Depression

& the ice afloat

Dear friends,

I’m not sure I know the name of the river that empties into Rockport Harbor a few miles from our house, on winter days like today yielding an astonishing spread of ice floes edged by sparkling silver crystals, defying comparison with anything but itself, black seawater visible here and there providing a gasp of contrast, the whole frozen quilt undulating with pulses of waves from the ocean, and I have only the slightest desire to look it up, knowing that my maps are back at the house, but it is probably the Goose.

The harbor is not on the way from the elementary school to my office but everyday I come this way after dropping off my boys, and on some days I need to stop and park awhile.

Today I can see the hook of land jutting out into the bay, around which, if I kayaked awhile, I’d eventually come to the little island where last fall I had my first real bout of depression. I was on a film shoot for a week with some of my favorite colleagues, in a truly beautiful setting, working on a whimsical and collaborative film, and through and through I felt a great deadening inside. I hid it as best I could from my crew, walking out early each morning to stand on the rocks, hear the surf, and breathe and talk to myself. For the first few mornings I would try to reason with myself, stating the facts of the situation: I was not in harm’s way, I was doing something I loved, there were no reasons to feel what I felt. When this corrective logic failed to kick melancholy to the curb, and I still felt as though nothing in my life was worth looking forward to, I focused on what seemed like the only merit to the situation: perhaps I finally had a glimpse of what depression was.

There are surely clinical definitions, which I’ve not recently looked up, and after all the word depression is just that, a word, but having spent years surrounded by friends & family who have combated what they described as depression, I felt on that island that I finally understood the depths of my own misunderstanding. There was nothing I could do to snap myself out of how I was feeling, and I had never felt that powerless before. Maybe this is something of what they felt, and I’d had no idea.

I’m always skeptical of anytime I imagine that I know what someone else is really feeling. And indeed I now feel shameful for all the times I would suggest things to a friend - go for a jog, you’ll feel better! Read some poems, that’ll do it! - without having any idea what they were really feeling. On that island, it was clear to me that all the jogs & poems in the world couldn’t have moved my mind to a new place. What I didn’t do, at the time, was talk about it. The thought didn’t even occur to me. I’m not sure I would have known what to say, or who to say it to.

I always bring a first aid kit on our traveling shoots, but we do not bring a therapist or a counselor, like they have on the Starship Enterprise, someone with the rank of Lieutenant Commander who always seems to notice when Picard or Worf is out of sorts. I like to think that younger filmmakers now, more fluent perhaps with mental health challenges, will staff their own film shoots a bit differently, or be more comfortable opening up about where their heads are on a shoot. Workplaces better funded than ours probably (hopefully?) are investing more openly in the minds of their workers, and perhaps some of this is spilling into the scrappy film world. Then again, the state of filmmaking these days has me wondering whether there will even be younger filmmakers on film shoots like ours in the years ahead.

That - the state of the independent documentary film world - was surely one of many constellated points spangling the fabric of my depressed mind, which is to say that I don’t consider my depression entirely illogical or haphazard, the way you might think a malarial mosquito bite is just a spate of bad luck. Our minds surely collect signals from the world - a parent battling cancer, kids getting bullied at school, financial distress, unimaginative politicians peddling the hatred of strangers - and these must fray the roots of happiness. But on the island, I knew that what I felt wasn’t an equation I could solve.

How do we confront powerlessness in our lives? Hell if I know, but I’ve been giving it a think on these mornings by the sea, a practice which perhaps foolishly has always appealed to me more than thumbing through a self-help paperback. First, I suppose we must see it clearly in ourselves: there are things beyond our control. And next I reckon we must love ourselves - and others - despite our powerlessness. Otherwise, a familiar spiral sets in: I cannot control how I’m feeling, and I am therefore worthless, and having no worth I have even less ability to control how I’m feeling, and on and on.

I’ve long since forgiven myself the poor job I did as a director that week, but more importantly I’m working to be attuned to how little I know of the interior lives of others. This is no great revelation: we all struggle. Surely others, too, are burdened by things beyond their control. Even if my peers are not “depressed,” surely they struggle. Do I make enough time to wonder how they are faring?

And beyond the bounds of my crew, what do I make of the people who share my landscape, my town and county? The hardest nuts to crack are the arrogant and the bigoted; are they just human scum, or is there some reason they’ve come to be with this way?

Arthur Miller came to speak at Yale when I was a freshman, and someone asked him how he defined evil. He was pretty old, and at first I wondered whether he mis-heard the question. “The devil? The devil is a lack of imagination.” I wrote that down in my notebook at the time, probably putting a star next to it, or circling it, even though I didn’t know the fullness of what he meant. I’m still turning over what he said in my mind, 26 years later and a few hundred miles up the coast. Maybe he meant that if we fail to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, to imagine what they are thinking or feeling or going through, if we cease to push our minds to do that work, the work of seeking an understanding of the unknown, then we have given in to a kind of cynicism, and this becomes a doorway to hatred, and evil.

For depression, you take pills and talk to doctors, you go for jogs and write in your journal, you hug your family, you try to love yourself despite feeling like worthless scum. You look at the ice and imagine the ocean breathing, which of course it is, exchanging oxygen and carbon in its own massive and mysterious way. The air I’m breathing at its shore is not something I can disentangle from the ocean, the oxygen slapping my lungs seamlessly connected to everything out there, the exhaust of passing cars and the cries of gulls, the exhalation of unseen whales. It doesn’t take any imagination today to remember how inseparably we are connected to everything else, and each other. And though such new age truisms won’t cure anyone’s depression, there must be some damn value in pausing by the edge of the sea for a few minutes, even without a soul in sight, not a single goose on the frozen Goose, to marvel at the way that water stays afloat on itself.