My Friend, Depression

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Faith can move mountains. 

Don’t quote me on this-I didn’t say this shit. I’ve prayed my whole life. 

Depression is a mountain, say I. A mountain of shit that stuffs my mouth full of wormy dirt and moldy dishes and vomit-speckled porcelain in my ugly horror yellow tiny bathroom and hairy bathtub and armpit-sweat hills of shoe-stepped clothes smell-tested many times over, that one wetter than this, underwear good enough for probation appointments, pebble pimpled rugs stains this flavor and that, stuffs my mouth for no purpose other than to blot out my prayers, muffle my pleas to please please budge an inch, smothering shit-mountain until I know what it is like to not be able to breathe for insert length of time here, letssay impossible eons of blackhead growth-cycle and literal paint peeling, my filthy mouth unable to form holy words, to pour forth praise from forgiven mud-tainted lips, mercified tongue, smoked out lungs gracified to high heaven if not for being buried alive under the weight of empty calendar squares and no-job social security days, not unlike Sylvia Plath’s damned bell jar, and look what happened to her. 

Me among drug addicts who talk in circles about how they used drugs to not feel, to dampen emotions. My experience is the opposite. I inhaled and drank and snorted and made love to deeply ingested French-kissed, tongue swallowed evil drugs in welcome of all the feels, the dopamine colors flooding of childhood joy. Substances and narcotics lapped up like a dirty sin-lovin’ dog, illegally un-zombifying me, zapping me like Bradbury’s Electric Man. To rise up and get shit done, check a box to feel good about before laying my head on faded pillow greased out but dry at least. 

Me being told you can’t use this coping method, the only one that I’ve found that works, you can’t see colors anymore, handcuffed and scolded and being sorry and meaning it, but being tired of being dead and not having the strength to go day after day after white-out nothing day but steaming shit-mouthed lung-clogged mud-stuffed mountain built mostly of time matter.  

 What do you do for a living? 

 I get government assistance. I don’t have to live. 

 I pray worms. 

You know, sometimes when criminals say I’m sorry, when alcoholics say this is the last time, maybe, just maybe, they mean it. 

Anyway, the therapists in rehab, they tell me a new idea, me smelling and ragged sit shame-postured in a circle when I just want to be alone and not have to do anything or ever be asked anything of, adult-shamed don’t-look-at-me mountain of everyone staring, therapists tell me this new idea:  

 Depression maybe isn’t big. 

 And that’s it, and it changes everything.  

Depression maybe isn’t a mountain, or maybe it is, but maybe it’s a friendly mountain, a mountain I can name and talk to. A companion who won’t judge my shat-on filth-swallowed big-nosed Squidward-assed prayed-out zit-smeared soul.  

 So I write a paper, and it’s called: 

 I’m Depressed. So what? 

And because art is therapy and cathartic, and creative people have to create or be unzombified illegally and thereby arrested once again so that I can’t just do whatever the hell I want, and because I don’t want to be condemned but to pray holy words from my mouth, I write the damn paper. 

And it’s a prayer of sorts, though quite unlike any prayer I’ve ever prayed before; it’s a prayer not to move a mountain, but to befriend it. And oh how I hoped this could be, but I mean let’s be real, how crazy does it sound to accept-perhaps even to love-one’s depression? 

I put pen to paper, and I paint a graphic picture, talking about, what would it be like if I made a sculpture that represented my depression?  

And because art is therapy and cathartic, and creative people have to create or be unzombified illegally and thereby arrested once again so that I can’t just do whatever the hell I want, and because I don’t want to be condemned but want to pray holy words from my mouth, I write the damn paper. I paint a graphic picture, and I talk about, what would it be like if I made a sculpture that represented my depression? The modern art museum kind that showcases blank canvas, or like how people peed in jars to be the first person to do it, or sold their biohazardous excretion for millions and brilliance, or splatter their blood on a canvas in the name of celebrating humanity, I get it, and what if I glue staple smudge smear my own mountain symbolizing my depression?  

So I write about my life from roughly 2014 when I felon-ized my social status irrevocably, gavel-pounding once and for all never-been-the-same since type shit that I have to pay for and make up for and be sorry for for all time which is fine, so long as I pay my fine and make myself better and do the damn thing, anyway, my life in Laramie as the freak that walked around Stinky Lake Park at odd hours, shouldn’t I be working, that whole time, what I might refer to as my very own Medieval Period, my personal Dark Age, and I mash together assorted images of my depressed and depressing existence that went on for the better part of a decade, and I stood up and read it and said, and I quote:  

Broken porcelain from a specific toilet bowl with layers of brown smudges mysterious black dots formed from months of wishing I would just pick up the brush literally right next to it, mixed together with flecks of vomit haphazardly smeared around; dirty dishes piled in a sink filled with grime and slime and green sludge that smelled like pond scum and sulfur, like LaBonte Park in Laramie, the aforementioned park moniker of Stinky Lake or Pond or whichever; piles of plates and cups and scattered silverware with hairs and bits of trash stuck on top uncleaned for months, because my sink plugged up and I never bothered to try and fix it despite the odor worsening and the accumulating green ooze ever thickening, and despite how easy it would have been and me acknowledging this on the phone, making sincere promises and being embarrassed yet time goes on; veritable mountains of trash and boxes of microwavable food strewn about; paste on a few squares of carpet un-vacuumed, bearing stains of I-don’t-know-what mixed with dirt and dust and God-only-knows-what; a dirty, sunk in mattress yellowed with sweat stains that tilted constantly toward the floor and threatened to crush whatever actually important items that may have found their way underneath, sentimental and forgotten at the same time; wrinkled clothes strewn about everywhere underfoot worn several times each, the lucky ones cleaned in the sink jailhouse-style so I could throw them on to go pee in a cup for probation (the highlight of my month, no joke); a fridge shelf with cans of rotted foot (I proved to my autistic best friend whom incidental y I adored because her innocence and prayer-kissed mouth that had never ingested anything other than a margarita on her 21st birthday that she never even finished that mold grows in a surprising number of shades of green-maybe-teal and off-whites and quite a few oranges and reds that could be called beautiful otherwise, that could be a respectable science project if not for what it was); notebooks and ripped papers full of never-finished or half-finished of finished-but-may-as-well-be-nothing projects; to top it all off, I would add printed page after page after page of internet history that read something along the lines of Youtube Youtube Netflix Youtube Yahoo mail Netflix LATimes Daily Crossword Youtube Youtube Facebook Pinterest Netflix Facebook Search Query: Diarrhetic Baby Hippos Youtube Youtube You You You...you get the picture. 

I would watch movies on perilous tilted bed until I couldn’t stand watching movies, then inevitably find another movie to watch that I couldn’t remember three days later. Sore from sitting there, but-except for going outside for what I dubbed my vape-’n-pace every insert too-often time unit-would continue to watch movies, on my stomach, on my back, rearranging once-blue pillows, placing the computer on the ground, on the mattress, on a pile of blankets of all shapes of Grandma-knitting and sizes of Walmart memories.  

I would sleep as much as I could, wake up, ingest kratom until I vomited so I could ingest more kratom, get tired, go to bed twenty minutes after waking up at 6PM one day, 2AM the next, each day bleeding into the next to form an endless series of what-is-it-that-you-do calendar square-shaped question marks. 

A blob of an existence, shapeless, form and void, like in the beginning was the earth. Before the word was, and the mountains were, and the word moved the mountains. 

And I wept. Oh, how I wept. 

I became the type of person who could narrowly miss getting run over by a car and maintain a steady pulse, or have a gun pulled on me without feeling the healthy fear of one who value their day-to-day existence. 

I would walk until my feet were sore, sometimes over 12 hours, walk obsessively, I had my 9th St. Walk, LaBonte walk, Beauford walk, extended Beauford walk, downtown walk, various combinations with minor tweaks here and there, university campus where I felt too dirty to be except at night, too lowly until the sun went down and I could be a freak unseen. Return to my apartment, relieve myself, feel an insatiable need to walk one of the routes again, turning into several more hours, maybe it’s morning maybe not, maybe I’ll have another seizure maybe not, maybe two pints of ice cream maybe three, maybe I’ll finally get my violin maybe I’ll just thinking about playing violin, maybe probably watch a movie while wondering why I can’t bring myself to play anymore, do anything anymore, I’m so excited to go to sleep, I’m sorry God for another wasted day, I’ll try better harder more sincerely tomorrow, all this over and again ad nauseum, always an acute sense of wasted time, I’m scared because I’m not scared, not enough, would prefer to be scared but there was just nothing there where the fear should be or maybe anger, or dare-to-hope joy, maybe, or anything but this monster mountain sculpture graphic painting.  

 As a dog returns to its vomit. 

 Tomorrow I’ll have energy and get stuff done and have an honest response.  

 As dust to dust, and ashes to ashes. 

 Eventually I’ll make something of myself.  

The Sun Also Rises and a lame echo of Hemmingway’s shotgun (or I think it was) from split-open earth void looking down on itself. 

 Big, for sure big, the kind of big that can’t become even relatively small. 

 But a monk on Netflix says, “Welcome.”  

Welcome, depression. In the old sense of the word, as in, well, come in, no sense keeping you out if you’re here to stay. A color of its own right. Just another spark in my old firework soul, a necessary shade in a painting that is not just one thing, not the first or the last but just another piece, essential matter, part of the whole. 

 A constant companion. We might as well get to know each other.  

 Not big or small but the exact size of me. 

 That’s the big idea, only it’s so simple how big can it be?  

 I’m depressed. So what?  

 

So I read my paper and it passes. 

And I start thinking, and my schema of depression begins to change. I’m praying and I’m thinking, and over time I guess I came to realize that maybe those silly, stupid words aren’t so lame and ridiculous after all, because one could argue that by accepting the mountain, I didn’t see it as a mountain, didn’t see it as this terrible horrible no good very bad thing that needed to be moved anymore, so is it possible that maybe just maybe my faith did move the mountain, after all? 

So I graduate rehab and I’m scared as all get-out to leave, and I’m depressed. I get a place to live and be safe and I’m depressed, then I finally get a job and it actually goes well and I’m depressed, and I’m happy one day and I’m depressed, and I wake up and I go to bed and I find bits of meaning here and there, and maybe I don’t have to it’s not up to me, I’m just depressed and you’re you and we’re all our own companions, what’s not to love?