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CHAPTER ONE
THERE ARE ALWAYS fresh flowers and plants in my house.
When they begin to die it is a sure sign that I, too, am beginning
to wither. The window shades are never closed.
Sunshine must always be visible. The bedroom is littered
with no less than four alarm clocks. None display the same
time. Some are as little as fifteen minutes ahead, others as
much as one hour. Each night I set the clocks for a wake-up
time of 6:00 AM. Rarely am I out of bed before 7:30 AM.
Mornings have always been difficult.
For most of my life I have nurtured a consistent, low-grade
melancholy; I have been addicted to despair. Because
of my habitual tardiness, an eighth-grade teacher once
scrawled these words of advice in my yearbook: Once you learn
to wake up in the morning, life will be a breeze.
Though I have attended college in many places and at
many times, I do not yet hold a degree. I have worked as a
word processor, secretary, file clerk, waitress, arts administrator,
phone sex operator, and creative writing instructor.
I am often working-class broke. I am also a single mother.
Life, for me, has hardly been "a breeze."
The majority of my days begin like this:
Barely awake, I head for the bathroom, stare into the
mirror until I can identify the person staring back. There
are still those mornings when my image seems foreign to
me, when I move through my house like an intruder, fumbling
over furniture and walking into walls, trying to avoid
the temptation to crouch inside a corner and just zone out.
"It gets better." I promise myself as I make my way into the
living room, "This day will get better. It has to."
Having sworn off most chemical mood-altering substances,
I choose music over coffee and cigarettes. Music
eases my depressed mood. I have come to rely on one song as
my morning prayer. I sit and listen to the words, allow them
to reach out, like hands, and lift me to a more sacred state of
consciousness. They affirm life as something worth living
despite this pain I sometimes carry.
To open my eyes and wake up alive in the world
To open my eyes and finally arrive in the world
With its beauty and its cruelty
With its heartbreak and its joy
With it constantly giving birth to life and to forces
that destroy
And the infinite power of change
Alive in the world
Music and motion are the two things that can immediately
touch the hurt inside of me. I can't begin to count the
number of times I have circled Los Angeles in my car, traveling
from one freeway onto the next without any particular
destination, the tape player blasting tunes, my mouth open
wide enough to scream lyrics.
There was a time when at any given moment I would
abandon my bed, my lover, my apartment, to literally drive
away the depression. The slow, gentle rhythm of automobiles,
trains, and buses surrounds and soothes me, like an
infant that is being cradled into calmness. But being a
mother has changed the ways in which I mother myself. No
matter how deep the despair or urgent the need to flee, I
can't abandon my daughter. Nor can I drape her sleeping
body in thick blankets, toss her over my shoulder like some
runaway's sack and take her with me. She relies on my presence,
my ability to cope.
Emotionally and physically taxing, the responsibilities of
parenting are overwhelming for even the most stable people.
Imagine them for someone with a history of depression
stretching as far as a late-afternoon shadow. The daily tasks--bathing,
ironing clothes, dressing, braiding hair, making
breakfast, preparing lunch, school drop-offs and pick-ups--require
every bit of what little get-up-and-go I
have. However, they define my day. These responsibilities help
me move past the temptation to rationalize myself right
back into bed. Most times.
Afternoons and early evenings are usually my best and
most productive times, when I am able to concentrate and
focus without fatigue or anxiety. Sleep plays a major role in
my efforts to maintain a balanced mood. I have found that
too much is as disruptive as not enough. Late evenings, like
mornings, take a harsh toll. I vacillate from insomnia to
hypersomnia, from not being able to get a wink of rest to over-sleeping
and constantly feeling drugged with exhaustion.
We have all, to some degree, experienced days of depression.
Days when nothing is going our way, when even the most trivial
events can trigger tears, when all we want to do is crawl into a hole
and ask "Why me?" For most people, these are isolated occurrences.
When the day ends, so too does the sadness. But for some, such as
myself, the depression doesn't lift at the end of the day or disappear
when others try to cheer us up. These feelings of helplessness and
desperation worsen and grow into a full-blown clinical depression.
And when depression reaches clinical proportions, it is truly an
illness, not a character flaw or an insignificant bout with the blues
that an individual can "snap out of" at will.
Our reality often comes to us in fragments. From 1989 to
1994, I experienced several episodes of major depression. I
prolonged the pain with silence, mostly because I was
afraid--of being misunderstood or ostracized, of losing
friends, of losing respect. Unless it has touched your life,
depression can be a difficult disease to understand. I certainly
would have never thought to consider myself a depressive.
Clinical depression simply did not exist within the
realm of my possibilities; or, for that matter, within
the realm of possibilities for any of the black women in my
world.
The illusion of strength has been and continues to be of
major significance to me as a black woman. The one myth
that I have had to endure my entire life is that of my supposed
birthright to strength. Black women are supposed to be
strong--caretakers, nurturers, healers of other people--any
of the twelve dozen variations of Mammy. Emotional hardship
is supposed to be built into the structure of our lives. It
went along with the territory of being both black and female
in a society that completely undervalues the lives of black
people and regards all women as second-class citizens. It
seemed that suffering, for a black woman, was part of the
package.
Or so I thought.
Not so long ago, a friend invited me to a dinner party. I was
standing with a small group of people deeply immersed in
conversation. I was the only person of color in the group.
My thoughts drifted from the conversation. To pull me
back into the discussion, my friend asked about my writing.
An older, heavily perfumed woman standing with us wanted
to know what I was writing.
"A book about black women and depression," my friend
volunteered.
"Black women and depression?" the woman threw out
sarcastically. "Isn't that kinda redundant?" The people standing
around us exchanged abrasive chuckles.
"Don't get me wrong," the woman continued, taking a
sip of her cocktail. There wasn't a hint of apology in her
voice. "It's just that when black women start going on Prozac,
you know the whole world is falling apart." I was instantly
filled with outrage, anger, and hurt.
"When black women start going on Prozac, their whole
world has already fallen apart. They're just trying to piece it
back together," I said. Months later, I am still unable to
shake the echo of that woman's comments. I have replayed
the scene a thousand times in my mind, each time giving
what I felt was a more fitting, stinging reply. Ironically, I do
understand the reasons for her comment.
Stereotypes and cliches about mental illness are as pervasive
as those about race. I have noticed that the mental
illness that affects white men is often characterized, if not
glamorized, as a sign of genius, a burden of cerebral superiority,
artistic eccentricity--as if their depression is
somehow heroic. White women who suffer from mental
illness are depicted as idle, spoiled, or just plain hysterical.
Black men are demonized and pathologized. Black
women with psychological problems are certainly not seen
as geniuses; we are generally not labeled "hysterical" or
"eccentric" or even "pathological." When a black woman
suffers from a mental disorder, the overwhelming opinion
is that she is weak. And weakness in black women is intolerable.
There is a poem by E. Ethelbert Miller that always comes to
mind when I think of how hard it sometimes is for black
women to be seen as vulnerable and emotionally complex.
It is simply titled "Billie Holiday":
sometimes the deaf
hear better than the blind
some men
when they first
heard her sing
were only attracted
to the flower in her hair
Sadly, it is not only white people who are unable to see beyond
the ornamentation that is placed on black women's
lives. I have had conversations about my depression with
black people--both men and women--that were similar to
the one I had with the white woman at the dinner party. I've
frequently been told things like: "Girl, you've been hanging
out with too many white folk"; "What do you have to be
depressed about? If our people could make it through slavery,
we can make it through anything"; "Take your troubles
to Jesus, not no damn psychiatrist."
When there aren't dismissive questions, patronizing
statements, or ludicrous suggestions, there is silence. As if
there are no acceptable ways, no appropriate words to begin
a dialogue about this illness. And, given the oppressive nature
of the existing language surrounding depression, perhaps
for black people there really aren't any.
You've heard descriptions of depression before: A black
hole; an enveloping darkness; a dismal existence through
which no light shines; the black dog; darkness, and more
darkness. But what does darkness mean to me, a woman who
has spent her life surrounded by it? The darkness of my
skin; the darkness of my friends and family. I have never
been afraid of the dark. It poses no harm to me. What is the
color of my depression?
Depression offers layers, textures, noises. At times depression
is as flimsy as a feather, barely penetrating the surface
of my life, hovering like a slight halo of pessimism.
Other times it comes on gradually like a common cold or a
storm, each day presenting new signals and symptoms until
finally I am drowning in it. Most times, in its most superficial
and seductive sense, it is rich and enticing. A field of
velvet waiting to embrace me. It is loud and dizzying, inviting
the tenors and screeching sopranos of thoughts, unrelenting
sadness, and the sense of impending doom. Depression
is all of these things to me--but darkness, it is not.