Somewhere in Alberta (Mental Health Pt 1)

 

Somewhere near Banff, Alberta

We were somewhere outside of Lethbridge, Alberta in a Ford Econoline van. There were eight of us, all grad students in architecture school on our way back from a fascinating conference on the future of computer-aided design at some fancy conference center in Banff. Someone got a text message that a student from one of the earlier years of school had committed suicide the previous night. I had been his Graphics teacher. The mood turned somber pretty quickly in the van. 

You put eight graduate students in a van for long enough, conversations will emerge. And pretty soon, we were neck deep in an intense discussion of mental health. Some of my classmates bared their struggles with mental health and depression. I remember vividly because at the time I was twenty two and invincible. I had never experienced depression or self doubt. I had succeeded at everything that I tried and was overcome with wonder at the possibility of the world. I recall trying to convince everyone that depression was a figment of their imagination; that all you have to do is believe in yourself and it will get better. I am paraphrasing and I doubt it was as cringey as I recall it now, but I certainly know better now. 

I sit at my table this morning listening to Justin Townes Earle, a spectacular musician not much older than me who died of a drug overdose, having used heroin for years to salve his depression. I know what depression is now. I just crawled out of it. Starting in 2019, I have had numerous unexpected bouts of depression. Sometimes it appears for no reason at all if I am doubting my place in the world. Sometimes it is two days, a couple times it has been two full weeks. As someone who is too stubborn to change my bad habits and too proud to medicate it away, I fight it with my writing. Often I write tales of past adventures, but where I sit now, staring at this past weekend with bewilderment, I feel the duty to write about mental health for the first time, if only for my future self to read.

Rationality vanishes in the swoon that I call the Spiral. Past accomplishments are meaningless. Future goals are pointless. Reason falls on deaf ears. The world feels hazy. Everything is there where I left it the day before, but it is lifeless. I sit at my computer and try to write columns but I stare blankly at an empty page. I hold my guitar but don’t play it. Where I usually have random stories or snippets of lyrics falling out of my head faster than I can write them down, there is silence. The frustration sets in. The voice in my head, so accustomed to being productive, is going door to door in the offices of my brain yelling profanities into my memory banks, chiding them for slacking on the job. With no progress, the tantrums come out. I pound the desk, complain loudly to anyone unlucky enough to be in the house. Patience is infinitesimal as I yell at the dogs for even the mildest transgression. More idleness, more frustration, more anger, more idleness, more frustration, more anger. Down the spiral goes until I verbally abuse myself as a worthless idiot with no mental fortitude or value.

I have tried to diagnose what starts and stops these spirals of self doubt. On my best days, I deal with life’s daily challenges triumphantly, mowing them down at a pace that few humans can match. But then sometimes, even the most trivial task can trigger a days-long spiral. That is what seems to have been the tipping point for this past weekend; a fussy light switch in the bathroom that took three hours to diagnose and repair. Now clear headed, it seems so illogical and ridiculous that I stormed around the house for two full days tearing down my lifetime of accomplishments because I couldn’t solve a simple light switch problem. Even after I did solve it with much swearing and angry screwdrivering. 

And that has been my big revelation since that van in Alberta. I now know what my classmates were feeling when they described their battles with depression. It can be like arguing with smoke. Dealing with it feels impossible because its existence is intangible. Spirals of depression are irrational when viewed from afar. I have discovered that it is impossible to rationalize myself out of an irrational spiral. It is virtually impossible to choose to not be depressed. 

Today, I am not in a spiral. Sometime in the last twenty four hours, the haze slowly lifted again and productivity returned. It feels wonderful but I know that I have quite a bit more work to do, not just to recover from lost time, but to prepare myself for the next spiral whenever it may arise. In my early fights with depression, I treated it like chicken pox, something that would knock me down for a while, but eventually, with the right medicine, I would get back up and not have to deal with it again. Unfortunately, I have come to realize that the spiral is more like a hurricane and I am Florida; you don’t know where or when it will strike, but rest assured, there will always be another hurricane that will hit Florida someday. 

This is just part one of a multi-part story of my mental health battles. Sometimes they will all pile up at once, sometimes they will be interspersed with stories of the golden years where life was good and living was easy. With time, I will learn more, but that’s all for now. 

Song of the day: Homesick by Noah Kahan