Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > 2008 > May-June 2008	Print View

Winston Churchill called it his Black Dog and was known to lay bricks until it curled up and went back to sleep. I’ve called it the Black Horrors and have been known to lie in bed, curtains drawn, waiting for the storm clouds to pass.

I’ve suffered with depression since childhood, though back then we called it “feeling sorry for yourself,” and I included self-pity in my litany of sins beginning with my first confession at age seven. Often the penance our parish priest meted out was, “offer it up for the souls in purgatory.” I will never know whether my weekly offerings commuted the purgatorial sentence of any sinners. If so, their gain was my loss. The sadness stayed with me, and I spent a good deal of my childhood praying for a liberation that did not occur.

What relief I did experience came from books or during moments of creativity. I’d spend hours in my room reading, or putting together dollhouses from shoe boxes using scissors and paste, or writing little stories into my spiral notebook, or making collages from cut-up pieces of colored paper. And then, when it was time to go downstairs into the real world of supper, homework, and Ed Sullivan, the heaviness came back and life returned to my version of normal.

My father suffered long, Lincolnesque periods of melancholy, during which he’d fall asleep on the sofa after dinner until bedtime and grind his teeth so loudly through the night we could hear it in every room of the house. We didn’t call it depression then either. We didn’t call it anything. But we knew that something was imploding inside of him; my father’s head was packed with memories of the horrors of war unmitigated by the passing of time. So we tiptoed around that nameless force, puzzled by its depth and afraid of the rage that would erupt if we woke him.

Whether it rises from emotional trauma, is encoded into my DNA, or both, depression has conducted some convincing whispering campaigns throughout my life. It advised me to marry before I was barely out of my teens because I’d met the only person on Earth willing to put up with me. It warned me not to divorce my unfaithful husband 10 years later because I could not survive without him.

With help, I found ways to defy it. When my marriage ended and depression insisted that I wasn’t smart enough to go to college, I put it in a room by itself while I typed term papers that, every semester, were marked with A’s. It told me that I was a terrible mother and to believe my born-again ex-spouse and his perky new wife’s claims that they were better parents than I. So I locked it in the car while I sat in a courtroom with them, making a case for my parenting skills that, while true, I only half believed.

Fifteen years ago, during a traumatic series of events that made sleeping, eating, and working next to impossible, my doctor prescribed antidepressants. For the next year we went through a variety of medications, weighing their merits and ruling out those with intolerable side effects. The first one tied my intestinal tract in knots. Four hours after trying a different one, the walls of my living room began to close in on me. Panicked, I ran out into the front yard, only to discover that the sky and the trees and the house next door were closing in on me too. Next came one that gave me migraines preceded by an aura of glittering needles.

And though it has given me back my sleep and the ability to enjoy the everyday pleasures of love, Johnny Depp movies, and cinnamon rolls, the medication I’ve been taking for several years isn’t an unqualified triumph. Just recently I’ve felt the old darkness pacing outside the door to my conscious mind, not unlike Churchill’s faithful Black Dog. And I’ve noticed the return of some familiar symptoms: random holes poked in my memory, the shadow of anxiety close at my heels, and an attention span that jumps and flits like drops of water on a hot skillet.

So you might think that I’m working with my doctor again to find the next antidepressant medication, the one that will help me through the next 10 years. But I’m not. Not yet, anyway. Because for all the good the medication does—and it does do good—it’s not without its emotional downside.

By definition, the equilibrium brought on by antidepressants softens the reality of the human condition. And there are those who believe that the desire to bring loss and mortality into sharp focus is, well, crazy. But experience has shown me that understanding loss means compassion for myself and others that isn’t as empathic when my emotional range is narrowed down to variations on the theme of beige. And while a mindfulness of death can (and does) lead to morbid thoughts (I have to stop myself from imagining my own funeral), it also makes the fact that I’m alive to strut and fret my hour upon the stage nothing short of a miracle.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating that severely depressed and suicidal people quit taking the medication that keeps them going day

A few years back, when I was teaching creative writing, a student raised her hand and said that the class wasn’t making her happy the way she felt it should. Surprised, I stopped for a moment and blurted out, “Who promised you happy? Virginia Woolf put rocks in her pockets and drowned. Ernest Hemingway put a gun to his head. Sylvia Plath put her head in an oven. This is not a club with happy members.” Not surprisingly, in her evaluation of my teaching at the end of the quarter, the student commented that I was angry and perhaps a little bitter.

We could make a long list of the artists who spent their lives dancing on the brink of madness until they lost their footing and toppled over the edge. Hemingway himself called depression “the artist’s curse.” Had he lived in the age of psychotropic drugs, would his agony have been relieved? Would medication have given him a new lease on his creative life, or diminished it? If Dr. Gachet had prescribed Prozac for Vincent van Gogh, the thinking goes, would he have been able to paint A Starry Night? If Mozart had taken Wellbutrin, could he have written Don Giovanni?

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t: the perfect recipe for depression.

On the other hand, I am reminded of Picasso and his infamous moods, which rose and fell throughout his long life like crows in a corn field, and who was productive until he died a natural death in old age. His emotions inspired artistic periods in colors as melancholy as blue and rose, and shattered the human form into the sharp-edged geometry of cubism. What might have happened—or not happened—had he taken Paxil to balance his chemistry and even out his moods?

Though I do not live in the same creative stratosphere as Picasso, Mozart, or Virginia Woolf, I do know what it’s like for life’s journey to reach a darkened corner. When I’ve come to that place, however, and I have on two occasions, something intervened: the knowledge that the end of life is the end of pain but that it is also the end of everything else, even the briefest moments of beauty, creativity, love, and success. The will to live was stronger than the desire not to, and I wasn’t on medication either time. And I still find the creative process, with all its frustrations, to be palliative. I find solace in a Saturday afternoon at the sewing machine, top-stitching a pleated skirt. I’ve lost track of time revising an essay and mapping out my next book.

So, for now, the question isn’t whether or not I’ll try another antidepressant. Neither will happiness be the test. The question is whether I can rise from my bed in the morning, get dressed, and serve the creative gift I’ve been given, however large or small. The test will be whether I want to write another book or paint with watercolors or plant pansies in my window boxes. I want to love my wonderful new husband and watch my grown children (who thrived despite their existential mother) build their adult lives. I want to be in the world to face the possibility of failure or success.

And if depression clouds my desire to live a loving and creative life? Then I’ll wait for the skies to clear. Maybe I’ll try laying bricks. Whatever it takes to get me through another day.

Mary Winstead (M.F.A. ’00) is the author of Back to Mississippi: A Personal Journey through the Events that Changed America in 1964. She lives in Apple Valley, Minnesota.