This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

203 Pages·2017·1.04 MB·English

by  Daphne Merkin

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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page

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To Michael Porder
Observe perpetually … Observe my own despondency. By that means it
becomes serviceable. Or so I hope.
—The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume V
All my watercolors fade to black.
—Annie Lennox, Pavement Cracks
PROLOGUE
Lately I’ve been thinking about the allure of suicide again—the way it says
basta! to life, like an Italian grandmother sweeping out all the accumulated
debris of daily existence, leaving a clean and unmarked surface. No more rage at
the circumstances that have brought you down. No more dread. No more going
from day to day in a state of suspended animation, feeling tired around the eyes
—behind them, too—and making conversation, hoping no one can tell what’s
going on inside. No more anguish, that roaring pain inside your head that feels
physical but has no somatic correlation that can be addressed and treated with a
Band-Aid or ointment or cast. Most of all, no more disguise, no more need to
wear a mask: “What, you, depressed? I never would have known.”
They come on, such suicidally colored periods, at times like these—I am
writing this in the winter, at my desk in New York City—when the days are
short, evening starts early, the sky lacks light, and you have ceased admiring
your own efforts to keep going. Although they can also come on when the day is
long and the light never-fading, in early spring or ripest summer. They come on
because your mood, which has been sliding perceptibly downward for weeks,
even months, has hit rock-bottom. You lie there in the sludge, no longer
bothering to flail around, marooned in a misery that is no less easy to bear
because there is nothing wildly terrible to point to in the circumstances of your
own life—on the surface, at least—to account for it. And now this fatal tug has
made itself felt again, suggesting an end to your despondency, your inability to
get with the program, a phrase you’ve never liked in its brisk, gym-coach
approach to what is after all a complex situation—this matter of your life and
how much you want to submit to its terms—but all the same an apt one.
You have never understood the program, to be sure, what it is that you are
meant to be propelling yourself toward, what long-term goal hovers before you
that would suggest the possibility of a successful completion. There is, of course,
the matter of your writing, a goal of a sort but also the impulse that keeps you
going most reliably. Art is supposed to be long and life short, or so the Latin
saying has it. Ars longa, vita brevis. But on a day like today, when everything
seems gray and thin, nothing gives you ballast. You are too worn down to even
pretend to know why you should put one foot after the other: it is life that seems
too long, endless. A clock ticks somewhere in the silence of your apartment,
empty second after empty second, reminding you that time hangs heavy when
you have lost your way, like a vise around your neck. You are reminded as well
of one of your stays on a psychiatric unit, when you sat in the so-called Day
Room with some of the other patients and watched TV in the middle of the
afternoon, something you would never have done at home and which made you
feel entirely useless, like a piece of clothing hung out to dry and then forgotten
about.
How ever did you fill your days before this torpor came and claimed you? It
is difficult to recall how you once went naturally from one activity to the next,
writing and reading, indulging in virtual window-shopping on the computer,
talking to your daughter, laughing over something with a friend, warming up a
cup of coffee or tea in the microwave. It wasn’t as though you were ever exactly
a dervish of energy, spinning from one hectically scheduled event to the next—
you are a stay-at-home sort at the best of times, someone who has to assemble
the internal wherewithal to go out and meet people, no matter how open and
receptive you seem—but before, you didn’t question the whole ongoing shebang
of making plans. Now you can no longer figure out what it is that moves other
people to bustle about out there in the world, doing errands, rushing to
appointments, picking up a child from school. You have lost the thread that
pulled the circumstances of your life together. Nothing adds up and all you can
think about is the raw nerve of pain that your mind has become—and, once
again, how merciful it would be to yourself and others to extinguish this pain.
You might have become an addict, under different circumstances, retreating
into the nullifying bliss of street drugs. Instead you take a prescribed regimen of
legal drugs, tweaked occasionally by a well-meaning psychopharmacologist, and
articulate your condition in fifty-minute sessions to people to whom you have
paid large sums of money to listen to you over the years. You sit in their offices
and discuss your wish to die the way other patients discuss their wish to find a
lover. Never mind your daughter, your friends, your writing, the taste of
something delicious, a new book, or the TV series everyone is watching: the
things that are supposed to moor you to this world. Even those who know you
best don’t understand the glare bouncing off your eyes, the glare that prevents
you from seeing up the road. Despair is always described as dull, when the truth
is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.