is it depression?

here's to sadness, and here's to joy

I’m watching the sun filter through concrete monoliths from the train carriage. It is peak hour, and I’m on the commute home after a session with my therapist.

“Okay bro, if you root her, I’ll give you a fuckin’ ten pack, I swear to god,” says the kid from the seat behind. I can smell the Jim Bean on him.
“Bro, I already did and I even got a fuckin’ video to prove it. Wanna see?” says his mate, laughing.

I fold the page of the book that has been sitting open on my lap. It’s Robbie Arnott’s highly anticipated Dusk, about a brother and sister hunting for a puma in the Australian highlands. I gather my things and move to the next carriage.

It has been an emotionally turbulent time. Sometimes the weight of grief or rage doesn’t emerge immediately, but afterwards. It arrives weeks, sometimes years later, when it feels like you can’t quite justify what you need to the people around you.

Recently, on a windy Sunday morning, Sal and I sat on a hill overlooking the sea and tried to figure out whether it might be depression. Our hands were sticky with chocolate from Mars Bar Slice, and children were running around at our feet.

When Sal first used the word ‘depression’, it flared up a wave of shame I didn’t realise was inside me. For all of the ways we destigmatise mental illness, it’s interesting to see just how much judgement remains if we affiliate these conditions with ourselves. How much fear we have that a diagnosis might lead to assumptions like poor work performance, bedbound paralysis, or labels like ‘crazy’ and ‘unstable’. And while mental illness can and does impact these areas, it can manifest in other, more subtle ways too. Depression can sit there, like water simmering on a stove, until everything slowly evaporates.

Sal and I spoke about whether grief, or life ache, or mourning a part of your life that was lost to fear, exists under the category of depression. These words weren’t used in the 15-question survey I did in the doctor’s office the other day – the reductive questionnaire I had to take to be eligible for discounted sessions with a therapist. But they are very much part of the human experience and can be crippling.

As a top-down processor, I approach my mental health with my head. I form strategies and write lists, talk to therapists, read books, and watch lectures online. While I do that, I maintain an extremely busy schedule. Why? Because when I am busy, I am hypervigilant. When I am hypervigilant, I am safe. And it is only from this point of safety that I can make sense of my emotional landscape.

This is a genius coping strategy, and I am perpetually amazed by my subconscious mind’s ability to do this. The only problem is, this strategy negates the body entirely. I never actually feel any of the things I’m so-called ‘processing’.

Healing lies where mind and body converge, like an estuary. Right now, the emotions are starting to find me, and the way they present themselves and beg to be felt is not conducive to the life I currently lead. And so, in the times when I am able, I will slowly work towards cultivating a future for which that might be more possible.

Walking towards a new way to live

The greatest sign of privilege is realising the harms of a system only when it no longer serves you. The capitalist, white supremacist, ableist system I have been propping up as a multiple-business owner, political campaigner, and mass consumer has been harming marginalised communities and the ecology of our planet since the dawn of colonisation.

At present, it feels like the only way to escape it is to take advantage of it first. If you want to become more self-sufficient, to grow your own produce, to live off sun and wind and community trade, you need the capital to establish that reality. And that capital requires making money in an apparatus that places profit over people.

We believe we are stuck, that it’s too hard, that it’s reckless, that we won’t survive. So instead, we sit around kitchen tables and dream of our ‘communes’ and clink our glasses and then leave with our coats and our empty serving plates and go back to our emails and 40-hour work weeks.

Surely there is another way? A way that could be possible for a working class family too?

There are plenty of communities that have imagined alternative ways of living, and are thriving in a world that laughs in their faces. There are, of course, communities for whom these alternatives were once daily life, before white settlers came and attempted to eradicate them.

I will start reading these histories first. Then, I will make a plan that pays respect.

Reading list: Cosmic Anarchy, Pluto Press.

Embedding ritual for safety

In my bedroom, on a chest of drawers bought from the local Vinnies, I have built myself a small altar. The altar is home to items that signify to me that I am safe:

kookaburra feathers tenderly pulled from the lifeless body of a fallen bird

emu feathers from a fence line out west

a small angel made of clay and wire

a ceramic disk with a platypus painted on it

a poem written on red cardstock, ripped from the back of a journal, rolled up and tied with twine

candles Sal and I dipped in beeswax in her kitchen

paintings bought from artists who have similar stories

oracle and tarot cards, narrative devices that I use to reframe challenges I’m finding it hard to navigate.

The collection lives and breathes.

When you struggle with panic attacks and inner turbulence, having tangible items to ground yourself is extremely helpful. I have witnessed friends create altars in their homes for years, watched on in therapeutic circles as items are placed in the centre to symbolise the presence of strength or protection or softness. It never made sense to me, until I opened my heart to it.

The territory of ritual and of spirituality was once very familiar to me. Prayer and devotion were coded into my bones for the first twenty years of my life. I tasted the expansiveness a spiritual practice could offer at a young age, but I sensed there was more to be had outside the confines of an institutionalised, conservative and subservient religion. I had just, until recently, harboured ill-informed judgements about those that do so on their own terms.

I can hear the Christian voices tell me I’m trying to play God, trying things on to see what will fit, what will suit me and allow me to keep living my ‘life of sin’. I can hear the voice of secular Western culture telling me that it’s all ‘full of shit’, God is dead, there is no point to any of it. And yet, I will persist. I will persist because hope strengthens me, because resting in a home that holds me makes me feel safe, and because the more magic I seek, the more I find.

Celebrating a new way to make art

I have had many creative practices throughout my life, but I never dared to call myself an artist. Art to me has always been paintings good enough to be sold, music good enough to listen to, ceramics good enough to drink from.

Recently, as I have been preserving food, writing this blog, knitting cardigans, dancing alone and growing indigo for dying, I have realised just how much what I do is imbued with a sense of creativity, and just how connected these activities make me feel to the grand metaphor.

It is through the vehicle of making that I can connect to my emotional wellbeing. There is space for her to exist when I’m cutting slices of cucumbers for pickles, when I’m spooning cake batter into cake tins, when I’m sitting on the couch, laptop in hand, writing this blog.

As I learn to celebrate these methods as the work of an artist (artist being a state of mind more so than an output), my sadness has a softer place to swim. She can arise tenderly. She doesn’t need to force herself through busy to remind me that she’s there.

~

The emotional capacity of humans is vast and interesting and heartbreaking, and I love writing into it. When you find language for your emotional landscape, and you use that language often, the shame no longer has a seat at the table and vulnerability ceases to become so scary.

I am sad and it might be depression, but I refuse to bow to the shame of that, refuse to take the shame that people project onto me about how we should be/see/feel. Life is complex, and I want to feel the truth of that more than I want to keep the walls I’ve built standing.

Here’s to sadness, readers, and here’s to joy.

Ruby x