REGINA ANAVY
Picture a spiral. You are on top, going along in your usual pattern. A thought intrudes, a moment of doubt, guilt, or self-reproach. Your spirits drop. You move lower, to the next rung of the spiral. As your mind turns inward and your thoughts become more constricted, your options seem to narrow. You suddenly flash in vivid detail on every error committed in your past: spiteful words uttered on impulse that you cannot take back; impulsive acts you cannot erase. You begin to obsess about relationships that have drifted away–all your fault, of course. And you weren’t always the perfect child, the perfect sibling, the perfect worker, lover, or friend. Oh, the mistakes you have made. Your life is one big mistake, from the minute you were born. You spiral down and down into the blame and shame of your life.
This negative-feedback loop of depression had been a familiar part of my psyche for as long as I could remember. Usually, I would find my way back up and come out on top of the spiral. However, in 1971, my luck ran out and I had a full-blown breakdown.
I was twenty-eight years old, Jewish, middle-class, and college-educated. I was living in a commune in Washington, D.C., and seven of us from the area were selected for the Fourth Venceremos Brigade after applying for the trip and being screened. We wanted to go to Cuba to cut sugar cane in support of Fidel Castro’s Revolution. Two hundred of us were in this brigade, from all over the United States. We would spend seven weeks in a work camp and then tour the island for another two weeks. It was the ultimate in commitment to the lifestyle of being a radical. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, this trip was illegal, which only made it more enticing.
I had volunteer-worked my way up to this point in my radical career by being active in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the anti-war movement. I had even become an above-ground member of the Weather Underground through a boyfriend who was involved with them. It was the perfect time for me to get out of town since I had inadvertently taken part in an explosion in the U.S. Capitol building. I say “inadvertently” because my friend had surfaced to come visit me and had left a book on my shelf. When he picked it up later, he opened the front cover to show me: the book was hollow inside and it held blasting caps. No one had been hurt in the explosion, but I still felt guilty about my participation, and I felt guilty about feeling guilty, for it meant I was not a committed revolutionary and still had bourgeois tendencies.
My disillusionment with the Revolution began the moment I arrived in the work camp. The lack of individual rights was apparent. The one newspaper we saw, Granma, spelled “America” with a “k.” The Cubans did not approve of the gay brigadistas, who were considered counter-revolutionary. This was the catchword of the moment, and to be branded such was the biggest insult imaginable and an invitation to being ostracized. It seemed to me that what was happening in Cuba was unrelated to my cultural values. Such thinking was, of course, counter-revolutionary.
There was a daily routine that provided structure. At sunrise, we had a shot of strong coffee, piled ourselves into claustrophobic Soviet trucks, and sang revolutionary songs all the way to the fields. We worked until lunchtime, came back in the trucks (same singing routine, with a few shouted slogans thrown in), had a copious lunch, took a siesta, and went out again in the afternoon. Before each trip to the fields, we sharpened our machetes. At night, there were cultural activities—movies shown in the “Palm Theater,” where we leaned against trunks of felled palm trees. Occasionally musicians came to perform for us. It was one big revolutionary party.
Social pressure worked subtly in the camp. We were “invited” to show up for work production meetings, where we were lectured on how to increase the amount of cane we cut. Occasionally, some important personage would come through the camp to give us a pep talk. We were expected to drop what we were doing, fall out in military fashion, line the path, and clap enthusiastically. It was like being in a cult.
Unfortunately, before coming to Cuba, I had become dependent on marijuana to elevate my mood. I had been in psychoanalysis for years, but the tendency to analyze and over-analyze had made me worse. So now, here I was, in a physically and emotionally trying situation, sleeping six to a tent, being covered in ash in the cane fields, often cutting myself with the blade of the machete, being harassed by the Cuban overseers who told us to cut faster and aim lower, and without my usual crutch (marijuana was not tolerated in Cuba).
There was also a lot of infighting among the different political factions. Doubt began to creep in, and I started questioning everything. If I had been wrong about the Cuban revolution, was I wrong about other beliefs? I came to the conclusion that I was wrong about everything; my life had been built on a lie. And then I became consumed by all-encompassing guilt for feeling that way. Everyone around me, except for a few of us doubters, seemed to be fully engaged in the revolutionary experience of cutting cane and mouthing the party line. So what was wrong with me? I took it all personally, lost my sense of perspective and, worst of all, my sense of humor.
The Cubans seemed fiercely patriotic and proud of their country, a great contrast to the constant criticism on the part of the North Americans against our own government and its policy toward Cuba. I started to feel weird about this, suspecting that the Cubans actually looked down on us for our lack of patriotism. They also were very anti-hippy and anti-drug, and they considered us spoiled and self-indulgent. They were determined to stamp these qualities out of us through hard work and indoctrination. I began to view my critical attitude toward Cuba as a symptom of overwhelming negativity. Was I just a rebel for the sake of rebellion? Was I doomed to see only the negative side of everything?
My self-confidence plummeted and I became more withdrawn, convinced that everyone suspected me of being a CIA agent. For one thing, I was being openly critical; for another, I was taking a lot of photos. The paranoia, both inside the camp and inside my own head, was not helped by the fact that one of the Cubans confided to me that before we had come, the Cuban government had taken them aside to warn them about us North Americans: we would try to seduce them sexually; we would try to poison their minds with our bourgeois, capitalist thinking; we were not really their friends. So it was all a sham––the forced companionship in the camp, the forced solidarity. My identity as a revolutionary was a sham, too, built on a false premise.
My world was falling apart. Going home was not an option, because joining the Brigade meant I was committed for the whole nine weeks and dependent on the Cubans for transport home. Clearly, I did not belong there, but where did I belong? It’s ironic that I could have bragged about being more revolutionary than anyone because I was involved with the Weather Underground, but this was something that couldn’t be revealed.
You realize you are in a prison of your own making. There is a wall separating you from others; how easily those fragile social connections you once took for granted are broken. You have forgotten how to engage in the proper behavior required for making contact. You feel detached from the human race, and this creates more self-blame.
This sense of detachment amidst people with whom I could not connect was the worst feeling of all. It was a signal to me that, emotionally, there was no turning back. I was doomed.
Somewhere down the spiral, after Blame, Guilt, and Detachment have arrived in full force, Anxiety suddenly appears. It’s a rogue wave, slamming into your body, turning you upside down and saturating every pore. You are drowning, unable to surface for air. Once Anxiety seeps in, you realize it has been there all along, stalking you, hovering in the background like a rejected lover lurking outside your house, waiting for a moment when your guard is down and you have left a window cracked.
Fear is Anxiety’s twin, for you now know there is no escape from your private descent into Hell. Sleep, when it comes, is full of nightmares. You awaken in the middle of the night, terrified, and filled with disgust at your terror. Morning arrives and you do not feel rested. Time becomes meaningless, for you are wrapped in the time zone of depression, your own private misery. The simplest act becomes a struggle: getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, combing your hair, dressing. Sheer maintenance wears you out. You are alone, falling faster into inner space.
As fear and despair took over, I experienced a loss of self, as if my core identity had been smashed and I had no way of reassembling it. I moved through the days like an automaton. So much of my energy was being taken up in this inner dialogue that little was left for interacting with my compañeros who, sensing my weirdness, began to distance themselves from me. This social isolation caused more anxiety. I was in a repetitive loop of self-criticism, self-loathing, guilt, despair, anxiety, loss of hope and, finally, thoughts of suicide.
The last two weeks of the trip were spent touring the island. This included a “forced march” in the Sierra Maestra. It was exhausting. By the time we returned home, in the hold of a ship, I was moving like a zombie, incapable of connecting, except with the other walking wounded. One of them was a drug addict who had spent the whole time in Cuba in a hospital, going through withdrawal. We spoke briefly, standing on deck, leaning against the rail. It was all I could do to keep from throwing myself overboard.
I vaguely remember the homecoming and being unable to articulate my experience or to connect with my friends. I vaguely remember buying sleeping pills and checking into a hotel. I vaguely remember writing a suicide note, explaining my “logical” reasons for doing this. I do remember the relief of gulping down those pills and lying down on the bed to sleep, forever. But it hurt, and I woke up: I was scared.
While unconscious, I had a vision of going down a tunnel, being led by a rabbit, and the thought had come to me that I was not ready to die. I did not want to follow that rabbit, and I forced myself to wake up. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done, pushing myself up off the bed and staggering into the hallway, where I incoherently flagged down a hotel guest and then passed out. When I awoke, I was on the locked ward of a hospital, having my stomach pumped. A good-looking young cop was standing over me, smiling, and I knew I was safe.
The first night in the hospital, I was rambling and carrying on, happy to be alive. They put me in solitary until I could calm down. The doctors laughed at me for trying to commit suicide with over-the-counter sleeping pills, and I felt like a failure again. This feeling came and went over the next few weeks. My analyst showed up (he must have felt like a failure himself). The approach in the hospital was group therapy and was much more directive than his Freudian method. I was surprised to see how many friends came to visit; some of them sought to “rescue” me in a guerrilla action from the evil clutches of conventional medicine, but I knew I needed to be there and refused to go with them.
The one failure in treatment was that I was not immediately put on antidepressants. The tranquilizers they gave me zonked me out but did nothing to quell my suicidal thought pattern. After three months, I entered a halfway house. This turned out to be a healing experience, and I gradually clawed my way back to mental health.
There were two crucial turning points. I learned that I could easily get a gun from one of the other residents, which would make committing suicide a definite possibility. I made a decision to stop thinking about suicide: I had regained my mind. Then, before moving into my own apartment, I had a brief affair with one of the staff, who made me feel like a desirable woman: I had regained my body.
I began to see a different psychiatrist, one with a new approach to the issue of depression. For him, it was simply a matter of proper brain chemistry, and he immediately put me on a tricyclic antidepressant. Amazingly, within two weeks, my energy and zest for life returned, and I became rational and more focused on my future. I was able to make social connections and appropriate decisions without second-guessing everything I did, a state of mind that had immobilized me since my breakdown.
The realization that my lifelong depression had a chemical and even a genetic component (my father had tried to commit suicide twice) relieved me of guilt and despair. I now had hope that I could recover.
And I did. I moved to the West Coast and went to law school for one year. I rented a beautiful apartment and got a job as a legal assistant at a law firm in San Francisco. With the money I saved, I bought property, becoming a real member of the establishment without any guilt. I became a massage therapist and took classes in painting. I maintained my interest in politics but worked within the framework of the Democratic Party, serving on the State Central Committee for two years. I met a man and fell in love. We traveled the world together, got married, and started what became a successful business.
Since my hospitalization more than three decades ago, I have had other bouts of depression, but I have learned to catch myself at the top of the spiral before I begin that terrifying descent. I heed those first warning signs—self-deprecating thoughts and debilitating anxiety—and, with the help of medication, I know I can stop the fall.
In 2003, I became interested in Cuba again and felt brave enough to go back for another look, legally this time. I no longer feel guilty about my negative perception of the Revolution. If someone called me a “counter-revolutionary” today, I would laugh and agree, taking it as a compliment.
I have now come out of the closet about my genetic tendency toward depression, although it still gives me a twinge of embarrassment to tell this story. I don’t want depression to define me. I know how to conquer it and keep it under control. I know how to prevent that descent down the spiral.