'It feels like a derangement'
I stare stupidly at it. It’s nothing much to look at. It’s only a small pile of clothing: the shorts and tank top that I wear in bed, which I have thrown onto the floor before getting into the shower. I stare stupidly at the clump because I can’t pick it up. It’s astonishing I managed to shower, because I know already that this is a bad day, one when I feel assaulted by my hormones, which I picture as small pilots in those huge Star Wars armored beasts that turn me this way and that, implacable. On this morning, I wake up with fear in my stomach—fear of nothing—and I know it will be a bad day. (...)
I can’t pick up the clothes. I can’t explain the granite of that “can’t” to anyone else, the way it feels impossible to beat. Look at me looking at the pile and you will think, Just pick it up. For fuck’s sake. But I don’t. I look at it, and the thought of accomplishing anything makes my fear and despair grow. Every thought brings on another and that prospect is frightening. All those thoughts. I write that down and I feel stupid and maudlin and dramatic. A privileged freelance writer who does not have a full-time job that requires her presence in an office and can be indulgent of what the medical profession calls “low moods.” In fact, plenty of menopausal women leave their jobs, endure wrecked relationships, suffer, and cope. Or don’t. But I don’t feel maudlin and dramatic in the bathroom, or on any other of a hundred occasions over the past two years. I feel terrified. I have no reason to feel fear. But my body acts as though I do: the blood rushing from my gut to my limbs in case I need to flee, leaving the fluttering emptiness that is called “butterflies,” though that is too pretty a description.
Still, I set off on my bicycle to my writing studio. I hope I can overcome the day. I always hope, and I am always wrong. A few hours later, I find myself cowering in my workspace, a studio I rent in a complex of artists’ studios, scared to go downstairs to the kitchen because I can’t bear to talk to anyone I might find there. I have done nothing of use all day. Every now and then, I stop doing nothing and put my head in my hands because it feels safe and comfortable, like a refuge. I look underneath my desk and think I might sit there. There is no logic to this except that it is out of sight of the door and no one will find me.
Even so, when the phone rings I answer it. I shouldn’t, but I am hopeful that I can manage it and mask it, and I haven’t spoken to my mother for a few days and would like to. It goes well for a few minutes, because I’m not doing the talking. Then she asks me whether I want to accompany her to a posh dinner, several weeks hence. She doesn’t understand when I ask to be given some time to think about it. “Why can’t you decide now?” I say it’s one of the bad days, but I know this is a mixed message: If it’s that bad, how am I talking on the phone and sounding all right? Because I am a duck: talking serenely above, churning below, the weight on my chest, the catch in my throat, the inexplicable distress. I try to explain but I’m also trying hard not to weep, and so I explain it badly.
She doesn’t understand. This is not her fault. She is a compassionate woman, but she had an easy menopause, so easy that she can say, “Oh, I barely remember it.” One of those women: the lucky ones. She doesn’t understand depression, though both her children experience it, because she has never had it. “But you sounded well,” she says, “I thought you were all right.” Now she says, “I don’t understand how your not being well is stopping you deciding whether you want to go to dinner.” Because it is a decision, and a decision is too hard, requiring many things to happen in my brain and my brain is too busy being filled with fear and panic and tears and black numbness. There is no room to spare.
I hang up because I can’t explain this. I stay there for a while, sitting on my couch, wondering how to face cycling home or leaving my studio or opening the door. All these actions seem equally impossible.
It takes a while but finally I set off. I know where I’m going. I have learned. On days like this, there are only two places to be. One is in my darkened bedroom with my cat lying next to me. On days like this, she takes care to lie closer to me than usual because she knows and because she loves me. Maybe my darkness has a smell.
The other place to be is in unconsciousness.
These are the safe places because everything is quiet. On days like this, I wonder if this is what autism feels like, when sensation is overwhelming. Not just noise, but thoughts, sights, all input. It is on the bad days that I realize what a cacophony of impressions we walk through every day, and how good we are at receiving and deflecting, as required. Every day, we filter and sieve; on the bad days, my filters fail.
I sometimes call these bridge days, after a footbridge near my studio that goes at a great height over the busy A64 road. On days like this, that bridge is a danger for me. I am not suicidal, but I have always had the urge to jump. This is a thing with a name. HPP: high places phenomenon. The French call it “l’appel du vide.” So very Sartre of them: the call of emptiness. The A64 is the opposite of emptiness, but still, it is a danger. Today I don’t have the filter that we must all have to function: the one that stops us stepping into traffic or fearing the cars or buses that can kill us at any time. The one that mutes the call of the HPP.
I avoid the bridge. I cycle home, trying not to rage at drivers who cut me off and ignore me. I have no room for rage along with everything else. Thoughts that would normally flow now snag. Every observation immediately triggers a negative thread, a spiral, and a worsening. On a good day, I can pass a child and a mother and think, How nice. Nothing more. Fleeting. Unimportant. On a bad day, I see the same and think of my own infertility, how I have surely disappointed my mother by not giving her grandchildren; how it is all too late, and what have I done with my life, and my book will be a failure and today is lost and I can’t afford to lose the time. It goes on and on. Snagging thoughts that drag me down, that are relentless.
When I get inside my house, I cry. I try to watch something or read, but nothing interests me. This is called anhedonia and is a symptom of depression: the forgetting how to take pleasure. The best thing to do is sleep away the day, as much as I can.
Toward evening, I begin to feel a faint foolishness. This is my sign. Embarrassment. Shame at the day and at my management of it. When I am able to feel that and see that, I am getting better. Now I manage to watch TV, though only foreign-language dramas. Without the filmmaking industries of northern Europe, my menopause would be even bleaker. Foreign words go somewhere shallower in the brain; they are less heavy. But soon I switch it off. I don’t care about the plot. I don’t care about anything. I take a sleeping pill to get the day over with, so the better next day can begin. (...)
Depression, wrote William Styron, is a noun “with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness.” It was pioneered by a Swiss psychiatrist who, Styron thought, perhaps had a “tin ear” and “therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering ‘depression’ as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease.”
Black dog. Walking through treacle. Low moods. Nothing I have read of depression has conveyed the crippling weight of it, that is a weight made out of nothing.
I do not have depression according to most authoritative clinical definitions of the condition. Depression is a long-term chronic illness. Mine is unpredictable, and before I got my HRT dose right, it lasted weeks at a time; but usually, these days, it lasts no more than twenty-four hours. My now-and-thens do not qualify as a disease. I do not count as depressed. Instead, I am one of the women of menopause, who struggle to understand why we feel such despair, why now we cry when before we didn’t, why understanding what is left and what is right takes a fraction longer than it used to: all this is “low mood” or “brain fog.” These diminishing phrases, which convey nothing of the force of the anguish or grief that assaults us, are reserved for women and usually relate to menstrual cycles or hormones.
I have never been sunny. People who can rise from their beds and see joy without working at it, they have always been a mystery. I still feel guilty for once asking a cheery person, cheery very early in the morning, why he was so happy—I made it sound like an accusation not praise—and I watched as his face fell and his warmth iced over. I’m still sorry. Cheeriness always seems like an enviable gift. I have always been susceptible to premenstrual upheaval: two days a month when things feel awful as though they have never been anything else. I endured them. Now and then, there have been therapists sometimes and antidepressants now and then, and, for the last few years, running, in whatever wilds I can find. The best therapy. I have managed. (...)
For many months, I told people I was “unwell.” Not crippled, not weeping, not disabled. “Unwell.” The implication: that there is something physically wrong. A proper illness, not depression. A definition of depression is heartache, but it is my head that aches. What if I told everyone I had a severe headache? A broken ankle not brain? They would understand better. Then, one day, as I sit at my computer and think of the writing deadline that is today and feel despair, and I try to read serious medical literature and instead put my head in my hands again, I decide to write to the commissioning editor, even though she is new and this may form her opinion of me, and say: I can’t function today. I can’t write. And it is because of depression. Please give me leeway. It shames me to write it, but I do. And I do it again, when needed. So far, every response has been profoundly kind. I should have done it sooner.
Mental illness. Such an odd concept. How strange to put a division between mental and physical illness, as if the brain is not in the body. As if emotions are not regulated by the brain. As if feelings are not linked to hormones. As if all maladies are not of the body. And still mental illness is put in its place, which is in a different category. Not “real” illness. Not physical. Easier to fix, to underfund, to sweep into the dark corner of the unspoken. Imagine the contrary. Have you broken your ankle? Cheer up. Do you have third-degree burns? Chin up. Think yourself better, you with your chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Smile.
I stare stupidly at it. It’s nothing much to look at. It’s only a small pile of clothing: the shorts and tank top that I wear in bed, which I have thrown onto the floor before getting into the shower. I stare stupidly at the clump because I can’t pick it up. It’s astonishing I managed to shower, because I know already that this is a bad day, one when I feel assaulted by my hormones, which I picture as small pilots in those huge Star Wars armored beasts that turn me this way and that, implacable. On this morning, I wake up with fear in my stomach—fear of nothing—and I know it will be a bad day. (...)
I can’t pick up the clothes. I can’t explain the granite of that “can’t” to anyone else, the way it feels impossible to beat. Look at me looking at the pile and you will think, Just pick it up. For fuck’s sake. But I don’t. I look at it, and the thought of accomplishing anything makes my fear and despair grow. Every thought brings on another and that prospect is frightening. All those thoughts. I write that down and I feel stupid and maudlin and dramatic. A privileged freelance writer who does not have a full-time job that requires her presence in an office and can be indulgent of what the medical profession calls “low moods.” In fact, plenty of menopausal women leave their jobs, endure wrecked relationships, suffer, and cope. Or don’t. But I don’t feel maudlin and dramatic in the bathroom, or on any other of a hundred occasions over the past two years. I feel terrified. I have no reason to feel fear. But my body acts as though I do: the blood rushing from my gut to my limbs in case I need to flee, leaving the fluttering emptiness that is called “butterflies,” though that is too pretty a description.
Still, I set off on my bicycle to my writing studio. I hope I can overcome the day. I always hope, and I am always wrong. A few hours later, I find myself cowering in my workspace, a studio I rent in a complex of artists’ studios, scared to go downstairs to the kitchen because I can’t bear to talk to anyone I might find there. I have done nothing of use all day. Every now and then, I stop doing nothing and put my head in my hands because it feels safe and comfortable, like a refuge. I look underneath my desk and think I might sit there. There is no logic to this except that it is out of sight of the door and no one will find me.Even so, when the phone rings I answer it. I shouldn’t, but I am hopeful that I can manage it and mask it, and I haven’t spoken to my mother for a few days and would like to. It goes well for a few minutes, because I’m not doing the talking. Then she asks me whether I want to accompany her to a posh dinner, several weeks hence. She doesn’t understand when I ask to be given some time to think about it. “Why can’t you decide now?” I say it’s one of the bad days, but I know this is a mixed message: If it’s that bad, how am I talking on the phone and sounding all right? Because I am a duck: talking serenely above, churning below, the weight on my chest, the catch in my throat, the inexplicable distress. I try to explain but I’m also trying hard not to weep, and so I explain it badly.
She doesn’t understand. This is not her fault. She is a compassionate woman, but she had an easy menopause, so easy that she can say, “Oh, I barely remember it.” One of those women: the lucky ones. She doesn’t understand depression, though both her children experience it, because she has never had it. “But you sounded well,” she says, “I thought you were all right.” Now she says, “I don’t understand how your not being well is stopping you deciding whether you want to go to dinner.” Because it is a decision, and a decision is too hard, requiring many things to happen in my brain and my brain is too busy being filled with fear and panic and tears and black numbness. There is no room to spare.
I hang up because I can’t explain this. I stay there for a while, sitting on my couch, wondering how to face cycling home or leaving my studio or opening the door. All these actions seem equally impossible.
It takes a while but finally I set off. I know where I’m going. I have learned. On days like this, there are only two places to be. One is in my darkened bedroom with my cat lying next to me. On days like this, she takes care to lie closer to me than usual because she knows and because she loves me. Maybe my darkness has a smell.
The other place to be is in unconsciousness.
These are the safe places because everything is quiet. On days like this, I wonder if this is what autism feels like, when sensation is overwhelming. Not just noise, but thoughts, sights, all input. It is on the bad days that I realize what a cacophony of impressions we walk through every day, and how good we are at receiving and deflecting, as required. Every day, we filter and sieve; on the bad days, my filters fail.
I sometimes call these bridge days, after a footbridge near my studio that goes at a great height over the busy A64 road. On days like this, that bridge is a danger for me. I am not suicidal, but I have always had the urge to jump. This is a thing with a name. HPP: high places phenomenon. The French call it “l’appel du vide.” So very Sartre of them: the call of emptiness. The A64 is the opposite of emptiness, but still, it is a danger. Today I don’t have the filter that we must all have to function: the one that stops us stepping into traffic or fearing the cars or buses that can kill us at any time. The one that mutes the call of the HPP.
I avoid the bridge. I cycle home, trying not to rage at drivers who cut me off and ignore me. I have no room for rage along with everything else. Thoughts that would normally flow now snag. Every observation immediately triggers a negative thread, a spiral, and a worsening. On a good day, I can pass a child and a mother and think, How nice. Nothing more. Fleeting. Unimportant. On a bad day, I see the same and think of my own infertility, how I have surely disappointed my mother by not giving her grandchildren; how it is all too late, and what have I done with my life, and my book will be a failure and today is lost and I can’t afford to lose the time. It goes on and on. Snagging thoughts that drag me down, that are relentless.
When I get inside my house, I cry. I try to watch something or read, but nothing interests me. This is called anhedonia and is a symptom of depression: the forgetting how to take pleasure. The best thing to do is sleep away the day, as much as I can.
Toward evening, I begin to feel a faint foolishness. This is my sign. Embarrassment. Shame at the day and at my management of it. When I am able to feel that and see that, I am getting better. Now I manage to watch TV, though only foreign-language dramas. Without the filmmaking industries of northern Europe, my menopause would be even bleaker. Foreign words go somewhere shallower in the brain; they are less heavy. But soon I switch it off. I don’t care about the plot. I don’t care about anything. I take a sleeping pill to get the day over with, so the better next day can begin. (...)
Depression, wrote William Styron, is a noun “with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness.” It was pioneered by a Swiss psychiatrist who, Styron thought, perhaps had a “tin ear” and “therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering ‘depression’ as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease.”
Black dog. Walking through treacle. Low moods. Nothing I have read of depression has conveyed the crippling weight of it, that is a weight made out of nothing.
I do not have depression according to most authoritative clinical definitions of the condition. Depression is a long-term chronic illness. Mine is unpredictable, and before I got my HRT dose right, it lasted weeks at a time; but usually, these days, it lasts no more than twenty-four hours. My now-and-thens do not qualify as a disease. I do not count as depressed. Instead, I am one of the women of menopause, who struggle to understand why we feel such despair, why now we cry when before we didn’t, why understanding what is left and what is right takes a fraction longer than it used to: all this is “low mood” or “brain fog.” These diminishing phrases, which convey nothing of the force of the anguish or grief that assaults us, are reserved for women and usually relate to menstrual cycles or hormones.
I have never been sunny. People who can rise from their beds and see joy without working at it, they have always been a mystery. I still feel guilty for once asking a cheery person, cheery very early in the morning, why he was so happy—I made it sound like an accusation not praise—and I watched as his face fell and his warmth iced over. I’m still sorry. Cheeriness always seems like an enviable gift. I have always been susceptible to premenstrual upheaval: two days a month when things feel awful as though they have never been anything else. I endured them. Now and then, there have been therapists sometimes and antidepressants now and then, and, for the last few years, running, in whatever wilds I can find. The best therapy. I have managed. (...)
For many months, I told people I was “unwell.” Not crippled, not weeping, not disabled. “Unwell.” The implication: that there is something physically wrong. A proper illness, not depression. A definition of depression is heartache, but it is my head that aches. What if I told everyone I had a severe headache? A broken ankle not brain? They would understand better. Then, one day, as I sit at my computer and think of the writing deadline that is today and feel despair, and I try to read serious medical literature and instead put my head in my hands again, I decide to write to the commissioning editor, even though she is new and this may form her opinion of me, and say: I can’t function today. I can’t write. And it is because of depression. Please give me leeway. It shames me to write it, but I do. And I do it again, when needed. So far, every response has been profoundly kind. I should have done it sooner.
Mental illness. Such an odd concept. How strange to put a division between mental and physical illness, as if the brain is not in the body. As if emotions are not regulated by the brain. As if feelings are not linked to hormones. As if all maladies are not of the body. And still mental illness is put in its place, which is in a different category. Not “real” illness. Not physical. Easier to fix, to underfund, to sweep into the dark corner of the unspoken. Imagine the contrary. Have you broken your ankle? Cheer up. Do you have third-degree burns? Chin up. Think yourself better, you with your chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Smile.
by Rose George, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Vilhelm Hammershøi: Rest, 1905
