Brownian Emotion

Monday 14:45, Provence, France.

It’s beautiful here, the perfect spring day, a gorgeous stone house overlooking resplendent fields that gently slope into mountains beyond. Honey bees murmur in the air, and every now and then I can hear a nightingale trilling from within the pear trees. I think I’m depressed.

Not the wallowing, dysfunctional, ugly kind of depressed from the PhD days, when you’d lay in bed endlessly, miss your deadlines, forget how to talk to people — or why you’d even want to in the first place. Forget to shower even and become convinced everyone can smell the disease on you, see it in the pallor of your skin.

No, this is a brand new flavour: the high functioning Queen of Depression. The type where you live an outwardly glamorous life but it is in fact just a glamour. You are at peak performance in your high flung career, dazzling everyone in stakeholder meetings with your perspicacity and gentle persuasions but the second the tab is closed and the green camera light disappears you are impotent and unable to execute on the simplest of tasks. Instead you placate the continuous discomfort that swarms your mind in these hours of aloneness with a vortex of doom scrolling that eats your entire day providing zero satiation and a mounting sense of doom, until finally panic sets in and some other version of you takes the reigns to pull together something in the last thirty minutes to pass off as a days contribution. How you are getting away with this is unclear, but the fact is, you are.

This is the type of depression where you travel and live a truly blessed life which you are grateful for every day. You meet beautiful interesting people, who tell you anecdotes which make you belly laugh while you stuff your face with perfectly ripe strawberries in the French manor of an ex-BBC art correspondent and her Oscar winning husband. You engage in these conversations with your new acquaintances, regaling your own charming tales, holding your own in the political tête-a-tête over slow roasted Easter lamb. You seem outwardly at ease, loquacious, charismatic even. You talk and laugh for hours with your friend, reading literature and relaxing into yoga poses on the veranda. In the moment all of these things feel somewhat good. But on the inside it’s like you are observing someone else perform these actions while feeling a persistent unease within. It’s a sense, or maybe the knowledge, you don’t actually belong here and you are acutely aware that this moment does not feel as good as it should. There’s dampers on every high, a breaker that dulls all joys. Any time you finally catch a moment to yourself it is only a matter of minutes before tears are streaming down your face but you couldn’t usually explain why.

This time, sitting on this sun drenched patio looking out over the picture postcard vistas, it was the emergence of the uninvited thought that one day Mama will be dead and she’d have lived a life so lacking of happiness. Maybe it’s the contrast of being around these well off people her age with their functional families, enriching friendships, and lack of generational trauma. It’s like looking through the glass of a boutique store at something you could never have. Maybe it’s just the guilt of wishing you could just be good enough, patient enough, in control enough to show her the unconditional love that she needs and deserves and knowing instead that you’ve been part of the cruelty because you just can’t forgive it all. You feel sad for her, but mostly you feel this foreboding that’s been growing for months. The writing is on the wall, you can see exactly how your life will pan out. Living alone, with no community or friends to rely on despite giving everything to those you loved. Miserable in the house you paid the bank ten times its value to own so you could have the security to merely exist in a space and continue paying taxes until you die. Except your own aloneness will be even more profound than theirs because you don’t even have a child that is obligated by a repressive type of love and duty to check in.

This is why I haven’t been writing much recently. It is so much harder to write about depression than heartbreak. Even the most naïve, most histrionic, among us know, deep down, that heartbreak is transient. But looking down the barrel at two chronically depressed, sixty-something year old parents that barely leave the house, one of whom has told you regularly for decades that they don’t want to live, is like peering through the eight ball at your own fate. It’s hard to see this as just a phase and not the downward trend of the rest of my life. A family curse, sown into the tapestry of my mind perhaps? Especially when you’re already doing everything they say should cure this malaise. You exercise and see friends, experience new things, you even have a therapist and eat fucking salads while dancing around your kitchen. But it all just feels like a plaster over a gun shot wound to the head. None of it stops the semi-regular emergence of the thought you’re not allowed to have — the one that slips in, quiet but sharp — what if I just killed myself?