Two friends of mine recently mentioned that keeping a gratitude journal helped them move through depression. Both these friends are cheerful and extremely persuasive in a way that lends even casual suggestions unusual gravity, so I complied though the idea seemed overly saccharine and “feel good”-y in a way that was aesthetically repugnant. When I tried to begin, plenty of ideas flooded in—my life, more so now than at points in the past, seems like something to be grateful for. All my friends are smart and clever and big-hearted. The chill and grayness of the city I live in have become intimately familiar to me. There is a mobility and freeness and sense of momentum to my life. I feel plenty of anxiety, some of it deeper than others, but most of it controlled.
The thing I struggle with most, and have for the longest, is my inability to really feel what I know to be true—the greatness of my own life—and produce the according output. I don’t know what causes it: maybe garden-variety depression, which half my generation struggles with, and seems to be a relatively minor detail in the overall painting of my life. Maybe an overt preoccupation with the future or the past, an inability to stay completely fixed and soak in the temperature and sounds of the present. Whether it's chemical or psychological or both, it spins in and out of my life, faithful as a boomerang. It has neither the exuberance of mania nor the jaggedness of psychosis, instead leaving me anhedonic and exhausted. But through its fluctuations my life continues. It does! People float in and out. There are disappointments and small lovely surprises. Parties are thrown and I attend them. Movies come out and I watch them. I cope, and sometimes do better than cope.
I frequently experience moments of genuine joy. Like a couple days ago reading Interior States by Meghan O’Gieblyn, stunned by how she'd already lucidly articulated what I was still fumbling to think about. Or a week ago, sitting in a bar with a friend, listening to him talk with uncharacteristic openness and feeling within myself the same openness dislodged, rolling loose like a marble. Or a couple of weeks ago, barreling down a snowy hill in Tahoe with questionable control over my skis, stunned all over again by the black tarmac and the gleaming white of the slopes and people in neon ski jackets and beanies pulled over their eyebrows: proof life is worth living one run at a time. These are the moments when I feel most like myself, or rather, the version of myself that’s most faithful to who I want to be. Immersed in the vitality of the world, optimistic about my ability to move within it, touched by people, who are mostly fun and kind and surprising in their infinite variation, their infinite sameness.
But there are also stretches of my life that are far from that: moments when my emotional landscape is dominated by flat lowness, indifference edged by despair. I feel small and constrained, find myself pinned to its gravity, flailing wildly. In this state I spend hours scrolling through content I don’t care about, opening and closing Messenger anxiously, not responding to anyone. I end up feeling far from the shore of myself, stranded. Why do I have to be so critical when the world is so beautiful? Why am I trying so hard to distract myself when there are so many things I’m genuinely enjoy?
Having tried to run from it, I am learning to sit with this feeling. I don’t think a relationship will fix it, or a work victory, or a night out with friends, or getting drunk, or traveling to Europe. I find that after the fog clears all of those things leave me once again thoroughly alone with myself, and if I don’t like my own company the fundamental problem of it remains untouched. So instead I try to stick with things that are good for me: I write, and I read, and I get work done, and I watch movies. I like to do yoga, which I have to admit really is everything people say it is. Lately I’ve been boxing. I cycle through a variety of workouts, but this is the one that has persisted. When I mention this people always want to know if I spar, and I have to admit that it’s not quite that exciting yet. Instead I show up most weekdays at 5 PM and wrap my hands and punch a bag, combinations and rhythm subject to the instructor’s whims, for an hour. It’s a workout that’s designed for someone approximately 25% more in shape than I am, so I’m always exhausted afterwards, hair sticking out of ponytail and face blotchy. But I always feel good: partly like I’ve been thoroughly and briskly exorcised, partly like my body’s reassured me everything is okay. Depression can often feel like the opposite of expansion, and so I used to believe that what I need was variety, excitement, newness. But—and I don’t know how to best phrase this—when you’re not well, all the newness and beauty in the world is lost on you. The way you are stains everything for better and worse. And I’ve found that routine, sameness—developing the ability to sit still with myself—is what’s helped me most.
I persist with the gratitude journal, hoping what I feel to be real will catch up to what I know to be true. There are good things in my life, little intimacies. Like being woken up last night, tucked under the duvet after a lazy Sunday, because the rain was hammering on the roof. Or how my body can do deadlights and pistol squats and crow pose and push-ups—well, really bad pushups. How my mom picks up on the second ring every time I call. The way SF is the kind of place where people like to start off conversations by asking you about The Future and I hate it but also—I could move to New York and Boston or anywhere else in the world to be snarky, isn’t it sweet to be somewhere where culture enforces wide-eyed dumb-sweet curiosity? Green Apple Books, and Park Gym, and friends who never get too mad at me when I’m late. How every night I fall asleep within two minutes by relaxing every muscle in my face and arms and pretend I am lying supine in a canoe in the middle of a still and moonlight lake. That I can eek out time feeling listless, feeling absolutely nothing at all, knowing I’ll find my way back to attentiveness. Knowing, believing, that attentiveness is the heart of all good work and play.
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