This isn’t about anything derived from French, neither about malaise nor ennui. Vague feelings of boredom, of existential displacement, aren’t what this site is about. Nor is it to do with the sort of despair that makes the neck ache, or the shoulders, or even the colon. What this site is about is your whole life hurting, of the terror of being unable to conceive of how you’re going to get through the next five minutes.
Been there, done that. Oh boy, have I — since around age seven. And nothing helps for long. God knows psychotherapy doesn’t, not a goddamn smidgen. Meditation doesn’t. Drugs and alcohol and sex seem to for the moment, but drugs and alcohol leave you even worse off than to begin with, and when you’re badly depressed, who can stand to be around, let alone fuck you? It snickers disdainfully at the, ahem, plethora of medications with their goddamn z- and v- and x-laden names, which it knows will succeed only in sedating the libido and inducing queasiness. In my case, even the combined adoration of the world’s most steadfast fiancee and sweetest little girl only forestall it. The weekend will pass and the one will return to school while the other returns to work, and my anguish will step laughing derisively from the shadows. Did you honestly imagine, dear boy, that I’d
I used to think it was sort of, well, cinematic, if you will — behold the tortured artist paying an awful price for his extraordinary dexterity with prose and melody! I feel that way no longer. My anguish isn’t cute, isn’ romantic, but squalid and boring and boring and boring. A pox on the memory of Churchill and Lincoln and Roseanne and the whole batch of other Great Victims of Depression. I’d sooner be perky, and may God make me live through another ten minutes like the past ten if I’m being snide when I say so.
But, Stu, say you, how could you have done so gorgeous a site as this if your anguish is a fraction what you claim? Because there are as many different styles of depression as there are x’s and z’s in the lexicon of pscyhopharmacology. I’ve never been one to remain in bed or skip meals or cry a lot. I’ve literally run from rooms that she who loves me most has entered for fear of her speaking to me, though, and walked through malls feeling that a thousand pins were stuck in me, wishing desperately that I could find my way back to the parking lot with eyes closed because everything in sight increased my pain — the CDs in the shop windows, and the young couples doomed by their DNA to become as invisible in middle age as I have, and the older people mere weeks (in perceived time) from the hospital beds in which they’ll die alone while their loved ones are stuck gnashing their teeth in traffic because everybody on the freeway has to slow down to gawk at somebody getting a ticket.
But enough about me. This is your site too, you poor devil, and your pain. So stop feeling sorry for yourself (may God make me live through another ten minutes like the past ten if I’m not kidding) and contribute something. A poem. A sketch. A personal reminiscence. The proposed text of your farewell note to the world. Not, you understand, that we’re suggesting anything.
A link:
The Option Institute. Its Webmistress, Kristie, asked if we’d consider reciprocal links. We were too despondent to put up much resistance. It wouldn’t surprise us to find out that the Institute’s husband-and-wife founders are the sort of people who might ask, for instance, “What are your feelings around (rather than about, you see) that?” But in our condition, should we be alotting so much energy to resenting trendy preposition substitution?
Don’t just lie there.
Contribute something.