Another bit of writing

The worst panic attack I’ve ever had was several years ago while I was spending six summer weeks in Berlin.  This was a few short weeks after the first major depressive episode I had ever had (which began with a weeklong stint during which I barely left the house) and even fewer, shorter weeks after I had started, in response, taking antidepressants.  In light of this new problem of debilitating depression, I had been very nervous to take the trip.

The host family I was staying with had a gorgeous apartment in the neighborhood of Mitte (“Middle”)—a relatively more affluent, residential part of the city. I had my own bedroom, which had its own entrance from the hallway (as the apartment had presumably once been two apartments that were now combined).

The bed, I remember, was a shape and size I wasn’t used to, and the covers were somewhat scratchy, and somewhere frustratingly in between being sheets and blankets.  The pillows were much taller, fatter rectangles than the American version—practically perfect squares, which to my out-of-place American sensibilities made them seem more like throw pillows than actual pillows-for-sleeping. 

To be clear, the apartment was beautiful and I had anything I needed.  But I was in a new place with new, weird things that coiled my senses like string around their odd foreign fingers.  The strain of that was enough to inspire in me my most intense panic attack to date.

On this particular night (which was fairly early on in the trip), I was especially worried about getting to sleep because I had signed up, via the study abroad program through which I was in Berlin to begin with, to take a weekend bus trip to Dresden.  I lived quite a ways from the campus of the Freie Universität, where the bus was to leave from; therefore I really needed to sleep, as I would have to get up well before the dew had dried in order to make it in time.  This pressing need to sleep, in anticipation of an equally pressing need to wake up early, coupled with my already-poor ability to fall asleep, and all strung together with a taut thread of jet lag, made for a filthy fucking stew of grime and anxiety.

I don’t actually remember how it began.  I remember lying in the strangely-shaped bed, resting my head on the strangely-shaped pillows, feeling a stifling disconnect between my body and the bedding, as if I were trying unsuccessfully to convince it I belonged there sleeping on top of it.

Eventually, lying supine in the dark on my reluctant blanket-sheets (having given up on my body’s discourse with the furniture), I started to notice that something wasn’t right with my breathing.  I sat bolt upright in frigid panic because, I realized, I was taking air in easily enough, but when I went to exhale, nothing was coming out.  I was pushing, trying to release the carbon dioxide inside my lungs, but it was like breathing through a straw with an ornery valve that only allowed the air to flow one way.

As I sat and tried to breathe like normal, I felt my panic building in proportion to the CO2 building in my body, precariously inflating me like a tired-out balloon.

At this point, I have to take a step back and confess that I still harbor an amount of heartfelt pity for the piece of me still living that moment right now.  And that is because in situations like this, there is almost nothing you can do but Wait It Out.  I was really and truly convinced that my respiratory system was failing to perform one of its most basic functions; exactly as convinced of that as you are of the fact that you are reading this right now.  What can one do to help a brain so misguided?  Take a deep breath?

In this case, I took a pill.  I ended up missing the bus, but at least I got some sleep.

  

A depressive anecdote

Welp, obviously I'm not a blogger.  But I felt like posting this little bit of writing that I did somewhere and figured this is as good a place as any.  It's adapted from a bit of a journal entry I wrote a few months ago after having a particularly bad day of depression.

Just to be clear, though, I have been dealing with this for several years and thankfully have it under very good control now.  But unfortunately that doesn't keep days like the one described below from happening about once a month (at the time I'm writing this).

This piece is not a means of fishing for pity or sympathy and it is also not an assertion that anyone else's depression necessarily resembles mine, and thus should not be taken as such.  It's simply my attempt to record the sorts of things I feel when my depression takes hold.

So, for anyone who's curious specifically how I experience it, or for anyone who wants to get a better understanding of what depression can do—or just for anyone: enjoy (you know what I mean).

[N.B.—The whole part about the job interview is fictional, but it's the only fictional part - I was looking for a way to flesh it out a little and get in a bit more of the sorts of things that depression makes me feel about myself. ]



Well that was unexpected. I didn’t get out of bed today until around 7PM. I overslept and then laid around and the longer I laid around, the darker it got outside and the further into depression I slipped. The light was off from when I went to bed last night so as the natural light from outside faded, the room went dark again. At one point I started thinking – this is what my room is like when I’m not here and I’ve shut the light out. And then I started to think maybe I’m really not here, or shouldn’t be.

It’s a little like something I think about relatively often, actually: how my consciousness is the only consciousness I can or ever will experience. I wonder what it’s like to experience the world from someone else’s brain. Sometimes, I think of someone very distant from me, and I think, That person is obviously doing something right now, somewhere in the world. I wonder what it is, and I feel so far away for not being able to know. But I’ve never been out of the house and thought, I wonder what my bedroom looks like right now, empty and dark. And yet as I lay there, I slowly started feeling less and less present, until at some point I realized that I was far away, watching the room exist and breathe on its own. It’s strange to know you’re there physically but to have this outside perspective of what’s going on around you, as if you’re not there at all, but somewhere else entirely, simply pondering – I wonder what my bedroom looks like right now, empty and dark.

This depression today was my lowest low for quite some time. No idea what brought it on – may have been as simple as lack of anything to do. Having nothing to do is, contrary to how it sounds, extremely difficult. Especially when a lack of commitment allows me to sit around and let myself wallow. At times it’s almost as if I allow a depression to come over me simply out of boredom. Like this particular day, for instance. I could’ve gotten up out of bed and done something with my day. I would’ve turned the light on in the room while it was still bright outside, and things would have felt normal. Instead, boredom fed laziness fed depression fed laziness fed boredom fed depression and eventually, my soul was in knots and I wanted to sink deep into the mattress until none of me remained and I could enjoy the dark non-world.

But it’s more complicated than that, I think. Yes, boredom and laziness play a part, but there’s some dark pall hovering somewhere from the very start of a day like this that makes any normal action (sitting up to drink some water, getting up to pee, making a sandwich) that much more difficult to force myself to do. There’s an impetus that begets a sort of bastard boredom and a bastard laziness –darker versions of normal boredom and laziness, which weigh down my limbs as if the bed has partially digested me, and orchestrate my downward spiral.

As it is right now, I’m kind of afraid to go to bed tonight. Today was really painful and I’m kind of scared tomorrow will be the same. I know I’m in control of that, but it doesn’t feel that way. It sure didn’t feel that way all day today while I was dying to eat, pee, have some water, but couldn’t sit up to drink from my water bottle, never mind get out of bed to use the bathroom or get something from the kitchen. Not being in control of your actions and feelings is really fucking scary. It’s almost like being two people at once: the coherent person (the real me, as it were) confined to my head, who knows that I’m literally in control of whether or not I get up out of bed or lay there until well after the sun has gone down; and, simultaneously, the other disembodied me – out in space - fueled by...something, I’m not sure what, that somehow “knows” any attempts to have a normal day are futile. The me in my head judges the rest of me for succumbing to the dark thing that keeps me immobile, which makes everything worse. It’s one thing to feel that you’ve disappointed loved ones (which incidentally happens all the damn time when you’re depressed); it’s another to feel that you’re letting your own self down in the most basic way possible. Pretty pathetic not to be able to utilize your own motor skills.

Eventually Patrick called because I told him I felt bad – he called three times before I picked up. I felt a tiny bit better hearing him and at least he made me talk a little. Then he turned on “Gilmore Girls” so I could hear it (he knows me too well) and that cheered me up some. I started talking a bit more and eventually started feeling like myself again. That’s when I finally got up and peed and ate (around 7PM). And it was at this point, as I finally started feeling like me again, that it dawned on me that I had missed my interview. All day, it had been the last thing on my mind. My phone ringing only served to make me hate human contact down in the pit of my guts – it sparked no useful response in me as far as snapping back to reality.

But as I stood at the toilet and peed, having needed to for about five hours, it was almost as if I was draining the fuzz that had drowned my brain and I suddenly had one of my first lucid thoughts of the day:

Job interview. Fucking great.

Newly mobile, I walked back into my room and sat back in bed, only now the light was on, so it was no longer the same slab I had been strapped to all day. I grabbed my laptop and immediately got to work writing an email to the company whose interview I had missed.

Dear Mr. —,

I am SO devastatingly sorry to have missed our interview today!! On waking up in the morning, I felt deathly ill and have only just in the last 30 minutes been able to work up the strength to get out of bed and hydrate and eat something. I know that not showing up and not alerting you to my illness was inexcusable, but I would be eternally grateful if you would give me another chance to come in in a few days. But of course, I totally understand if you don’t want to.

Apologies again!!


God I am such an anus-licking pussy, I thought as I watched this email come out of me like snot from a snail. But this is who I am, I suppose – I fuck up, I apologize profusely, I beg for a second chance – and if I get it, I do a bang-up job, make no mistake. I am good at what I do. It’s just that, at the risk of making excuses, it’s pretty hard to do anything at all when you’re so depressed that you start feeling like you no longer exist. So there’s that.

In a manner either very professional, or very indicative of his having nothing better to do than sit on his computer (in my case, it’s mostly the latter), I got a response relatively quickly.

Sorry to hear you’re ill. Interviews continue until Friday so let me know when you’ll be hydrated and I’ll squeeze you in if I can.


Cheeky bastard. He doesn’t buy one word of my bullshit story. It is, after all, a bullshit story. Well—it’s partially true. But I can just imagine him curling his lips around the word “hydrated,” balancing it on his tongue until it melts and he can spit it at me. Oh well, at least he’s going to give me another chance (hopefully). Let’s hope that my daily Happy Pill works its magic for the next few days so that when the second interview comes, I’m actually able to prop myself up on my elbows, sigh, slide out of bed, and go wearily on with my morning like all the normal people who do this kind of shit every day.

Someone's bitter....

I just read this heinously bullshit article on music which was posted in today's Boston Globe Magazine: http://articles.boston.com/2012-03-04/magazine/31115605_1_pyramid-scheme-liberal-arts-contrabass

Here is my response, which I submitted to the Globe as a Letter to the Editor.

Dear Sir or Madam:

I would like to respond to the article by Adam Ragusea entitled “Facing the Music” printed in today’s Globe Magazine.

I am currently studying composition at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, the department to which Mr. Ragusea alluded in his piece (where he too studied composition).

While I understand that it can be frightening or frustrating to realize, at the end of a degree path, that one’s chosen field may not be the most lucrative, it is ludicrous and melodramatic to accuse one’s professors of deliberately poisoning students’ minds to think they can achieve unattainable goals.

In the end, some people are talented, driven, passionate, and lucky enough to be successful in the arts; some are not.  The job of the professor of music (or dance or theater or studio art) is not to decide which students will succeed and which will end up investment bankers.  The professor’s job is to teach the student who asks to be taught, to the best of his or her ability.

I make no presumptions about how Mr. Ragusea feels in his current career as a radio reporter, but what I can say is that I cannot imagine ever truly being happy without music as an active part of my life.  And if that means being a professor and teaching this stuff “to some other sucker”—i.e., sharing my knowledge and passion with students who are just as passionate as I am and helping them to create art for the benefit of this community we all live in—then so be it. I actually quite like the idea. 

I do not expect to make a living as a professional composer, and I certainly have never had a professor here (or anywhere) imply that I would definitely be able to.

In truth, it is hard for me to imagine a student going into a master’s or doctoral program in the arts, still deluded into thinking there are plenty of good jobs to be had in those fields outside of a professorship (and even those are harder and harder to come by nowadays).

My colleagues, professors, and I are all here because we love music and cannot imagine our lives without it.  What the others will end up doing with their careers after this is their business—we are here, now, to learn to make the art we love.

If that’s too much commitment for you, study accounting.

Sincerely,

Evan A. Rees

Accompanist,

Indiana University Department of Theatre and Drama

Bloomington, IN 47401