Written by renowned author and novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie.
Sometimes it begins with a pimple. A
large shiny spot appears on my forehead. Or it begins with a feeling of
heaviness, and I long to wear only loose-fitting clothes. Then my mood plunges,
my lower back aches, my insides turn liquid. Stomach cramps come in spasms so
painful I sometimes cry out. I lose interest in the things I care about.
My
family become unbearable, my friends become strangers with dark intentions, and
cashiers and waiters seem unforgivably rude.
shrouds me: every human being with whom I interact is wrong, either insensitive
or ill-willed. I eat mounds of food – I crave greasy stews and fried yams and
dense chocolate truffles – or I have no appetite at all, both unusual for a
careful, picky eater. My breasts are swollen and taut. Because they hurt, I
wear my softest bras – “tender” seems a wrong word for the sharp discomfort.
Sometimes they horrify me, so suddenly round, as though from science fiction,
and sometimes their round perkiness pleases my vanity.
At night, I lie
sleepless, drenched in strange sweat; I can touch the wetness on my skin. I am
sitting in a doctor’s office in Maryland and reciting these symptoms. On the
wall of the bright room, there is a diagram of a lean female, her ovaries and
uterus illustrated in curling lines; it reminds me of old pictures of Eve in
the garden with Adam. The doctor is a kind and blunt woman, bespectacled, but
reading over her lenses the forms I have filled out.
When she first asks why I
have come to see her, I say, “Because my family thinks I need help.” Her reply
is, “You must agree with them or you wouldn’t be here.” Later, it will strike
me that this is a quality I admire most in women: a blunt kindness, a kind
bluntness. When she asks questions, I embellish my answers with careful detail
– the bigger-sized bra I wear for a few days, the old frost-bitten ice cream I
eat because I will eat anything.
cycle, to repeat that I always feel better when my period starts. I make fun of
my irritability: everyone I meet is annoying until I suddenly realise that I am
the only constant and the problem has to be me! It is, I tell her, as though a
strangeness swoops down on me every month, better on some and worse on others.
Nothing I say is untrue. But there are things I leave out. I am silent about
the other strangeness that comes when it will and flattens my soul. “It sounds
like you have premenstrual dysphoric disorder,” she says.
It is what I want to
hear. I am grateful because she has given me a name I find tolerable, an
explanation I can hide behind: my body is a vat of capricious hormones and I am
at their mercy. But the doctor is not done. Her eyes are still and certain as
she says, “But the more important thing is that you have underlying
depression.” She speaks quietly, and I feel the room hold its breath.
She
speaks as if she knows that I already know this. In truth, I am sitting
opposite her in this examining room because my family is worried about the days
and weeks when I am, as they say, “not myself”. For a long time, I have told
them that I just happen to have hormonal issues, victim to those incomplete
tortures that Nature saves for femaleness.
say. “It just can’t.” Mine is a family full of sensible scientists – a
statistician father, an engineer brother, a doctor sister. I am the different
one, the one for whom books always were magical things. I have been writing
stories since I was a child; I left medical school because I was writing poems
in biology class. When my family says it is “not just hormonal”, I suspect they
are saying that this malaise that makes me “not myself” has something to do
with my being a writer. Now, the doctor asks me, “What kind of writing do you
do?”
I tell her I write fiction. “There is a high incidence of depression in
creative people,” she says. I remember a writers’ conference I attended in
Maine one summer years ago, before my first novel was published. I liked the
other writers, and we sat in the sun and drank cranberry juice and talked about
stories. But a few days in, I felt that other strangeness creeping up on me,
almost suffocating me. I drew away from my new circle of friends.
One of them
finally cornered me in the dormitory and asked, “You’re depressive, aren’t
you?” In his eyes and his voice was something like admiration, because he
believed that there is, in a twisted way, a certain literary glamour in
depression. He tells me that Ernest Hemingway had depression. Virginia Woolf and
Winston Churchill had depression. Graham Greene had depression.
wasn’t just writers. Did I know Van Gogh had wandered into the field he was
painting and shot himself? I remember feeling enraged, wanting to tell him that
depression has no grandeur, it is opaque, it wastes too much and nurtures too
little. But to say so would be to agree that I indeed had depression. I said
nothing. I did not have depression.
I did not want to have depression.
And now, in the doctor’s
office, I want to resist. I want to say no thank you, I’ll take only
premenstrual dysphoric disorder please. It fits elegantly in my arsenal of
feminism after all, this severe form of premenstrual syndrome, suffered by only
3% of women, and with no known treatment, only different suggestions for
management. It gives me a new language. I can help other women who grew up as I
did in Nigeria, where nobody told us girls why we sometimes felt bloated and
moody. If we ever talked about what happened to our bodies, then it was behind
closed doors, away from the boys and men, in tones muted with abashment.
and mothers and sisters, a band of females surrounded in mystery, the older
whispering to the younger about what periods meant: staying away from boys,
washing yourself well. They spoke in stilted sentences, gestured vaguely, gave
no details. Even then I felt resentful to have to feel shame about what was
natural. And now here I was, burnished with a new language to prod and push at
this damaging silence. But depression is different. To accept that I have it is
to be reduced to a common cliche: I become yet another writer who has
depression. To accept that I have it is to give up the uniqueness of my own
experience, the way I start, in the middle of breathing, to sense on the
margins the threat of emptiness. Time blurs. Days pass in a fog. It is morning
and then suddenly it is evening and there is nothing in between. I am
frightened of contemplating time itself: the thought of tomorrow and the day
after tomorrow, the endless emptiness of time. I long to sleep and forget. Yet
I am afraid of waking up, in terror of a new day. Mornings are dark, and I lie
in bed, wrapped in fatigue. I cry often.
because there is no cause. I open a book but the words form no meaning. Writing
is impossible. My limbs are heavy, my brain is slow. Everything requires
effort. To consider eating, showering, talking brings to me a great and
listless fatigue. Why bother? What’s the point of it all? And why, by the way,
are we here? What is it I know of myself? I mourn the days that have passed,
the wasted days, and yet more days are wasted. The doctor calls these symptoms
but they do not feel like symptoms. They feel like personal failures, like
defects. I am normally full of mischievous humour, full of passion, whether in
joy or in rage, capable of an active, crackling energy, quick to respond and
rebuke, but with this strangeness, I do not even remember what it means to
feel.
lives of others, but with this strangeness comes misanthropy. A cold
misanthropy. I am normally the nurturer, worrying about everyone I love, but
suddenly I am detached. It frightens me, this sense of slipping out of my
normal self. It cannot be an illness. It feels like a metaphysical failure,
which I cannot explain but for which I am still responsible. There is an
overwhelming reluctance to move. A stolidness of spirit. I want to stay, to be,
and if I must then only small movements are bearable. I switch off my phone,
draw the shades, burrow in the dim stillness. I shy away from light and from
love, and I am ashamed of this. I feel guilty about what I feel. I am unworthy
of the people who care about me. I stew in self-recrimination. I am alone.
it, I say to myself. What is wrong with you? But I don’t know how to stop it. I
feel as if I am asking myself to return a stolen good that I have not in fact
stolen. In some of my family and friends, I sense confusion, and sometimes,
suspicion. I am known to nurse a number of small eccentricities, and perhaps
this is one. I avoid them, partly not to burden them with what I do not
understand, and partly to shield myself from their bewilderment, while all the
time, a terrible guilt chews me whole. I hear their unasked question: Why can’t
she just snap out of it? There is, in their reactions, an undertone of
“choice”. I might not choose to be this way, but I can choose not to be this
way. I understand their thinking because I, too, often think like them. Is this
self-indulgence? Surely it cannot be so crippling if I am sentient enough to
question it? Does the market woman in Nsukka have depression? When I cannot get
out of bed in the morning, would she be able to, since she earns her living day
by day?
people, “we don’t know why that is”. Her tone is flat, matter-of-fact, and I am
grateful that it is free of fascination. “Do you think anybody else in your
family might have depression?” she asks. Nobody else does. I tell her, a little
defensively, about growing up in Nsukka, the small university campus, the
tree-lined streets where I rode my bicycle. It is as if I want to exculpate my
past. My childhood was happy. My family was close-knit. I was voted most
popular girl in secondary school. Yet I have memories of slow empty days, of
melancholy silence, of perplexed people asking what was wrong, and of feeling
guilty and confused, because I had no reason. Everything was wrong and yet
nothing was wrong. I remember a gardener we had when I was a child. A wiry
ex-soldier called Jomo. A man full of stories for little children.
and I followed him around as he watered the plants, asking him questions about
plants and life, basking in his patience. But sometimes, he changed, became
blank, barely spoke to anybody. Perhaps he had depression. Later, I will wonder
about African writers, how many could be listed as well in this Roll of Depression,
and if perhaps they, too, refuse to accept the name. The doctor says, “I’d
recommend therapy, and that you try anti-depressants. I know a good therapist.”
A therapist.
woman, a strong Nigerian woman, a strong African woman, and we don’t do
depression. We don’t tell strangers our personal business. But the joke lies
still and stale on my tongue. I feel defensive about the suggestion of a
therapist, because it suggests a cause that I do not know, a cause I need a
stranger to reveal to me. I remember the first book I read about depression,
how I clung to parts that I could use to convince myself that I did not have
depression. Depressives are terrified of being alone. But I enjoy being alone,
so it cannot be depression.
to rant, to tear off clothes, to do something crazy. So it cannot be
depression, this strangeness. It cannot be the same kind of thing that made
Virginia Woolf fill her pockets with stones and walk into a river. I stopped
reading books about depression because their contradictions unsettled me. I was
comforted by them, but I was also made anxious by them. I am in denial about
having depression, and it is a denial that I am not in denial about. “I don’t
want to see a therapist,” I say. She looks at me, as if she is not surprised.
“You won’t get better if you do nothing. Depression is an illness.” It is
impossible for me to think of this as I would any other illness. I want to impose
it my own ideas of what an illness should be. In its lack of a complete
explanation, it disappoints. No ebb and flow of hormones.
medicine either. I’m worried about what it will do to my writing. I heard
people turn into zombies.” “If you had diabetes would you resist taking
medicine?” Suddenly I am angry with her. My prejudices about American
healthcare system emerge: perhaps she just wants to bill more for my visit, or
she has been bribed by a drug rep who markets antidepressants. Besides,
American doctors over-diagnose. “How can I possibly have PMDD and depression?
So how am I supposed to know where one starts and the other stops?” I ask her,
my tone heavy with blame. But even as I ask her, I feel dishonest, because I
know. I know the difference between the mood swings that come with stomach
cramps and the flatness that comes with nothing. I am strong. Everyone who
knows me thinks so. So why can’t I just brush that feeling aside? I can’t.
it is this, the “cantness”, the starkness of my inability to control it, that
clarifies for me my own condition. I look at the doctor and I accept the name
of a condition that has been familiar to me for as long as I can remember.
Depression. Depression is not sadness. It is powerlessness. It is helplessness.
It is both to suffer and to be unable to console yourself. This is not the real
you, my family say. And I have found in that sentiment, a source of denial. But
what if it is the real me? What if it is as much a part of me as the other with
which they are more at ease?
perhaps the ancestors have given me what I need to do the work I am called to
do. A lofty way of thinking of it, but perhaps another way of saying: What if
depression is an integral but fleeting part of me? A fellow writer, who himself
has had bouts of depression, once wrote me to say: remember that it is the
nature of depression to pass. A comforting thought. It is also the nature of
depression to make it difficult to remember this. But it is no less true. That
strangeness, when it comes, can lasts days, weeks, sometimes months. And then,
one day, it lifts. I am again able to see clearly the people I love.
back to a self I do not question. A few days after my doctor visit, I see a
therapist, a woman who asks me if my depression sits in my stomach. I say
little, watching her, imagining creating a character based on her. On the day
of my second appointment, I call and cancel. I know I will not go again. The
doctor tells me to try anti-depressants. She says in her kind and blunt way:
“If they don’t work, they don’t work, and your body gets rid of them.” I agree.
I will try antidepressants, but first, I want to finish my novel.