the DEPRESSION essay

There seems to an uniting concept in the world of comedy that the comedian is often suffering from a variety of mental woes: most often, depression.

Here's a shortlist of comedians who have come forth to talk about their personal stuggles with depression:

• Jim Carrey


• Sarah Silverman


• Owen Wilson


• Drew Carey


• Rosie O'Donnell

My point: depression and having a semi-upbeat, semi-mischievous, semi-carefree public persona seem to go hand in hand.

This is where I fall into the line, you see (not that I'm the next Jim Carrey or anything like that). This is where it gets personal and semi (THERE WE GO AGAIN) relevant. For many years, I've battled clinical depression. I say battled with all the awareness of how dramatic that sounds. People battle through cancer and actual wars. Me? I am just sad a lot.

And that sadness can be too destructive. What is horrible about depression is how it leaves the sufferer unable to enjoy anything- the merest pleasures of life, dissolved. Everything falls prey to that sensation that suppresses anything remotely positive. The joy, literally, is taken out of your lungs like a lost breath."But Brittany," people have said to me, and I'm sure people will continue to say, "you can't be depressed. You're so upbeat and happy all the time!"

There's another one of my many, many points: people don't tend to think so deeply. Because, you know, if something looks one way, it means is obviously IS THAT WAY. Governments always tell the truth and oceans are full of mermaids and not shipwrecks! I learned at a young age no one wants to be around an unhappy person. I don't know when I learned this. I don't know how I learned this. Maybe I was sulking at recess and was wondering, at the same time, why DOES NO ONE WANT TO PLAY WITH ME ON THE SWINGS? Is it because I'm not smiling? Hmmm....

Somewhere, somehow, I learned that it was better to be more cheerful around other people, and to always have a joke ready to go on my lips. Not that I don't like making jokes of things, mind you. I can't help but see the stupid, amusing side of any given situation. Show me a genocide and the back part of my mind will find at least one offensive quip to make about it. Snicker, snicker. It seems to be a failing device, for me know. Despite the ability to make light of things and to have people tell me stuff like "oh I just love being around you! you're so cheerful!"*

I don't find myself any happier. Oddly. And they say “fake it until you make it.” Still working on making it: would like to see it actualized some time soon.

It could be that I'm making the mistake of assigning happiness to association with other people. As has been said, hell is other people. Well, so is heaven. Spending a good hour with a friend talking or going out for an evening with a group of my peers are among the best times of my life. So there's that, and I do believe that there's a lot of happiness to be found in doing benevolent acts for others, even the tritest act. Even if it's just making them feel at peace in your company for a little while, as misleading as it may be.

And the older I get- God, in my 22 years, I'm so wise! The more I see that happiness is just a series of moments and not a place to get to. The more I believe that, anyway, if it's only to bring my weakened self comfort. And hope that one day I’ll trick myself into thinking the persona is actually me, inside.

I have a case of the empties at night. I've learned to refer to it in the abstract- it's only the past few years I can tell you it's been an actual problem. Something to fear, really. Some sort of gaping, closing sensation in my chest that I sometimes wonder if it's going to swallow me? There's a Catholic crisis of faith that's the closest I've found to describing this time I've grown to hate so much- I've tried to fill it with art, reading, movies, alcohol; I really think it only lessens when I have the proximity of someone I care about, otherwise it's like an incubus or something- the Dark Soul of the Night. At first, it only came in small doses or every week. Most of the time, I was safe from it. But as my future grew dim and my hope for a better tomorrow fizzled, I realized it was to be EVERY NIGHT. I find the days to be, well, okay. Fine. They go by without much event except for the occasional breakdown which cripples progress. But at night, when it is just me and this artery-clogging despair, well. I don't get to be so positive.

Maybe I'm selective about my depression and I just departmentalize it; it's non-existent during the daytime but at the night when you wake up into a world of blackness, that's when it rears it's ugly head. At 2 AM when you wake up to nothing and you fear becoming nothing and you feel your heart begin to race and any faith you ever had in anything, ends up in doubt. The closest term I’ve found to that- dark soul of the night.

I remember the moment I stopped caring about a lot (see also: everything). It was at work; I was temping at an insurance agency at the time. It was stifling to me; I listened to audio books and read on my breaks and tried unsuccessfully to talk to my coworkers but there was no room for growth and no room for a person like me, who does not live for the occasional "Jeans Day" and such. But I found myself, after four years of learning about the craft of writing and what literature was the most notable and etc, sitting in a cubicle while other people I knew found jobs at newspapers and media agencies and made me, by comparison, feel like a broken failure. I barely associated with my friends, came home to my grumpy family who were often screaming and considered a good night being asleep by 9 and was, at the same time, receiving dozens of rejection letters. DEAR APPLICANT, WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU...KEEPING YOUR RESUME ON FILE OKAY BAI

Years of worrying about the virtues of proper sentence structure and AP style, and I remember standing over a copier that I barely knew how to work. I was feeling quite inadequate BECAUSE I couldn’t figure out HOW TO OPERATE THE FUCKING COPIER. That was the most pressing thought on my mind. Oh my god, where do I put the paper again?

When I stood there, wavering a bit, and realized where my mind was going, I nearly exploded from rage. I was whoring myself for a paycheck and it was a paycheck that wasn’t even going to get me out of my hated hometown. All my romantic prospects seemed to get hot for a few days and then just disappear. Pssssh. Like that, like sizzling up on hot summer pavement. Psychologically, this was (and is) damaging to me. I realized it that day, sitting in said cubicle, and thought "what can I do to make this last less longer than it has to be?" So I bought a pack of Newports (CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP) and began to wait for death. If someone had to approach me for conversation, I would have said to them about the customs of Arctic and Antarctic explorers that run into the snow to wait for death. Dying in the snow is supposed to be a peaceful, warm death. You get hot beforehand and take off your clothes and then you go. I can't imagine a better way out.

Maybe it started sooner, though. My last year of college was no gleeful romp through the park and I often revisit it in my memory, with a sort of quiet hatred. I remember being referred to as my class’ resident confessional poet. Take a look at any confessional poet, from Roethke to Plath. Happy people? Not so much. “So who’s this girl in your poems?” my professor asked me across the room, grinning. I groaned and avoided coherent verbalization. I wish he had moved onto the other girl that was stuck writing poetry about her dead grandmother. Which was atrocious. I wanted to say so many times, “I’D GLADLY TRADE PLACES WITH YOUR GRANDMA. AT LEAST SHE DOESN’T HAVE TO READ THIS SHIT.”

I dreaded going home then, too. I was surrounded by people finding their happiness, while in a room that was all too quiet and smelled like mildew. If it wasn’t too quiet, I could hear the drunks outside. If not the drunks, I was sleeping on the floor in a nest of blankets by my own design. To say I spent many nights here with my face, down-turned in my pillow, sobbing, would be an understatement. I think it was every night. But if you had found me in the morning, I would have said something about tipping the cows outside. What was I to say- “it smells like shit out. GOOD, BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY I FEEL.”

Setbacks aside, I still find myself being more lighthearted than ever. I try to embrace it when I can. And now it's less for people accepting me and wanting to be in my company, or for the hope that I might make someone feel slightly better about life for a few seconds, as a way for self-preservation. To make my life seem better, in a way. Is that what becomes to all humorists? Does humor eventually cross the line from tool used for others to tool used for yourself? Is it that life is so bleak and so colorless without it? I guess, yes.

If you can't laugh, you cry. And don't some of us know it.

* sometimes people do say shit like that. ODDLY