dignity & depression

on spooky season with lessons from the fallout

Hello gentlepeople,

It’s been a while.

These last few weeks, I’ve been acclimating to a new part-time job. As you may know, if you’ve been here awhile, I was unemployed for a considerable amount of time.

This year has been the hardest year of my life and with three months left, I sometimes wish I could just close my eyes and blink it over. But I know, not only that it is impossible, but the passing of time may have little effect on the memories my body will hold as I go forward.

So I breathe through it all. If I take a few months to stop on my walks and stare at the leaves as they turn, I count it all miraculous. I wish I could collect every moment I find myself loving the present—because I know what it is like to spend months wishing I could leave it.

"In A Time" by Maya Angelou

In a time of secret wooing
today prepares tomorrow's ruin
left knows not what right is doing
my heart is torn asunder.

In a time of furtive sighs
sweet hellos and sad goodbyes
half-truths told and entire lies
my conscience echoes thunder.

In a time when kingdoms come
joy is brief as summer's fun
happiness its race has run
then pain stalks in to plunder.

October is Depression Awareness Month.

I wondered for a while if I should do something to highlight it, as someone who has lived with depression for years.

Depression doesn’t exist to make logical sense. It’s not like being sad temporarily. For me, it’s like carrying a heavy backpack, full of reasons not to live. One I have had since I was a teenager.

There are good days when I can carry the weight—and some might call me graceful. There are bad days when everything is a drag. There are days in between, marked for their moments of sprinkled forgetfulness—where joy interrupts, and I almost like it here. There are streaks of days when tremendous effort might make it seem like I am whatever it means to be “normal.” In all those days, I am a person with depression, sometimes winning, sometimes losing sometimes in a tug of war. This is my normal.

Until 2021, I had not been on medication consistently. Since then, I’ve learned just how intertwined my depression is with the psychosomatic functions of my body. I’ve learned, through trial and error, how to lift some of the weight and get on with life.

Healing for me is an ongoing pursuit, with no real destination. I know this, and I know I feel a strange duplicity when people ask me how I am doing and I say I’m okay on days when it was really hard to get up.

So I have done my best in life to hold the box of horrors close to my chest. But this year, certain events knocked over the contents of that box and I have been picking them up ever since. I fell all the way apart in ways I have feared my whole life and somehow, I am still here. Somehow I still have people in my life who love me.

fear and friendliness

As I walk around my neighborhood people have their Halloween decorations up, I find myself critiquing “spooky season.” I walk around with scary things on my mind a lot of the time.

I know what it’s like to share something I think is benign and scare others, either with the depth of the thought or the reality it unearths. If only we used the exercise of fear to course-correct. Let’s talk about the things we are afraid to talk about.

I think a lot, too, about how much spookiness depends on disregulating the nervous system….for fun. As someone who also has C-PTSD, every day is full of a series of things that could scare me.

Also, I am Black. I live in a body that the world may find spooky…in the same beat that it seeks to put the spook in me to manage my presence.

So today, I am not afraid to scare you with these confessions about dignity and depression. Fear is a helpful emotion and response to hearing someone has had thoughts of unaliving themselves. But if you are to take up the practice of fear and recalibrate your nervous system…perhaps…lean in? Learn up and offer something useful.

Before I found a good therapist, the right friends, and helpful books, I heard a lot of bad advice. Heard a lot of out-of-context scriptures and received a lot of pats on the back from well-meaning but ill-equipped pastoral figures. I have learned that I do better when I do not depend on any one person to have all the answers or provide all the comfort.

dignity and depression

I remember a time when I read Maya Angelou but didn’t “get” Maya Angelou. I heard a quality of voice that spoke to what it meant to survive. I heard a confidence that was unbacked up by a world that does not see dignity in Black women.

I was 11 when I first heard her poems and I remember thinking, “I’m going to do that.” I read one of her autobiographies, about growing up, surviving abuse, and finding her voice through mutism. Her poems have always felt like a glorious refusal to me. A refusal to stay dead after being declared dead upon arrival into this world. A refusal to stay dead despite hope being killed within you. A refusal to stay dead despite the hands that have come down to kill you.

Within me is the same glorious refusal, a dignity that survives depression.

• A dignity that survives depression even when it is not artistically useful.

• A dignity that survives depression even when I cannot tell you what I saw while I was in the depths of it.

• A dignity that survives my inability to bounce back…

• A dignity that yes, sometimes looks like what I’ve been through, and yet find the strength to demand the simplest of human hopes.

• A dignity that survives the pull towards isolation and reaches out…despite the fear that lives in me…or the hands that reach out to handle the fallout.

Landing Tracks

Decided to pick songs as landing tracks.