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Daphne Merkin's cover article from last Sunday's NYTimes magazine on her experiences with chronic depression startled me the same way the first few chapters of Prozac Nation (before it got too self-indulgent for me to handle.) This article is mildly self-indulgent the way that chronic depression seems to be-- but it's such a poignant read for me, reminded me so strongly of my own experiences.

Some excerpts:

By age 8 I was wholly unwilling to attend school, out of some combination of fear and separation anxiety. (It seems to me now, many years later, that I was expressing early on a chronic depressive’s wish to stay home, on the inside, instead of taking on the outside, loomingly hostile world in the form of classmates and teachers.) By 10 I had been hospitalized because I cried all the time, although I don’t know if the word “depression” was ever actually used.

...

(I have not been free of psychotropic medication for any substantial period since my early 20s.)

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“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” observed the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a depressive 19th-century Jesuit priest. I don’t think I’ve ever met a depressed person who wanted to get out of bed in the morning — who didn’t experience the appearance of day as a call to burrow further under the covers, the better to embrace the vanished night.

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The lack of a reading lamp added to my panic; even if my depression prevented me from losing myself in a book, the absence of a light source by which to read after dark represented the end of civilization as I had known it.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:30 PM | shower me with attention