Your Depressed Valentine
Januaries always seem deathly long and monotonous to me. I dislike NYE celebrations which make my brain feel like a grumpier version of Merlin, The Mad Ragdoll cat champing on an empty rubbish bin while begrudging-ly ensconced in it. I am skeptical about celebrating inviolate beginnings that hinge on the spurious premise of how with a random change in date, I will now be able to hold pretezely yoga poses with spectacular finesse and regularity or finally swim out from under the nubilous Pacific of my Tsundoku — a Japanese term that denotes the habit of amassing books without reading them. It is cause for dissonance and self-blame later. Or maybe it is just that I tend to hit a sour note with every Capricorn of Aquarian I have ever met and I feel avoidant towards this singular month of their birth. In short, I am a testy bellyacher at the start of any new year. This year has been no exception including sudden and additional episodes of trauma relapses as well as the periodic onset of depressive cycles that wiggle out from their nooks with a scheming knack. That I am a shrink and I see this replicated in my own clientele only affirms my stance against the jejune glee that ties its gaudy bow around the start of any new year.
Then, the arrival of February with its tidy sprint of days, is a matter of personal comfort till I remember how it also semaphores that menstural-red phase of overwrought romance — Valentine’s day. I can be sufficiently glib and bang on about how my inner snark-o-leptic is adept at sidestepping the late capitalism dramaturgy vaunting its brazen occupancy in every corner. But I know I’d be lying just a tiny bit there because these theatrics do affect me in ways that I haven’t fully come to terms with so far. Fact is — as someone who fights clinical depression, these loud displays are an obvious sparkplug for sloping a conflicted sense of self-woth; an already feeble amour proper, if you will.
No, it is not about love or companionship. I can just as easily slip into the depths of depression even when I am successfully partnered-up during this time. It is about an expectation of conformity that feels regressive and stifling. Rationally, I know how it is just a day and nothing more. I know it is a hoopla of marketing antics. I also know that at 34, I have freed myself from a wide cache of social expectations attached to the notion of romantic togetherness but I somehow still can’t escape the inferential noise that surrounds from weeks before its arrival. Like the proverbial ostrich, I am emotionally agile enough at burying my head in the nearest sandpit I can find but advertising with its predatory zeal seems to burrow through with equal ease. It has the longevity of a cursed scarab.
Depression is always entwined with this disembodied isolation. The capacity for love is thwarted by long held distortions in my emotive frequencies. They are mostly about whether love desired is love deserved. The mind-heart network slips into antagonizing calculations before I can trust what I truly feel. It is hard for me to be comfortable with love. Cometh the season, cometh the anhedonia. There are two houses inside my head— one where my need for love lives, the other where my acceptance of love lives. They share a yard but can’t agree to cohabit beyond that. Most people don’t realize that this loneliness isn’t a matter of presence or absence of others, it is a deepening concavity; a steady vacuum where every sound turns into silence, where hours are frozen solid like wintered lakes. This loneliness festers internally as if the deathless labour of termites chewing their way through sandalwood. It is not only hard to explain this to others in meaningful terms, it is harder to discern with any legible intricacy for my own self. Walking through the streets where shops with regnant displays invoke both annoyance and pity, it is during these times when am most forced to confront my inability for conventional companionship. Here is this rich gamut of possibilities when it comes to romance and here I am, frequently incompetent at holding onto any or all of it. Cognitively, I know this is an exaggeration but emotionally, it is a series of pinpricks to the thickest vein.
Depressive phases have usually signaled a loss of love. Depression has ended relationships that I desperately wanted to be tethered to on brutally cold nights so much so that at times I was willing to set my entire world on fire. Sometimes it was them disappearing because they didn’t know how to deal with my erratic receding, at others, it was I who knowingly withdrew into a miasma of abjections. Sometimes being depressed grants you an arresting clarity about all the ways in which you will fail yourself and someone else in a shared journey. 14th February became a knife of exploration. In this routinely grind show that has shifted quite far from its starker inception which involves a martyred Roman saint helping the persecuted, the feeling of alienation and being forsaken rises to the surface like plastic wrappers chucked into the Trevi fountain.
No matter how much I remind myself of how frivolous the present-day avatar of Valentine’s day is, watching friends and strangers in full sway of maudlin yet tender exchanges somehow becomes a reminder of how I don’t experience a whole range of emotions due to my condition. Yes, I too love, and I love with great passion and great temerity. But I also dissociate without preludes. I submerge and stay drowning for so long that when I finally manage to come up for air, the hand I want to hold is merely a memory. Then, I blame myself quite like Alejandra Pizarnik — “If I am anything at all, it is cruelty.”
The words turn inside me and I stay awake wondering about the futility that always tags along with the availability of love. I want smaller benedictions but not in a reductive way, just so I know they can fit the palm of my hand without my dropping them like a clumsy priest. A happy home-cooked meal. A late breakfast. A dog spread out between me and him. A collection of succulents. Sunlight brightening his sleepy eyes. The way the air shifts when he enters or leaves the room; his distinct scent leaving a fading trail. These are the ways in which I love. Sometimes when depression has a stronger hold on me than my own will to live and love, these are the breadcrumbs by which I find my way home.
Yes, it can be crushing to float under the weight of expectations that arrive after the act of falling in love. Yes, the fear to fit into another’s world with your own jagged edges is terrifying especially when you’ve folded yourself for those who only took that as a sign to keep making you scarcer, more threadbare. Sometimes the most harmful relationships I entered came with copious doses of chocolates and truck-full of roses. I assumed I would be au fait with my emotional compass. I was wrong.
Whether you are alone or with someone, know that romantic love is not the only measure of your worth as a human being. With the universalization of hookup culture, we are toggling between various dating and intimacy models and we thankfully live in a time where sexuality is not synonymous with shame. But this also means that being alone has become a taboo in a whole new way. Being alone is not a shortcoming and certainly not a crime. Attachment is not the only way to validate your emotions. Romantic closeness is therapeutic but it isn’t the sum total of all the ways in which we might need healing. Also, friendships aren’t a placeholder for romantic love but a completely separate wellspring for care and affection. We do ourself a serious disservice when we forget the importance of love that is also friendship.
And yes, sometimes when we are depressed we feel disconnected from the significant other(s) in our life. This isn’t a flaw in character but a tough condition we have to constantly negotiate with, on a daily basis. Don’t blame yourself if you can’t automatically summon readymade joys just because you are coupled this Valentine’s day. Don’t push yourself to do what makes you uncomfortable because it will further the distance between you and the persons you love and desire in your life. Not all of us will have the mental, emotional or even financial reserves for grand gestures and it is ok to binge-watch Kung fu classics while eating Pho.
As for those who are with someone who experiences depression, be a little more accommodating. Please know that a depressive cycle can erupt with very little warning and seasonal triggers do serve as a catalyst sometimes. We are not lacking in gratitude when you do something thoughtful for us, just that sometimes our mind is so fragmented and unsteady in its own axis that a lot of our time and energy is directed towards stabilizing it first. We sometimes just want to ensure you don’t have to be displaced by our instability. We love your love. We also understand that it can be hard to deal with the mood swings and we want to listen to what you need from us. Give us a little bit of time and we will. When we seem cold or aloof, it is more a defense mechanism, a shield for our hearts than a statement about your capacity to care. We have often been told that our struggles aren’t that painful or even real. If you ever get time, google how a pangolin protects itself from environmental threats — it rolls itself into a ball at the slightest touch. Sometimes we are your human pangolins.
César Vallejo wrote that “Feeling is always the right size.” It takes a little bit of time to lean into the depth of this sentence.
If you struggle with depression during this Valentine’s day, know that you are not alone and also it is a phase not a failing.
Scherezade Siobhan is a psychologist, writer and a community catalyst who founded and runs The Talking Compass — a therapeutic space dedicated to providing mental counseling services and decolonizing mental health care. She is an award-winning author and poet whose work is published or forthocming in Medium, Berfrois, Feministing, SPR, Jubilat, DATABLEED, Nat Brut, Winter Tangerine, Cordite among others. She is the author of “Bone Tongue” (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), “Father, Husband” (Salopress, 2016) and “The Bluest Kali” (Lithic Press, 2018). Find her @zaharaesque on twitter/IG/Facebook. Send her chocolate and puppies — nihilistwaffles@gmail.com.
