THIS DEPRESSION IS VERY BORING

I am bored by it and I am writing about it anyway

Last week's post started with me describing the first warm day of the year, the promise of heat in the first bright hours of the morning; the budding potential of spring and all its heart-swelling offerings; sun-soaked sighs and stretching limbs—oh the possibilities felt endless on that morning! Well, I’d been duped. Midmorning last Monday a blanket of clouds rolled over the city, quashed the warmth beneath a benevolent boot, and the thick gray blanket hasn’t seem to let up since then. The sun got swallowed, and the chill still hasn’t quite been cut out.

I’m in a depression. And, so, that’s where we’re starting today. I’m in a depression and I have been for a minute now though I’m always hesitant to call it by name and it always resists being named. The lethargy bogs me down, the fog keeps me from thinking clearly–it is a difficult thing to face head on by design. I’m in a depression but I’m not writing this today to be the poster child for depression or share my lifelong experience with mental illness or spread awareness. I don’t care to get into the details of the oversleeping and the undereating and the guilty inability to reply to texts and keep up with the relationships that mean so much to me. I think as a culture we’ve got a pretty good grasp on what depression is now and how it grips the mind and I’m not interested in influencing culture anyhow. This newsletter is my avenue for examining my creative process and attempting to understand why I make art and how I can better my craft. I’m looking at my depression today through a writer’s lens. I’m doing it even though I’m tired and every little sinew of muscle in my body resists action. I’m in a depression but I’m clawing my way toward what makes me happy.

When I’m building characters for a novel, I’ve often gravitated toward exploring characters with mental illness, probably as a way of trying to offer myself a path through the labyrinth. But I’ve found when I force my way into a story in search of a really specific solution, it will always evade me. The truest answers only come when I’m not looking for them. And even beyond that, I’ve pulled away recently because I’ve come to find that depression is, quite honestly, very uninteresting. From an internal and external perspective, it’s an incredibly boring disease. Inside, it is quiet and dark and foggy. Outside, it is gray and still and repulsive. Depression has a really stupid way of turning everything inside and around you into nothing–beautiful things lose their color, ideas that normally intrigue become flat and featureless, the mundane which always has the potential to inspire becomes a chore or even an affront to the deep apathy one finds themself in. The feedback loop of depression is that it exhausts the mind and body and it dampens the senses so that it feels deeply pointless to pull out of because nothing seems worth crawling out of it for. Writing a character experiencing the world like this is really difficult because it requires sacrificing a lot of time in the book to the absolute drudgery of being depressed.

When I fall into a depression which, graciously, happens less and less as I get older, time gets all twisted and ugly. Weeks pass that feel like months, months pass that feel like hours. So much is lost to the one desire you are allowed: laying down to rot. God, there is nothing better than laying down and feeling like shit and succumbing to the rot when depression has taken root. It’s a great topic to write about, but it’s a shit tool in a story. It takes an axe to the character’s motivations, it halts any forward progress in their relationships or the central action. It’s a normal, if disordered, response to things that might be happening to a character, but it’s just fucking boring to elaborate upon and it really muddles a story—which is reality, of course. Depression absolutely muddles the narrative of my life. It brings everything I care about to a halt, all of my projects and ideas and motivations and desires to deepen my relationships come to a standstill because I’m beholden to the lethargy. Coming out of a depression, I usually find that my memories of that time are difficult to access and so much of the time has blended into one big pile of gray slop.

I find it really difficult to elaborate on the internal reality of a character experiencing depression as well. It’s a very negative, repetitive line of thinking. There’s little going on up there beyond ‘I hate myself, I’m lazy, I’m doing this to myself, I should get up but I won’t because I’m a piece of shit, I hate myself, everyone leaves, I hate myself’ and it’s just another factor in the feedback loop that holds a person down in the depression. Unironically, Netflix original Bojack Horseman portrays this really well. The arc of the show feeds off of the endless repetition of depression, the titular character’s inability to change is a direct response to his internal reality, something the audience is really supposed to just intuit, until season 4 episode Stupid Piece of Shit. It’s the first time the audience really experiences the ceaselessly churning inner monologue of Bojack and sees how it informs his every terrible decision. It was a great tool for the episode but there’s a reason it only happens once and never again. Depression is exhausting, relentless and rather annoying. After thirty minutes of listening to Bojack call himself a stupid piece of shit over actions he took because he can only see himself as a stupid piece of shit so of course he’s going to make stupid piece of shit decisions–you see what I’m getting at.

I’d like to say that writing is a great tool for getting me out of a depression but it’s not, really. Writing helps guide me inward and it shows me pieces of my internal reality that I might not have noticed or maybe was altogether ignoring, but it can only show me the truth, it cannot offer me a clear path out of the fog. Engaging in my writing is what’s brought me to recognizing the depression I’m currently facing. I shared a short story this past Friday and I’m deeply disappointed in it. Whether or not it’s because I think the story is good or bad isn’t really the point. I didn’t enjoy the process of writing it, I resisted digging deeper into it, the editing process didn’t intrigue me and I felt no relief upon sharing it. I doubted the story from the get go and I still doubt it now–this is a symptom of the state I’m in. The things I love most, like writing and building stories, become an absolute drudgery and forcing myself to just strap in and do the work anyway isn’t satisfying. I can’t engage with writing the things that matter most to me in this gray-nothing mindset. If I’m not enjoying the process, if I can’t go to the difficult, honest places I’d like to explore in my work then I’m going to feel doubt and I’m going to slip into the feedback loop of producing work that I doubt and then seeing it as a permanent flaw in my sense of self. 

There’s no glory or beauty in depression. It’s a gross, gripping, black-hearted disease. It is deeply uninteresting, it makes me uninteresting, it makes my writing uninteresting. Some artists (mostly white men) have made entire careers off of writing about/mining their endless sadness and weaving the self-hate into their work and they’ve done it very well. I have no interest in this. The tortured artist, which has evolved more recently into the ‘sad girl’ (huge win for feminism), is an old and tired trope. There is very little in my experience with depression that is worthy of being mined for my writing. It actively hinders my ability to do the work that matters most to me, it holds me back from my purpose of writing things that help me connect to the world around me, it leads me to writing that isolates and feeds the loop. 

What I find much more interesting is the work it takes to pull myself out of a depression. There is something deeply human in the crawling, scraping, clawing that it takes to drag myself out of the trench that this disease would prefer to keep me in. Breaking the feedback loops, making pointedly healthy choices, turning inward even when it’s terribly fucking ugly in there, despite my mind’s insistence that I keep away from myself–this matters to me. Turning away from the ugly gray landscape and turning toward the gorgeous future I have spent so many years building for myself, this saves me. I am much more interested in the will to live than the thing that tries to snuff it out. That is what I like to weave into my stories–the spark of life that exists in every person, the thing that gives purpose, and the journey it takes to find it.

So I’m trying now. It looks ugly, like a naked human-inhuman body scrambling for purchase on a muddy slope in the dark. There’s lots of straining muscles and slipping and sinking and resting and then trying again. I have to do all of this work to bring myself back to life and then I have to keep living even though I know I’ll end up back in the trenches again. It’s a shitty deal but it’s the one I’ve been given and I’ve spent far too much of my life unable to imagine a future for myself to give up on the one I’ve finally got in sight. I refuse to let anything keep me from the joy of crafting stories and the ugly vulnerability of sharing them with others. So, I’m trying now. I’m crawling back to the joy. I’m bloody and tired and I want to lay down and rot my life away but, you know, Fuck That, etc. I have stories to tell and I won’t be letting this black parasite keep me from sharing them. Onwards and onwards and onwards.

jw

And I don't want your pity / I just want somebody near me
Guess I'm a coward / I just want to feel alright

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Inspirations

This is great writing music so long as you aren’t listening to closely to the soft-hummed lyrics. There’s a lot of reckoning with tough familial relations, guilt about not trying hard enough in love, and still going on loving all the same. The sonic landscape is disarming enough that the content eases its way in but I’ve still got lots to digest.

I’ve been deeply obsessed recently with this artist, Wenjie Ding. He uses a really classic Chinese style of painting to produce these scenes of really straightforward homosexual kink. It is unabashed in its portrayal of male eroticism and can even sometimes lean a bit silly or humorous. A goal of my art-making recently has been to work through so much of my sexual shame as a gay man and seeing other artists be really bold and upfront about their sexuality has been guiding me toward more sexual honesty. And beyond all of that, he’s simply so talented and I love seeing traditionally exclusive styles being co-opted by the people excluded.

Watching Willow Smith publicly make music since the age of, like 11??? has been such a gift. I find it deeply impressive that she’s been able to explore her art and make songs that are so unabashedly honest while existing in a very obvious spotlight. This album is great. The arrangements are jarring and interesting and full of self-exploration. The fact that she can make music that pushes boundaries like this and she’s only 23 is bonkers. I cannot wait to see where she goes from here.

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Collaging Round-Up

Split Me Open

worship

unforgiveness

There’s quite a bit of religious imagery in this week’s collaging and that’s mostly by circumstance. Someone on my street put an entire bookshelf on the sidewalk overflowing with free books. There was some really weird shit there but I mostly took the things I knew I could mine for collaging content, and one of those books was a Christian textbook used for teaching kids the love of Jesus. That gold logo set against purple in worship came from the cover of that book and I really haven’t gotten over how fucking good that logo is. Unironically, really great design. Also from that book (again, for teaching children) the genuinely unsettling tableau in unforgiveness.

Unforgiveness is a rare example of allowing myself to really plumb the depths of how dull and dark and stupid depression can feel. I don’t make art that reflects that reality very often, again because it’s boring and one-dimensional, but this is a pretty close reflection of the feeling. In the center of a swirling pool of cold apathy, a man begging a higher power he doesn’t even believe in for some relief. A collage is small enough to hold the sickness.

Worship holds a related bit of self-loathing. It’s about mindless devotion. It’s about the things I will do to myself to keep someone close to me. It’s horny too, in a very aggressively Greek Homosexual kind of way—all admiration of the male form or whatever with lots of room for self-repression and praying to the gods for absolution. This one holds my sexual exploration and my sexual shame in equal measures.

Split Me Open doubles down on this. Much less horny and much more emptying of the self for the satisfaction of the other. I visited Denver in 2021 to see my partner at the time and we found this book in a used book store called The Best Little Boy in the World. The author wrote about his coming of age as a gay boy in the 60’s behind the mask of a pseudonym with lots of humor and grotesque horniness. My partner and I laughed at the title when we saw it. I found this same book on that sidewalk bookcase last week and was like, okay, I’m being sent a message obviously. I lost a lot of myself in that relationship trying to be the best little boy in the world for someone who didn’t even really want that. I’m still rebuilding my sense of self after giving so much of me away. Shame is proving to be a recurring theme in all of my art and the more I dig into it, the more I find needs to be unpacked.

My body's a temple / It was built for you / To do all the things you dreamed you do