The Limits of My Language

Meditations on Depression

Eva Meijer

• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781782276005
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

A beautiful and moving study of depression, in which the author draws on her personal experience of mental illness as well as her deep knowledge of philosophy, to show the issue in a new light

Much has been written about the treatment of depression, but relatively little about its meaning. In this strikingly original book, Eva Meijer weaves her own experiences and the insight of thinkers from Freud to Foucault and Woolf into a moving and incisive evocation of the condition. She explores how depression can make us grow out of shape over time, like a twisted tree, how we can sometimes remould ourselves in conversation with others, and how to move on from our darkest thoughts.

The Limits of My Language is both a razor-sharp analysis of depression and a steadfast search for the things great and small – from philosophy and art to walking a dog or sitting quietly with a cat – that make our lives worth living.

11

1

On the seeping away of colour and death at the dinner table: a brief history

May 1994 was unusually warm and sunny, as I remember it.1 My classmates sat around on the grass every break time, making daisy chains and playing the guitar—the world glowed and life was full of promise. But as they skipped merrily through life, each step I took made me sink further and further into deep, invisible mud. It was as if the force of gravity was too strong, as if the earth was dragging me under. I was fourteen and that feeling of bleakness was something I’d long known.

On my eighth birthday, for example, one of my aunts took me to a toyshop where I could choose a present for myself. I picked a plush dog in a basket, which had little puppies with it. I thought it was really sweet, but at the same time I had the feeling that I hadn’t chosen well, 12that I should have picked something more sensible. My birthday wasn’t pleasant; there was an argument, and a strange grey atmosphere crept into the day. I sensed something wasn’t right—so how could other people pretend it was? That feeling kept coming and going throughout my childhood, until that month of May when it came into the foreground and pushed other things further and further back.

May turned to June and everything grew greyer, like in a cartoon film in which colour gradually seeps from the surroundings until everything is black and white. Then, in the black and white that followed, the contrast faded: the white became less clear and finally the grey just bled into grey. The world around me became a different world, in which things wouldn’t simply turn out well, in which it was actually more likely that they’d never turn out well again. While my body was being taken over by that weight, my thoughts clumped around a single theme: it would be better if I didn’t exist. For many years afterwards I detested May, the smell of spring, the green and the growth, and I still don’t feel happy at the first signs of summer—unlike some people, I can’t look forward to what is on the way.

Around that time I first read Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea,2 in which the main character, Roquentin, has exactly the same feeling of pointlessness. I found it a very frightening book. It was as if what I was feeling, and what Sartre 13described, touched on a barren truth, a desolation, which now that I’d discovered it would never go away. For Sartre, that barrenness isn’t purely bad: it’s also the starting point of freedom. According to him human beings aren’t simply bodies, we are also consciousnesses, and to rise above our physical situatedness we must confront the absurdity and emptiness of existence. This shouldn’t be camouflaged with the idea of a god, the illusion of consolation, or by wanting to fulfil other people’s wishes: you have to will yourself free. It is by making your own choices and taking responsibility for them that you can achieve self-realization. But I didn’t know about that freedom then. I read about Roquentin doing his historical research in the library, about his increasing sense of alienation and his consequent realization that this has nothing to do with him, but is simply what the world is like. His nausea is not a reaction to random events, but is a symptom of his growing understanding of existence. Those who believe in goodness and beauty, like the Autodidact, who is often in the library as well, are simply naïve and gullible. And we’ll find nothing behind the bad things; don’t fool yourself.

Teenagers and existentialists understand something true, something bleak about life. Perhaps children don’t live in a safe world—it is already the real world, a world where cats are killed by cars, animals are eaten, and other children experience war (or they themselves, in many parts 14of the world)—but often they haven’t yet acquired the hardness of adults, or the habituation of the adult to that hardness. Their world is magical and alive, everything is still possible. For the adolescent, however, the world presents itself with full force. Falling in love for the first time can create a sense of limitlessness; feeling is something that flows out from you, in every direction. Life’s lack of meaning can present itself in this way too: this is how it is, this is the truth about life, and everyone who simply enjoys it is labouring under an illusion.

I thought things would never get better, that I’d always feel that way, and in addition to the various feelings of guilt I had, I was constantly thinking about death. Death, my own death, acquired a shape in those days, like a shadow that was always at my side. My plans weren’t concrete, but at the same time they were constantly present. I talked about it, with my friends and at school, and with various therapists who thought that things would sort themselves out. In those days I liked wearing bright clothes and that was one of the reasons why I wasn’t taken seriously by all the different psychologists and psychiatrists I consulted. One of them literally wrote that it couldn’t be all that bad, because I was wearing a green woolly hat with a butterfly on it, instead of just wearing black, and anyway, according to him, I was gifted in all sorts of ways. I drank a lot, skipped school and argued with my teachers, and 15I sang. That all helped a little, and just managed to carry me through the days. I didn’t have the feeling I was ill: I thought I was bad, and the things I did were aimed at getting rid of that feeling, or setting it aside. Night after night, I sat by the window smoking roll-ups and listening to music, while I wrote poems and songs, and letters, which I sometimes burnt. Everything whirled around a chasm: this is how it is, I am alone here, everything I do is wrong—and then again.

Philosophical and concrete suicide

In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus wonders whether understanding that life is meaningless should necessarily lead to suicide.3,4 According to him this question, whether or not we should commit suicide, is the fundamental philosophical problem. Life is chaotic and arbitrary and absurd: we ask, and the world is unreasonably silent; it does not give us the meaning or purpose we long for. You could respond to this by believing in a god who has shaped the universe in his or her own image and invested it with order and purpose. Or you can accept that life is meaningless and make the leap into death, because its lack of meaning makes life not worth living. There is, 16however, a third option: to embrace absurdity. In a world in which absurdity prevails we, as humans, can choose to confront the absurd, as well as the contradiction it brings: wanting to fight against it, wanting to break free from it, although this is also absurd. If we do this, then suicide isn’t the solution, but rather choosing to live as broadly and richly as possible: like Don Juan, who pursues his passions pointlessly, but with whole-hearted conviction; like the actor who lives through countless human lives; like the artist who doesn’t attempt to give meaning to absurdity, but represents it exactly as it is.

Camus is right, of course, when he argues that we should embrace absurdity. That life is absurd is also a source of joy, and humour is one of our best weapons against its lack of meaning. But this is also one of the areas where things can go wrong when you’re depressed: you can no longer appreciate the value of that absurdity, or its fun. Relationships lose their meaning, and so does art; you become cut off from yourself and from the world. I had good friends during my first depression, who knew what was happening to me, but that didn’t help at all, because I thought I’d finally understood that I was alone and that was why I really was alone. My thoughts isolated me. And everything was grey; I was completely grey, just a husk for the feeling I had. No one else could see that everything was grey now, or how I really was—anything sweet that 17others did for me only confirmed my own self-hatred. And there wasn’t any prospect of things changing. Sometimes my mother would say that your school days are the best days of your life.

In spite of skipping school and behaving badly, I passed my final exams without any problems, and then I went to England to study singing. A new start, rooted in the past. A few months later my aunt took her own life. It wasn’t entirely unexpected; she’d had serious neuralgia for a long time and we knew she didn’t want to carry on like that; she had made a half-hearted suicide attempt before. At the same time, it was totally unexpected, a lightning bolt that split the world in two: a before and an after. Death always splits the world in two, of course, but for me something really did shift in how I thought things fitted together. Things don’t always get better; certain fractures still remain, more than twenty years later. The inconceivable can actually happen. I’m not talking about grief or sorrow. That was there too, of course, although my grief was as nothing compared to that of her mother, her sisters and her two daughters. But something really did break. I don’t know whether suicide is worse than any other kind of death; that must depend entirely on who dies and how. It is different though, certainly in the case of someone whose treatment options haven’t yet been exhausted, or barely explored, in fact. Then there are 18plenty of loud, harsh ‘if I’d onlys’ or ‘if I’d just beens…’. In my aunt’s case there are so many different ways that the tide could have been turned, or so it seems: not having left her alone on the day it happened; getting a psychiatrist to investigate her in the days and weeks before; getting her admitted into a specialist facility; or maybe medication could have helped. I never actually talked to her about her death wish.

The complete grief and misery after her death wasn’t good for my state of mind, but it didn’t change my ideas about suicide: suicide is an ending, not a solution. A solution presupposes that something good will come of it, that something of the old will shift into the new, while suicide only leads to the absence of the previous problem. I just think you shouldn’t do this if you have children. At least, that wouldn’t be my intention—I can’t judge the depth of someone else’s (unforeseen) suffering.

What I did see very clearly at that time was that suicide as a concrete act is far removed from the abstract philosophical question as to whether or not we should take our own lives. It’s a desperate act, motivated by acute or sublimated despair, an act that often goes wrong,5 with blood, injuries (sometimes permanent), and frightened family members and friends. If the attempt does succeed, then the survivors don’t just have to sort out a coffin, funeral music, eulogies, money matters and other things, 19but they’re also left with an enormous amount of guilt and distress. That guilt and distress leave traces, scored into the lives of all that are left behind. The edges eventually wear away, but they never vanish, just as grief never vanishes either, but simply changes form, and these traces carry on shaping everything that happens afterwards.

Carving out a place in the world

I don’t actually think that whether or not we should take our own lives is the fundamental philosophical question—there are so many of them. But it is a question I carried with me for a long time. The depression that started when I was fourteen lasted about seven years, on and off. There are some years I can scarcely remember, from around the age of seventeen to twenty. Lost time, probably still stored somewhere inside me. Since I turned twenty-one, there have been other periods when things went badly for me, but never again for such a long stretch—sometimes for just a few months, a couple of times for about a year and a half. I bear in mind that I may become depressed again, but it’s been going pretty well for quite some time. For me, ‘pretty well’ never means that it’s completely light—I carry the darkness with me, to a greater or lesser extent. That’s not 20to say that nothing good or nice ever happens to me—my life is a rich one. And I always have the feeling that things are going very well as long as I’m not actually depressed, even if that’s not necessarily the case.

In the first weeks of the ethics module in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, the focus is on hedonism and utilitarianism, schools of thought that take happiness as the main measure of value. That was something that made me stumble as a student, and it did so again when I was teaching there. Putting aside the question as to whether this is indeed a sensible way of thinking about ethics, it surprised me that people can really be happy, or that they aspire to it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not a good idea to build a life on the pursuit of happiness, although I do like contributing to the happiness of others.

One element of learning how to deal with depression is looking elsewhere for what is valuable. What eventually saved me was my work.6,7 I learnt how to link my destiny to what I was making and because of that I could put in brackets the question of whether I should die, and to a certain extent I could also do that with how I was feeling. This doesn’t have much to do with being cured; it means adopting an attitude to something that is given to you. My work gives my life meaning, and working gives me and my days their shape. I’ve taught myself a routine that keeps me going. It makes a difference that I’m an 21optimistic depressive: I have the urge to realize myself and I’m disciplined and militant. And the beauty of the work I do is that my feelings can flow into what I create. I wrote the final section of my novel The Peacock Butterfly,8 for example, at a time when I could do little else except describe what was dragging me down. Many of my songs are about falling, and the darkness sometimes sneaks into my drawings. I usually work too hard, or harder than most people, at any rate, but that’s good—it’s better to be tired than dead. I’ve trained myself to live like this and it works. For someone for whom being alive isn’t all that self-evident, it’s already quite something to be able to cultivate this sort of attitude.

The first things I wrote were songs. In her song ‘The Letter’, Kristin Hersh describes what it’s like to be imprisoned in your own head: ‘September 29th, 1984, Dear so and so, gather me up because I’m lost, or I’m back where I started from, I’m crawling on the floor, rolling on the ground.’ Accompanied by the same two chords throughout, Hersh sings a room to life, a hotel room maybe, a place where the person she is singing to isn’t present and can’t be present: the room is in her head. She can’t get out of it. It’s not just a song, it’s a ritual, an incantation; by singing she creates a space where there is no space.9 When I was a teenage...