Learning To Love My Depression

SHERRY AMATENSTEIN

I am a therapist. When a patient expresses suicidal ideation, I invariably preach, “There is always another choice.”

And I believe that to the bottom of my UGGs.

Still . . .

In my heart of hearts, soul of souls, I don’t dismiss that one day I might down a bottle of pills. I have no imminent plans and don’t foresee it happening, but I will never say never because never is a scarily long time.

Many times patients have cried in desperation: “How can you help me? You don’t understand what depression feels like!”

I tell them: “I don’t know exactly what your depression feels like. But I do know what it is to lose all hope.”

I am eight years old, burrowed in my mother’s lap in the shiny kitchen of our gold-carpeted house on Cruger Avenue in the Bronx. I am robotically eating potato chips from a Charles Chips tin. Mom has just finished telling me, for the third time this month, about being thirteen, escaping from the Nazis, and then allowing herself to be captured a few weeks later because she was going to a concentration camp eventually—why not go the same day as her best friend? My father, also a survivor, doesn’t contribute his tales of trauma. It’s not necessary; his hazel eyes are permanently haunted.

That night, and many nights before and after, in bed, I cry into my fat toy poodle’s fur, “Fifi, I don’t know how long I want to stay in such a mean world. If I didn’t have you, I don’t know if I could bear it.”

All week I tick off the hours to Sunday night when Mom and I snuggle in her bed. (Dad is in the basement, listening to worn LPs of Madame Butterfly and Figaro.) Fingers intertwined, Mom and I watch Sonny and Cher exchange passive-aggressive banter, cherubic Chastity propped between them. I feel safe, light, whole, but darkness tints the edges of my psyche.

Tomorrow is school. I have friends at P.S. 96, even served as Class President, a position that rotates monthly. But to get there I have to go out in the world—a world that kills and maims and tortures. A world that often feels painful as a kidney stone.

When an optimistic thought burrows its way up my throat, I bite the words back. Voicing, Adam Sherman will ask me to the school dance is a “Kina Hora.” This Yiddish term roughly translates into: Who are you to expect fate to dish out something good? Fa—you will suffer now.

Alas, refusing to believe Adam will ask me out doesn’t deliver him to my door. However, not expecting my crush to crush on me is a win for a career depressive: less severe disappointment when the inevitable happens.

In these pre-therapist days, no one tells me that my ALL NEGATIVE ALL THE TIME mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My internal Debbie Downer, however, doesn’t prevent me from being a rah-rah, find-your-happiness coach for others. The pleaser at home (how could I ever want to make trouble for my parents, who have endured the unendurable?), I’m the one classmates gravitate to for advice; the person who stays sober at frat parties so others can be reckless.

I even help my friend Ann sneak her stuff out of her super strict father’s house—a plan that backfires when her father comes running after our car, scraping his bare feet on the gravel, crying and screaming, “Don’t leave!”

Watching their fierce hug, the high of the reunion clearly making both certain their relationship will automatically be blissful, I experience what I have come to call “sad belly”—a pit deep, dark, and endless. People don’t know how not to hurt and disappoint each other, I think. Ann and her dad’s negative cycle will likely resume within a week.

I outdo even my expectations of doom and gloom when I marry a psychopath I’ll call Bill. There are clear issues during the two-year-long engagement, like the time he pushes me out of a car. At least it was parked and I landed on grass. Yes, depressive positivity! We still made it to our appointment with a wedding photographer.

My parents know nothing of his violent side, though mom (the sharpie who snuck food from under the Nazis’ noses to feed her ill friend) has suspicions there is something a bit off.

Still, Bill is Jewish so instead of saying, “Sherilah, you’re nineteen. What’s the rush?” my parents throw us a lavish wedding at Temple Torah.

I go through with the wedding because, well, Bill keeps saying how much he loves me and needs my help to become a better person. I need to be loved and needed, too, although I have no clue how to make him a better person.

Besides, the fog of depression is such an energy and clarity sapper, I can’t fully grasp that I can call off the engagement.

During the three-plus years of our marriage, I lie in bed beside my snoring husband and think: Is my life over? I’m so lonely I could die.

On the plus side—yes, honing that positivity!—Bill never again pushes me out of a car. He is more into lying (passing off as his authorship a love poem by ee cummings) and the occasional verbal threat (“I have Mafia connections. If you leave me I’ll have your parents killed”). Okay, the latter boast from the string-bean boy raised in Co-op City who still lisps when nervous is likely in the lie category as well. Only I’m too naïve and ready to believe the worst to suss this out.

Despite the sturm und drang of my daily life, I am fortunate. My depression is rarely completely debilitating. When sad belly and poisoned mind trap me in what feels like the bottom of a well, I retreat to my place of salvation.

I am not an observant Jew. Indeed, I loathe the heinous inhumanities frequently committed in the name of religion. Thus the altar I pray at is work, even if said occupation is neither feeding orphans nor—my dream—being a staff writer at the New Yorker. My paycheck is for editing a soap opera fan magazine called TV Dawn to Dusk.

Work saves me when the marriage finally implodes. As I now tell my patients, it can be the hardest action in the world to leave the familiar hell for something unknown. So I can’t quit Bill until he is nearly ready to quit me as well.

After enduring a three-day trial separation, with Bill staying at a neighbor’s apartment but stopping by every night for a round of let’s-pin-the-blame-on-Sherry, New Year’s Eve morning I fill a plastic bag with toiletries and take my shaky knees and sad belly into the rest of my life.

Becoming Sadie, Sadie, Divorced Lady without succumbing to a total breakdown brings on an Oprah aha! moment—Perhaps I’ve inherited a smidge of my parents’ survivor makeup.

Ensuing crises are further tests of my spirit and spine. A car accident leaves my ankle an inch from amputation, necessitating three surgeries and moving back into my childhood home while I am convalescing. The cherry on top: two weeks after car meets ankle, I spend my thirty-fifth birthday in bed with Mom in my parents’ bed while dad is exiled to my sister’s old bedroom because I’m not trusted to sleep alone.

Then there’s a live-in relationship with a man I’ll call Bill No. 2, to whom I lend $10,000 to start a business. At the same time, I put $60,000 into a startup homeopathic cosmetics endeavor with my bestie girlfriend. Even I know this is a stupid move, as I recently left a soul-killing magazine job to freelance.

Shocker: Both businesses crash and burn simultaneously. Once again I want to end a love relationship; once again I’m too chicken. Bill No. 2 had given up his apartment to move into mine. He says, “I see your pain and that you wish I wasn’t here. So I’ll pack up and leave.”

His departure, as well as the departure of the savings I meticulously built up after my divorce, creates an emotional tailspin that has me seriously contemplating suicide. But, as I tell my best guy pal, David, “I can’t kill myself while my parents are on the planet. “

Instead I dive into work—reinventing myself with a 9 to 5 editing gig at ivillage.com, a part-time job at a magazine, and teaching journalism two nights a week. There is no time to think or feel. When sad belly threatens to upend my equilibrium also known as flatline, I pop an antidepressant and keep on keeping on.

The event precipitating my present incarnation—therapist, healer of souls, soother of my own soul—started on 9/11.

Volunteering at Ground Zero Food Services reawakens a need shared by many children of holocaust survivors: to help others in pain atone for being unable to erase our parents’ pain.

Another pull toward more meaningful work is witnessing my parents’ slow, aching decline. Mom develops heart troubles and dementia. Alzheimer’s turns my opera-loving, New York Times’–devouring father into someone who stares and stares at the New York Post headline: “West Side Gory” with no comprehension.

David says to me, “Maybe you shouldn’t kill yourself while your sister and her daughters are on the planet. “

My mother dies during my second semester at Wurzweiller School of Social Work; dad lasts four more years. His fulltime caregiver calls early one Friday morning—she walked into his bedroom (the one I’d slept in with my mother) and found him forever sleeping.

At the house, I cuddle next to his already icy body and whisper in his ear that I love him. Dad’s hazel eyes are open, looking upward, beatifically, at mom.

It is surreal to be a fifty-something orphan. Once again surviving what I’ve long dreaded (can’t kill myself while my sister and nieces are still around!) schools me in acknowledging and accessing my own strength.

By then I am seeing patients, many whose problems make mine look like a skinned knee at summer camp.

A millennial I’ll call Sam whose father committed suicide asks at one session, “Dad was so weak I hate him, but how can I keep going with this horrible pain?”

I answer, “What he did is never something you’re going to get over. But last week you laughed and talked about a great date you’d gone on. Pain isn’t a constant. There’s an ebb and flow. Looking out a train window there can be a gorgeous view you want to hold on to but darn, you whizz past it. Then there’s an ugly sight out the window you don’t want to see. The train whizzes past that too.”

He takes a Kleenex from the ever-present tissue box on the sienna oak table between us and wipes his eyes. “If I’m happy sometimes, am I disloyal to my dad? When I feel good I tell myself I’m a horrible person.”

I stifle a gasp. Sam’s question sends a stream of light into the heart of my sad belly. I say to my patient and myself, “First off, every time you attack yourself, you dig that negativity deeper. It’s emotional junk food; no nutrients. Second, you honor your parents’ lives when you build something good and nourishing for yourself.”

Sam reaches for another tissue, “That makes sense but how do I deal with my depression when it gets so intense?”

The question lingers in the air. I say, “Feel it here in the room with me. I can handle it. What is the pain telling you? Ask it questions. What can it teach you?”

The two of us lock eyes. He breathes slowly and I think about the Tibetan practice of Tonglen where one internalizes another’s pain and sends back joy.

Sam says after some silent seconds, “I feel better. I guess running from depression doesn’t make it go away. It just goes underground.”

“Yes, life is a kaleidoscope. To live fully we have to embrace all the colors.”

My patient leaves the session looking less haunted.

I feel heavy but also light. I’ve earned my depression. It still sometimes weighs me down. But it’s a grounding weight rather than a bottomless pit of sad belly. I’d rather dance with my demons than drown in them.

One day I may commit suicide. But I doubt it. There is always another choice.