Brighten The Corners

by Hannah Rome

Humor me if I bore myself for a second. Lately, leaving my house requires three deep breaths. It’s like a high dive, and approaching the threshold is like staring down 30 meters to a surface that looks forgiving, but would actually break all of my bones on impact. Logical me knows that walking out the door is a simple and relatively safe endeavor. Illogical me (speaking), feels like I’ve already been outside three times this week and a fourth outing may be pushing fate. This petite agoraphobia has reared as one of the ugly heads of my depression Hydra, who I’ve been fattening up with weed, doom scrolling, and vitamin D deficiency all year long. 

When I care enough to look, I find myself sunken into the couch in an anatomically impossible position, surrounded by the spoils of indulgence. Dirty dishes, empty water bottles, bags of chips crumpled up like sculptures made for corporate parks. My sweatshirt is stained, my hand down my pants. The glow of the television, out of frame but very much present, reflects off my yawning eyes. When I close them, an image seared into my retina remains: Created by Dick Wolf. I’ve been crying at photographs of my dear dead dog and mistaking instability for whimsy. I eat noodles all day long, knowing that last year’s pants will only fit me again if I get a tapeworm. Then again, I wonder, just how bad could a tapeworm be? I’m stoned all day long, even though I know weed makes my depression worse. Self-sabotage is a hallmark of mental illness, and I’m very, very good.

This has been my arrhythmic dance with depression and anxiety. Sadness grips me by the wrist and leads me in a catatonic waltz, while anxiety plays a frenetic beat that I can never quite catch up to. I was five or six years old when I had my first panic attack — a precocious little nut. I have no choice but to take this on faith, considering that time of my life really only exists in my parents’ oral history. Other than what they’ve told me, those early years are like a blurry montage of core memories, many of which honestly should not have ranked — like my preschool teacher’s ugly ponytail or my brother shitting in the tub. We had a big green backyard. My mom used to pull weeds from it with big dirty gardening gloves that made her look like a survivalist Mickey Mouse. I dug worms out of the mud and caught lizards with such tenderness that they’d let me hold them open palmed. However, I don’t remember the familiar hum of anxiety that vibrates like bass behind my memories both new and indelible. It’s a strange feeling, being told you’ve been a certain way since you could be any way at all. At eleven years old I started having panic attacks that I could remember, and do remember, like the tight fraying fibers of one long neurotic scarf.

When I was young, panic attacks began as an escalation of fights with my parents over normal tween drama like unnecessarily short shorts or using too much data. Now, they’re the culmination of normal twentysomething drama like finding wet food in the sink or my wretched cunt of a boss. It starts with overstimulation, like my skin becomes permeable, exposing my raw nerves. I hyperventilate, my brain drowning itself in oxygen. I feel faint; unconsciousness a tremorous hand extended to lead me somewhere dark, but still. When I was young my mom would sit me down, pull me close against her chest, and have me breathe into a paper bag until I regained my composure. Nowadays, I go into the bathroom and watch myself cry in the mirror, and that, I’d prefer not to unpack.

I was fifteen when I was diagnosed with Depression proper (Major Depressive Disorder if you’re kinky like that). It began with my mom’s concern, which was more serious than normal mom concern, because she was a psychiatrist. She treated teenage girls with concerning behavior for a living. My mom interpreted my panic attacks as Generalized Anxiety Disorder and my constantly being stoned as catatonia. In her profession, disruptive mood swings were treated with SSRIs, so a doctor in her practice wrote me up a prescription for Lexapro. I didn’t see a counselor and I was only ever evaluated by a colleague of my mom’s. I’ve held onto some anger about it -- forced to bear the cross of a diagnosis before I could even understand what it meant. It was isolating. I didn’t know anyone else on antidepressants besides my old cantankerous Jack Russell terrier, and to be fair, he really needed them.

I kept taking the medication for a while after I moved away for college. It wasn’t some great consideration, just a continuation of my routine. As I settled into college and the freedom it afforded me, my routine changed. I left for the bar at bedtime, ate only what I could make in a microwave, and consulted my parents as little as possible. With no one reminding me to take the medication, no one reminding me I had depression, I started to forget both. Once I realized it had been months since I’d taken them, I suddenly became worried the pills had been the only thing standing between me and the proverbial ledge. I thought a bluff might suddenly appear underneath my chin. I almost wanted it to. Needed it to. It was unbearable to think the story my parents told me could have been a lie. That all along I had been normal. I searched for that ledge, the promise of my depression. I thought I might summon it like a spirit. Instead, what lay ahead was a bittersweet expanse, demanding I march forward and leave my decade old prescription behind.

I felt good for a long time. In the dilating distance between me and my last dose of antidepressants, I interrogated my own mental makeup. I couldn’t remember if I’d actually felt depressed when I started medication all those years ago. I do remember being a  moody, disinterested teen who collected school absences like Victoria’s secret thongs. I had panic attacks, but only when I was fighting with my parents. After I stopped taking the medication in my early twenties, I assessed the course of my mood. It was no more, and no less stable than anything else in my life at 20 years old. As time went on, each day more certain than the last, I started to feel fundamentally misdiagnosed and misunderstood. I was resentful of having to live with what was likely a combination of my parents’ professional bias and an aversion to the tempestuousness of teenage girlhood. Now, convinced of the sanctity of my own introspection, I officially refused the diagnosis of depression and sought to relearn myself outside its lens.

For years, I had the privilege of not paying my mental health any mind. But recently, old issues started scratching at the door. At first, I thought I was just exhausted, struggling as I was with persistent insomnia. I had the bandwidth for exactly one exertion each day, and the rest of the time I would spend trying to build my energy toward a second. The panic attacks came back. They would occur randomly -- I would be walking down the street and would suddenly feel like the center point in a perspective drawing, the entire landscape converging on me. The line between undetectable and untenable is like the horizon: moving away from you steadily until you fall off the edge of the earth. When it occurred to me that I may be depressed, my sadness was all but eclipsed by shame. Everything I had done to find myself, and there I was, in my big green backyard, same as I’d always been.

I went to see a primary care doctor for persistent insomnia, with the goal being a prescription for sleeping pills. In the exam room, I tried my best to look tired, but clean-cut enough for the good shit. My doctor asked if I had anxiety at night. I replied, yes, it’s the best time to have anxiety. She typed something into the computer, I assume about how charming I’d been. She said she was prescribing me Trazodone for sleep and Lexapro for anxiety. Lexapro. I wanted to object, assure her it wasn’t necessary. Instead, I blinked twice and thanked her. I knew my birthright, even if I was the last to know. 

Depression has felt like a brick tied to my shoe, a sandbag of predetermination. I’ve learned, unlearned, and relearned it again. I don’t know if depression is something I have, something I am, a normal reaction to a crumbling world, a harbinger of a crumbling mind. The medication works, sometimes. But, this week I didn’t leave my apartment for three days straight. I’ve been practicing my breathing, showering with lavender oil, and eating a lot of Thai food. I’m working at it, trying to understand the engine that drives me. In lighting the most shadowed parts of myself, brightening the corners, maybe, just maybe, I can find the way through.