If you check the
portal page for
Holidailies you'll see a lot of posts that seem to be talking about
some form of post-holiday letdown.
Kathy
surveys the detritus of Christmas and contemplates the changes she must
make in the new year to preserve her health.
Amethyst
is having mood swings.
Angela
finds herself "in a bit of a mood" despite good news in her life. And
Dreama is just
plain sick.
And I find that I'm repeating myself. When I opened this file and
wanted to verify Emily Dickinson's actual lineation and punctuation for
her famous "slant of light" reference I had the feeling I'd done it
quite recently. Sure enough, just
three days before
Christmas I used the same epigraph when I wrote about having
"another beak under the wing" day. The first one had been
the day after my
party, when I thought I was just slowing down to recover from all
the extroversion.
I started this day with a list of things to accomplish. I conveniently
ignored the fact that they were all left from yesterday's list except
the mailing of a birthday card. That is, apparently, all I did
yesterday, although the task was complete before eight in the morning.
The rest of the day I spent doing parts of things — putting away part
of the Christmas decorations in one room, updating part of my address
list for my holiday letter (new addresses for reunion attendees but not
the friends from the Bread Loaf experience).
I seemed to be moving in slow motion. At noon I got dressed to go out
to the copy shop to duplicate my letter. I chose clean clothes not from
my holiday outfits because I'm tired of the sparkly stuff, put on my
makeup, put in earrings, tied my shoes, and then sat down on the bed in
tears. Then I crawled under the covers and put my beak under my wing
for two hours, at the end of which I felt really no better. That's when
I came out of denial and acknowledged that maybe, just maybe, Melanie
is here.
Melanie is the name I give to the embodiment of my depression. When I
first wrote about her in this space I called her
The Witch of
November because that's when she'd shown up that year. I have what
mental health professionals call
dysthymia, a kind of
generalized chronic depression thought to have genetic origin. I have
suffered two periods of
major
depression, both triggered by life crises, not uncommon in
dysthymics. I also have from time to time periods of
Seasonal
Affective Disorder, a condition not yet accepted as a separate
diagnosis by psychologists but called a "seasonal pattern specifier" in
people like me.
Some years, as in 2000, Melanie arrives with gong clangs and siren
howls (an image from William Carlos Williams's
"The Great
Figure," possibly my favorite poem of all time, even over anything
by Emily Dickinson). Other years she's very quiet, not coming until
February and then sneaking in only for a brief stay.
Standing up and saying hello to her really helps. And that's what I did
this afternoon. I ate some fruit, took a shower, and got dressed all
over again. Then I completed my errands and arrived at the Red Robin at
6:15 to have dinner with Lynn and our friend Erin, a young woman who
was among my eleventh graders back in 1997. Afterward we went to her
house, a funky farmhouse cottage down a long dirt road, and "hung out"
(as Lynn calls it) until just past 9:30.
Some people, including some mental health professionals, disparage the
whole idea of depression and SAD. They claim that mental illness is a
myth. I first became aware of this stance when a follower of
Thomas Szasz, the leading proponent of the
philosophy, joined an Emily Dickinson discussion list I was part of to
decry the fine work that Dr. John McDermott had done on the possibility
that the poet had the condition. As a result, Dr. McDermott and I
entered into an occasional correspondence and he joined both the
discussion list where his work was being attacked and the one I run.
Mood disorders, I've come to understand, exist on a continuum. Some
people exhibit no tendencies at all, others have some of this and some
of that and respond to differing strategies to manage their symptoms
(including just plain ignoring them) and some people are so paralyzed
by the conditions that they cannot function.
I am blessed with the resources to use many strategies to live with
Melanie. For tonight, I'm choosing to greet her, make her comfortable,
and ask her what she wants rather than ignore her. In my experience,
it's just attention that she wants, and she's satisfied with very
little.
