There was a time in 8th and 9th grade, when it hurt to talk, move or even look someone in the eye. I wish I could have read a novel about depression then, when I had no name to give it and neither did anybody I knew.
In that period, I shrank within myself and rarely smiled, laughed or talked. I couldn’t form a sentence with anyone that wasn’t broken and halting. In every picture of me for about two years, I look in pain, even when I’m trying to smile. I didn’t know what was wrong with me.
In the past week, I read an insightful and beautiful book, Lovely, Dark and Deep by Amy McNamara, about a girl’s journey through the darkest moments of depression to a slow, halting recovery. This book nails teen depression in such a powerful way. All I could think as I read it was, man, if only this had been handed to me when I was a teenager.
What I remember from then is a haziness, an inability to focus, a drowning. People used to call me out for being spacey, for not understanding what they were saying, for needing everything to be repeated ten times. I didn’t remember anything. I lost things all the time. I learned nothing in school.
In Lovely, Dark and Deep, Amy McNamara captures this fogginess perfectly, as well as the brief moments of clarity, the breaks from the heavy load of depression. I never knew back then that depression doesn’t necessarily mean you’re crying all the time. Sometimes it means you try to escape. I didn’t sleep as Wren/Mamie in Lovely, Dark and Deep does, but rather, I read constantly, even while I walked from place to place. If I didn’t have a book, I daydreamed. I lived within other worlds when my own world was too much for me to bear.
Back then, I had no tools for planting myself in the present and seeing the beauty in every moment, beauty that was both inside and outside of myself. It was all about escape. During this time, I wish I could tell you that I started to write and this made all the difference. I think it would have, but I was too far gone from who I was and what I loved to do.
One of the things that saved me then was swimming. I was on the city swim team – we didn’t have a high school swim team – if we had, I surely would have quit, but the kids at the city swim team didn’t go to my high school and didn’t know I was a pariah. I could be a regular kid there every morning and every night.
From the moment I dove into the water until the time I got out, I had a break from the expectations of others. Ironically, it was one of the only times I cried because nobody could see me under the water, or at least nobody said anything if they did. All I had to do was count every time I did a flip turn. Often the fog would take over and I’d lose count, but at those times, I relied on the kids in front of me to stop when it was time to stop and to go when it was time to go.
When I finished the workout, I always felt a little better, like the water had lifted away some of the darkness. I stood in the hot shower afterward, pushed that button with the timer for the water, again and again, until my hands were prunes and everyone else had gone home. Then I’d get out, change and enter my regular life.
Nowadays, I teach both creative writing and yoga to teens with this experience in mind. I think about how just counting while I was swimming helped plant me in the moment, about the regular breathing required and the solidness of that physical experience.
How does one escape from the darkness that can become such an overwhelming feeling at various stages of life, including when you’re a teen? How do we access the part of us that can separate and observe ourselves, even as we go through powerful emotions? How do we then translate that into something powerful in our art or our writing?
So many artists, writers and creative people experience emotional turmoil, depression, rage. We aren’t known for being the happiest or most balanced people. The question is how do we access that part of ourselves for art and writing without letting it overcome us in life?
In Lovely, Dark and Deep, Wren/Mamie finds her way back to her art as her depression lifts and as she gains a greater sense of herself in the world. I too have found that my writing is strongest when I’m most alive in the moment with a sharp sense of awareness and a feeling of being grounded in the sensory experiences of life. When I feel my feet in my shoes as they take each solid step forward and the slightest breeze blowing through my hair, that’s when I’m most alive as a person, and as a writer. As I write, I’m then able to get into a solid experience within my character’s body.
Stephen King talked about escape in his book, On Writing, which I highly recommend. He said that writers drink because they aren’t writing, not in order to write. We escape in various ways to deal with heavy emotions and yet that takes us away from creative selves. So, how we get back to that creative self to start creating again?
I think meditation is one really powerful tool. A meditation I teach teens is breathing deeply from the belly for a count of eight, holding it for eight, breathing out for eight and holding it again for eight with the breath out. If that’s too much, you can do it for a count of four. When you do this even for a few minutes, you can feel whatever stress, anxiety, heaviness inside of you, lifting just slightly.
This is what I’ve found about depression; it’s not a matter of being happy, but making yourself feel a little better, moment by moment, choosing a thought that’s slightly better than the previous thought, and doing something, anything, that might ease things just slightly. And then pull out your sketch pad or start writing. Take that moment when things have eased up to start creating again and don’t let anything stop you.
Kim Purcell is the young adult author of Trafficked, a novel about a seventeen-year-old girl from Eastern Europe who’s forced to be a modern-day slave in America. When she’s not writing or teaching writing, she loves to do yoga, go on long runs with her dog and dance anywhere a good song is playing, especially in empty elevators or change rooms. (Twirls.)