying to get married to my partner who lived six hours away, and planning an upcoming wedding. It was leading to some unhealthy habits that were sending me down a dark path and thankfully I had people in my life who helped me along. I would end up leaving Wisconsin in 2019 to start a new job and new life in Seattle. We arrived on a gorgeous day in early July; 70 degrees out, sunny, and grass and trees so lively and verdant. Ashley and I would unload our trailer in record time and celebrate by eating food at a local taqueria down the street. I remember the sensation of guzzling down the last drop of bottled Mexican coke once I’d finished my carne asada tacos and thinking that life was good. Depression? What depression?
But remember, it’s insidious. It’s just now that I understand the depths of my depression: it’s been going on far longer than I was aware of and I just…didn’t know. And now I’m left here trying to reframe my life and, more importantly, my outlook on life. Without revealing too much, there’s a lot of transition going on in my life and it means I’m kind of waiting on things to happen. Recently I was on the bus heading to campus, thinking about the past year and looking ahead to possibilities, and I started feeling anxious. What if x doesn’t happen? What am I gonna do then? How bad is it going to feel?
But strangely, a thought occurred to me: what if I think of this moment, where the paths are farther ahead and I’m not quite sure which way I’ll be going, in a hopeful light? What if, despite whatever happens, I look back on this time where I was scared, anxious, and waiting as a time where anything was possible? What if the potential of life is revealing itself in this moment? In this time, right now, hope springs eternal. Though I still have that anxiety and worry, it does give me some comfort to know that in the present, I’m stepping up to the spring, and taking a sip.
For now I’m drinking in that hope, letting it soothe my body and soul.
