I'd been lonely before.
When I was nine my mother uprooted us. She wanted to live closer to her bestie. With the narcissistic myopia of adults who project their inner lives onto their children she falsely believed that her bestie's son was my bestie, so that with perfect generational symmetry I'd love the change as much as she. In reality I was devastated. My true friends were Pam and Wes and Lulu, neighborhood kids I'd loved since infancy. When she tore me away from them I grieved for years.
I mean this literally. I thought of them day after day. Within hours of receiving my first bicycle I rode it 40 miles across town and back hoping to see them. I didn't.
Uprooting became a major theme in my emotional history. Where change means loss of treasured friendships, disruption of support networks, isolation. The pervasive sense of un-belonging, forever in the wrong place with the wrong people, living the wrong life.
I'd just begun to forge new friendships when the second disaster changed my world forevermore.
The San Diego Unified School District has a gifted program — yay. The District Powers pressured my mother to send me across town to my second new school in just a few months. They were persistent and unsubtle. They told her that I'd mentally stagnate in ordinary classes, and when I pointed out that I'd done fine in ordinary classes up till now they insisted with more emotion than reason that without the accelerated program I'd later falter throughout the whole of a miserably stultified adulthood. I was vehemently opposed, and I was right. It was clear to me that socialization in my new neighborhood was more important than advanced arithmetic. Busing my fourth grade ass to a special school would isolate me from the new friendships that were not yet secure, but which I needed if I were to have any genuine chance at emotional normality. I fought, I said no, I refused, but the adults were united. All of them. I have a vivid memory of an alcoholic neighbor, swirling a glass of bourbon on ice in the hot summer afternoon, slurring her words as she insisted, "Us intelligent people gotta stikka gether."
You can sympathize with my mother's motives. Single parent, factory worker, not much going in life, surrendering her own dreams because it's just too much effort to work forty hours and raise a kid and major in music all together. With her own legacy of childhood abuse, depression, social isolation — and her profoundly Ozarkian belief that children lack lasting emotions.
With consummate cluelessness she had me read two science fiction novels. An explicitly portentous gesture: These will help you understand your new life. They were Slan by A.E. van Vogt, and Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke: both centering on uniquely gifted male children whose profound otherness isolates them radically from peers and society. You're different to everyone else, she was saying. Get used to it.
These were disastrously wrong decisions which profoundly colored the rest of my life. Forever after, wherever I was, was wrong. In my blue-collar neighborhood I was the special kid who was too good for the neighborhood school. At school I was the blue-collar bad boy in a world of white-collar good boys and girls. Our fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Schulman, said so, out loud, in front of the class. "I taught at your school," she said, pointing at me. She meant the school in my neighborhood which would have been mine had I not been exiled to the gifted program. "You're lower class."
I said nothing, because even at the tender age of nine I knew not to argue with the truth.
I was miserable. And very lonely, and very lonely at home, where I coped with schoolday misery by calling in sick two or three days a week. When children lack the power to overrule adult ineptitude all they can do is evade. I learned to wear masks, meaning, hide my feelings and my ambitions from others, because I was convinced from experience that if I gave them access they would fuck them up. I maximized my personal control by withholding my identity. I built multiple public personas, all false: False Mark at School, False Mark in The 'Hood, False Mark Among Family. Where my fear was that if I shared True Mark, someone would take him away from me.
It did feel very much like the protagonists of the sci-fi novels with which my mom had so carefully delineated her view of who I was to become. Like Jommy Cross, the orphan mutant in Slan, I hid my lonely identity in fear of those in power. Like Alvin in Against the Fall of Night I rebelled, at first within the limited means available to childhood, eventually bursting openly into full-on-fuck-you revolt. I was lonely all the time. I've been lonely all the time ever since.
But loneliness is not depression.
Early medical and psychiatric beliefs regarding depression in children and adolescents were that juveniles were psychologically unable to experience 'true' depression, and consequently, depression in this population was considered to be rare. As the theoretical and clinical understanding of depression has grown, it has become apparent that depression does occur in juveniles and that it is diagnostically predictive. It is now recognized that despressive disorders occur more frequently than previously believed, and, if left untreated, may seriously compromise a patient's sense of self-worth, impair school performance, damage familial bonds, and impair both interpersonal and peer functioning, as well as intrapersonal capacities.
— William P Fleisher, MD FRCPC1,2 and Laurence Y Katz, MD FRCPC, "Early onset major depressive disorder", Paediatr Child Health. 2001 Sep; 6(7): 444–448.
For me, "adolescent onset" lasted about four years and was very different to the two subsequent periods of major depression I experienced later in life. Today it would probably be diagnosed as Agitated Depression or Mixed Affective State. While I experienced many of the classic symptoms I was also very angry, and wired with jittery electrical energy which sometimes felt uncontrollable.
Around age 15, ish, I found myself having difficulty concentrating. I became disinterested — obviously disinterested in school, that goes without saying — now also disinterested in friendships, sports, dating, reading. I'm surprised they didn't put me on ritalin — today they'd have me on Adderall in half a heartbeat. I shook and bounced and spun, rocked on my heels, chattered continually, all the while feeling more and more that I was somehow sinking into the ground while shooting up about six inches a year, so that my bones ached and my muscles felt like they were burning from the inside out.
Reading was difficult. As a child I'd loved reading but with depression in adolescence it was necessary to concentrate in order to concentrate. I'd have to double-back to re-read whole chapters 'cos I'd lost the thread somewhere. I'd have twenty books open, each of which I'd partly absorbed and partly forgotten. Studying required re-reading many many times.
Circadian rhythm was fully whack. My pattern for about ten years was to stay up all night in intense anxiety which drained away only at dawn. It was an extreme hypervigilance, where rustling leaves outside would leave me bolt upright in bed, listening with all the might I could summon. Much of my truancy was driven by insomnia. Even on days when I did turn up I was frequently a couple of hours late.
I grew my hair. This was less a badge of post-Hippie teenage Zeppelin-worship than a physical screen to hide behind. If I wanted to talk to you I'd put it back in a pony tail. If I didn't, which was most of the time, I'd shake it forward: now you see me, now you don't. I was scrawny and girlish, a favorite target for bullies and jocks, until the bullies figured out that if they fucked with me I was willing to die to kill them first, and the jocks came to realize that I was better at most sports than they were. Hair was a costume, and I had a lot of practice assuming false personae.
The masks I wore became more and more extreme. I lived parallel lives. The nerdy wargame boys, the older stoners, my neighborhood kids, girls on the beach. These were separate universes I moved between, a Postmodernist collision of disparate worlds with me as the gateway.
At school I lost my formerly upright posture and walked with stooped shoulders, so that hair covered my face; I'd peer out from dirty wireframes with owlish vigilance. I was simultaneously fast-talking and uncommunicative. I learned that jokes were as effective a screen as hair: if I kept people entertained they'd not ask questions. So that I was both class clown and deeply withdrawn.
Humor was handy with the stoners, too, typically in the canyon a block from campus. There was very little money, so getting high required mad skill at social engineering. Little by little I slipped into drug abuse. If this was an attempt at self-medication, I picked the wrong medicines. My favorites were acid or alcohol-plus-speed, the best bang-for-the-buck highs, dramatically exacerbating my already manic hyperactivity. If I couldn't get those I'd do weed or reds, at that time the primary teenage drugs of abuse. It was the uppers I lived for, though. Speed made me even more physically jittery than before, but it calmed the racing thoughts which kept me so distracted.
On my block I was able to channel my agitation into sports. I played football or basketball every day, and in summer I'd go for sixty or eighty mile bike rides all over the city. I joined in crazyass games of bicycle chase: up and down curbs, around trees, down flights of concrete stairs, between and around moving cars on the street. A scene in Alicia Vikander's Lara Croft movie is similar, but we'd have five or six rabbits running at once. After dark I'd run two or three miles, trying to calm down. The endorphin made me feel like God, but I still couldn't sleep.
My only memories of calm during these years is of girls on the beach. I'd skip school to hang with the girlfriends of the silly surfer dudes. I wasn't yet hitting on the girls, I was inexperienced and they were frequently college women, allkindsa beyond scrawny teenagers. But I loved being with them. I loved their voices: womanly yet still girlish. They were kind to me and patient with me and it felt good to be with them. It felt like they were looking after me, although I was keenly aware of not truly belonging.
Always, wherever I was was the wrong place to be. I felt close to no-one, confided in no-one, hid my disparate realities each from the others. Didn't care, wasn't interested. Couldn't see the point. Frequently had trouble processing what people said to me. Didn't see how it applied to me. Couldn't tell what they wanted from me, or why I should give a fuck.
In hindsight, depression is so painfully clear in the limited number of school pics I failed to prevent. Hair; body language; dirty wireframes masking dilated eyeballs. Downcast, confused, lonely. Poster boy for teenage onset congenital yeeps. Thanks gene pool! Your boy is fucked.
There was — of course — no diagnosis. This was fifteen years before Prozac, when the culture had no realistic concept of "mood disorder", and "mental illness" was synonymous with "booby hatch". In adults, symptoms of depression were commonly viewed as laziness or self-pity, while the same symptoms in teenagers were seen as perfectly ordinary acting-out. My family's hillbilly outlook was that the emotions of children are unreal: children have no lasting or deep feelings, and whatever complaints they may express are hollow holdovers from infancy, crying at every little thing. All the adults thought this way. My mother was distant, inward, wrapped-up in her own multiple legacies of childhood abuse. School authorities showed no interest at all.
Most importantly, nobody knew. I was extremely skilled at dissembling, and I was not about to share the real events of my life, the important events. Adults could not be trusted. They were incompetent, and they were disinterested. I wore my masks. I kept adults and schoolkids alike at far more than arm's length. It's not really anyone's fault that nobody understood.
I had a girlfriend for a year I was not close with. Another for another year I was equally not close with. There were school kids who imagined we were friends, who I gave not a second thought to after graduation until they looked me up on Facebook decades later to tell me they missed me. I had no idea who they were.
From middle school through high school I have very few memories. The ones I'm able to bring into focus feel like someone else's home movies. Yah I was there, but it has nothing to do with me. Just passing through. In many of them I'm at the beach when I should be in school, getting high with older girls I'm not yet having sex with. In others I'm drinking rum on the bleachers, or spending the schoolday holding hands with my neighborhood gf at her mother's apartment. Over time I'm increasingly at the university, UC San Diego, when I should be in high school. I'm volunteering at the Che Cafe or at Groundwork Books, I'm learning about Anarchism from the milieu and about Frankfort School Marxism from Marcuse's grad students.
I used the word "graduation" back there but it was others who graduated, not me. The Adult Powers took notice of me long enough to inform me, about three weeks before the end of my senior year, that my services were no longer required. Motherfuckers! To have waited that long. I assume it was their little bureaucratic way of saying "Fuck you too, kid." If they'd been even remotely polite they'd have done it years before.
Where even the reading rebounded: amplifying and focusing the darkness I was experiencing.
Like probably the majority of American teenagers of that era my first exposure to mood disorder in literature was The Catcher in the Rye. Where so many of my high school peers loved Salinger, I found his world perplexing and off-putting. He seemed to suggest that Satori belongs to a certain class of Ivy League intellectuals with the leisure and the wherewithal to pursue it, where the result is less enlightenment than spiritual snobbery. He romanticized mental illness, equating breakdown with illumination, so that with part of my struggling brain I thought perhaps my struggle was to understand God, and might therefore lead to something positive. My ambition to become a writer was coming into focus, and what I learned from Salinger was, I'm supposed to feel this way, because this is how writers feel.
Holden Caulfield led to Franny and Zooey who led to Seymour's door with its once snow-white beaverboard lettered with epigrams. Which led to Seymour, which led to a certain slip of the pen, which opened a different door, the definitive literary door onto Depression Central: Søren Kierkegaard. Who became, for me at seventeen, the Romantic avatar of despair.
Among philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard is depression's poster boy. Free of Hegel's commitment to resisting despair, Kierkegaard followed every truth to its illogical final point, striving to eschew compromise. He took curious comfort from his pain because he believed in its honesty and reality. 'My sorrow is my castle,' he wrote. 'In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I loved my melancholy.' It is as though Kierkegaard believed that happiness would enfeeble him.
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas Of Depression (p. 316). Scribner. Kindle Edition.
I loved Kierkegaard's epigrams: the concision with which he was able to express profound sorrows. He wrote, "I feel the way a chessman must, when the opponent says of it: this piece cannot be moved." To this day I find that an extraordinary statement of exactly how I feel when depression renders me hopeless. So I concluded that things were exactly as they should be.
This matters, because we adapt to the ideologies that surround us. If the concept of depression as treatable neurochemical disruption is available to you, you'll be more likely to seek help than if depression is thought of as weakness, or malingering, or a literary affectation. So I sank and, instead of fighting, I embraced.
Next was naturally The Bell Jar. But it was a very different experience.
At the time it was only recently available in the U.S., where reviewers were reading it through the filter of The Catcher in the Rye. I found the comparison glib, and sexist. The two works are entirely different orders of observation and intent. Plath's writing frightened and haunted me. Salinger's left me exasperated and to a certain degree contemptuous.
Salinger is didactic, elitist, class-bound, smug. Plath is hilarious, self-deprecating, vastly more humane, and a far better writer. Esther Greenwood's a working class girl on scholarship, Holden Caulfield's an entitled Park Avenue twit. Esther's driven because she has to be, Holden's the ur-slacker because he can be. Esther's brilliant, Holden's a clod. Salinger romanticized mental illness, equating breakdown with enlightenment. Plath's narration of her attempted suicide made me cry.
Salinger had no direct impact, but he led to Kierkegaard, who became unfortunately central for a time. Plath's impact was immediately visceral. Not only the alarming fragility she narrates, but most particularly it's internalness, by which I mean, its origin within her own psyche, rather than from some external shock.1 Esther like Plath herself is broken. That's just how she is, and in the absence of scientific understanding of neurochemistry its mystery was frightening. I knew I wasn't right — was I broken? Would I one day crawl under my home with a fistful of sleeping pills and a big glass of water?
I've re-read it this week. In the days since, I haven't been able to stop crying. I attribute that not merely to my current fragility but also to the beauty of Plath's prose, and the power of her intellect, and the infinitely sad depth of my inability to protect her.
I began dramatically challenging The Adult Authorities to notice me.
I became more and more brazen in my absences, and I was more and more frequently intoxicated when I showed up. When a football player insulted one of the special-ed kids I socked him smack in the nose. Hauled in front of the Vice Principle to explain myself I called him a "fat cunt". I was unjustly flunked in Chemistry, the one class I truly loved. After that I refused to return, so that I flunked second term as well. Turned out I had a "counselor" — who knew? The one time she spoke to me she was entirely disinterested in learning who I was or what was happening in my world. Instead she restricted herself to expressing her personal disappointment over my chemistry failure — I assume this means I'd diminished her performance evaluation. After that I got drunk every day until they expelled me.
I had no framework for understanding these experiences. "Depression" wasn't yet a term that was in popular currency. I wasn't Holden Caulfield, I wasn't Esther Greenwood, I was rebelling in an entirely more confrontational way than Søren Kierkegaard, and there were no additional models that I knew of. The idea that I had a mood disorder, or any other mental aberration, was not available.
Someone should have known, someone should have done something. But how could they? I was a cypher to all my circles of non-friends and unless I was socking people in the nose or calling them a fat cunt I was invisible to the authorities. I would of course never have reached out. I felt the authorities had betrayed me, and at this exact moment I was reading about Vietnam, discovering that we'd all been betrayed, by authorities far larger than the San Diego Unified School District.
With nowhere to turn I collapsed more and more inward, until at the end of this evolution I flatly refused to leave my room. I stayed there for a year, despairingly reading Kierkegaard, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Joseph Campbell.
The worst, where I had the full panoply of classic symptoms — lethargy, sleep disruption, weight loss, social isolation, melancholy, suicidality — happened the first year after high school. I took a gap year, to read the literature and the mythology I'd become fascinated by. I withdrew into my room, seeing no-one, living on comfort food: chips, cake, sodas, cookies. I was not exercising, or getting sunlight, or having sex, or talking on the phone. Over that year I sank into profound despondency, with frequently suicidal ideation. Where loneliness, decades later identified as my major trigger, multiplied and amplified that despair.
I wanted to die. Except, I didn't really. I wanted to stay in my room bouncing a tennis ball off the walls. Only I hated doing that. What I really wanted was to play wargames with my nerd friends. Except we weren't truly friends and what I actually wanted was to play basketball with my real friend, Craig, or ride bikes together. Only not really, because I wished I was at Marine Street flirting with rich La Jolla girls in bikinis. Probably dying would be simplest but probably it would require energy? And I really couldn't see myself having enough. I wanted to get high and look at pictures. In the end I'd stay up all night listening for noises outside the window.
I thought of death continually. But I was very scattered, so that even the thought of death was unfocused. It would feel good for the turmoil and the exhaustion to be gone. But there was no way I'd ever be that organized.
Somewhere in there I had a long, adolescent, destructive relationship with entirely the wrong partner.
Charming narcissist: ur-model of many future heartbreaks.
Ruthless in her selfishness. She wanted what she wanted and it was gonna happen, nevermind collateral damage. Cutting, frequently biting in a self-absorbed way. Annoyed by my poor spelling, my writing in general, my acne and my skinny legs. In a cruel spasm of Narcissistic Personality Disorder she told me she was embarrassed to be seen with me. That hurt, and I carried the wound for a very long time.
Which, as you may imagine, dovetailed perfectly with Kierkegaard as Romantic avatar of despair.
It made perfect artistic sense. Was I supposed to have successful relationships? Of course not. What would there be to write about?
But the damage was real. When you're thinking of suicide 24x7, being told by your girlfriend that she finds you embarrassing is a wickedass dick punch.
In her defense, she had no idea. I never told her, and she was far too disinterested in the world outside herself to notice without being prompted.
1. Daphne Merkin writes, "Men, that is, have cannily figured out how to sidestep the implication of moral failing that attaches to mental illness—as well as the specific criticism of self-indulgence that is attributed to more introspective accounts of this condition—by insisting on a force outside themselves, or on a purely genetic susceptibility. The female version, by contrast, tends to tip the other way. As epitomized by Anne Sexton's poetry and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, female sufferers tend to take ownership of the condition of depression, accepting that it springs not only from errant biology but from a yawning inner lack—some elusive craving for wholeness or well-being. This writing is usually highly interior almost to a fault: the world in which the narrator moves when she is not depressed is given such short shrift that it tends to fall away entirely." (Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017 (p. 13).) While I find the female/male generalization a bit exaggerated — IMO the best autobiographical narrative of depression is by far Andrew Solomon's, while The Catcher in the Rye is itself certainly highly interior — her point that women's narratives minimize exteriorality is interesting.