part0033

When I walk into the Van Gogh exhibit, I’m at depression level 4. This estimation is based on the chart doctors show to help you describe your physical pain, a zero to ten scale with corresponding smiley faces. I use it to approximate my mental health, too. Being at a 4 means I am the chartreuse smiley face: mouth a flat line, with the word “moderate” floating above it. In other words, I’m beginning to consistently not feel feelings.

So, no, I do not especially want to be at the Van Gogh exhibit. But then, I do not particularly want to be anywhere. And looking at paintings seems healthier than staring at nothing in my bedroom, vaguely wishing a small, specific asteroid would descend through the ceiling. Besides, going to the art museum is experimental, like pushing a bruise. Will I feel anything? Or will I, surrounded by famed artistry, feel a continual and pressing blankness?

The top floor of the museum is overcrowded, and the only thing that keeps me from retreating is a tidbit I recently read about Van Gogh—the speculation that he was a “migraineur.” That’s the word the article used. So stylized, so posh! Like the condition happened exclusively on a velvet chaise, one hand draped across his forehead. Not, say, groaning in a dark room while he increasingly feared his skull would split like dry bark. Not struggling to walk to the bathroom because of vertigo. Not calling off work again, all too aware that it sounds like an exaggeration.

In other words, I—fellow migraineur—am so hideously lonely for commiseration about my personal Venn diagram of art, mental health, and physical health that I dragged my level-4 depressed ass out in public.

Chronic migraines are not my only physical issue, and depression is not my only tango with mental illness, but I think they’re the two that intersect the most. Getting knocked out by a migraine for a day or two can act as a tripwire for depression. And, if I get a daylong migraine while already depressed, that nexus can really make me wish to be excused from the dinner table of mortal existence.

That sounds dramatic—I know. It does to currently healthy me, too. But twelve hours deep into what feels like an icepick to the forehead, with emotions that will not show up long enough to feel hopeful that it will end soon? Well.

Beyond even that, the two conditions share a lot: hours spent at doctors’ offices, medication trials and costs and side effects, the occasional spike in severity. Canceled plans. Frustrated crying at the setbacks and lost time. Hours spent in bed begging for sleep or, failing that, an asteroid. That kind of thing.

I guess I just want to know if Van Gogh knew what it’s like.

The exhibit is called Into the Undergrowth , and my first stop is its namesake, Van Gogh’s Undergrowth with Two Figures . The canvas shows the forest floor in flecks of pale green, swipes of saffron. Poplar trees run vertical, blue-violet and flushed-cheek pink. The horizon looms dark between the trees. In the center, two figures are painted with few details, but one appears to be wearing a dress, one a suit.

Van Gogh painted it less than a year before he shot himself.

I’m standing near a middle-aged man and his young daughter. He says to her, “This one, I like.”

I like the painting, too, but I only know that from memory. The museum owns it, so I’ve seen it before, and I remember feeling curious about the focus. Is it the two figures, centered but imprecise? Or is it the forest floor, rendered with such color and detail? If it’s the latter, why even include the people?

Squinting now, I try to read illness into Van Gogh’s point of view. I want to see it in his brushstrokes, the way you can see it in my fiction. Not always—just glimmers. If you share a specific malady experience with another, I think you can spot it sometimes.

So I try to spot it. The figures seem solitary and drab in an otherwise lively forest-world. That feels familiar, at least?

As I move around the crowded room, I can’t help but overhear the many conversations happening entirely too close to me. From them, I confirm that people only tend to know about Vincent van Gogh what I previously knew: Starry Night , those ginger-bearded self-portraits, and the ear thing. Oh, and that he was, as an older man standing next to me by one of the Bedroom at Arles paintings puts it, “Pretty freakin’ unwell .”

People do not tend to know when I am pretty freakin’ unwell. For a lot of reasons. I don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable or burdened or—often, I just don’t want to talk about it. But also because, frankly, most of the wrestling matches between my health and me happen in a dark bedroom. (Although, shout-out to the many strangers who saw me stretched out on LaGuardia’s floor during my last public migraine!) Usually, the sole spectator is my husband. That’s another thing that depression and migraines have in common. Only he sees me at my unhidable worst, when I am too exhausted or too sick to pretend it’s not really hard. Only he sees the frequency, the nuance. Otherwise, both beasts are near invisible unless I mention them.

I move toward a timeline of Van Gogh’s life, large on a prominent stretch of wall. His birth, his major career moments, and his breakdowns. This is familiar to me. Not his personal details, per se, but the inclusion of “episodes” in the timeline of someone’s life. It’s like any other milestone—a birthday or graduation or promotion. The calendar in my memory lists all the times the pain scale went past 9.

Van Gogh’s biographical info doesn’t mention migraines. It turns out I can feel one feeling today, and that is grumpy disappointment.

Near me, one woman asks another, “Did you know about the brother? I didn’t.”

I didn’t, either. She means Theo, Vincent van Gogh’s brother, who appears in approximately every third item on the timeline. They shared a close bond, exchanging hundreds of letters over the years. They’re buried side-by-side. When Vincent died, Theo wrote to his wife, “It was he who fostered and nurtured whatever good there might be in me.”

I admit, Theo’s existence and devotion surprise me. The middle school art class version of Vincent van Gogh painted him as so extraordinarily . . . alone. A genius, to be sure! But suffering. Desperate. Mad! I mean, the ear thing .

And maybe all that is true. It’s just not the whole painting.

“He wanted to be committed,” an older lady beside me tells her friend. “Did you know that? Can you imagine ?”

Yes. And yes. (Self-Portrait at Level 9.5. )

“I just don’t get it. His life doesn’t seem so bad,” the friend muses.

I imagine all the portrait lamps craning to put a spotlight on me. I’d tap-dance for these ladies, singing like in the finale of All That Jazz : “That’s not! How it . . . wooooooorks!” Standing there, I wonder—as I sometimes do—if people think of suicidal ideation as thoughts that are obviously sinister. If they assume the voice comes in a snake hiss or a demon’s warped bass. Does it occur to them that it could sound like the friend who nudges you at a bad, crowded party and whispers, conspiratorially, “Hey, let’s get out of here.” Do these women consider how well you have to know yourself to see that moment for what it is and whisper back, “You are not my real friend.”

The last comment I can stand to overhear comes from a man speaking to his son. He remarks how selfish suicide is.

Maybe he cannot think of another way to articulate the fundamental thing he wants his child to know: that this thing—this act—is tragic. But why did he go straight to selfishness, of all things? Here in this overcrowded exhibit, the anger overtakes me. It feels like hot poison in my core, spreading out to even the tiniest vein, up my neck, down my hands. I’m so mad that my fingertips tingle; I feel like I could zap this man with the pent-up energy like a ragey adult Matilda. “Van Gogh was really sick! ” I want to yell at him. “Tell your kid that mental illness can be very hard, and how important health care and access are, how we have to talk about it.”

I mean, honestly, what are all these people even doing here? Do they just love irises? Go to brunch! For god’s sake, if you can still enjoy the taste of pancakes, eat them! I have lost access to that particular pleasure. And all pleasures. ALL I HAVE IS THIS ROOMFUL OF PAINTINGS AND IT’S NOT GOING GREAT .

I fantasize cutting off my earlobe just to throw it at the boy’s father.

“Sorry!” I would say, wild-eyed with blood dribbling down my neck. “Sometimes we unwells just can’t resist!”

I’m so mad that I start laughing. Because I can feel something! Is it some kind of noxious hate smog, leaking out from my pores? Yes! Is it a deep resentment toward people who do not understand? Yes! But it is something .

I am wrong in that moment. I am objectively, statistically wrong, and I know it even then. In a room that crowded, plenty understand very well, and some have certainly suffered more than I. Maybe even this very man has grappled with depression! Health—mental and physical—intersects with every other part of life. And when I’m healthy, I feel lucky that I’ve woven a support system and resources—treasured ropes that, together, make a fairly sturdy net. There are worse things than this head of mine, and we do okay with art and with a Theo or two.

That night, I settle back into bed with my laptop, hunting for more Van Gogh information. I watch video clips; I read some letters between Vincent and his brother. It’s good that I am interested enough to do this, even if I am mostly journeying back into the 1800s as a pathetic grasp for commonality.

One thing I have learned from years of migraines is that I can try medicine and sometimes find comfort in distraction—a podcast at a low volume, a bath. But, usually, I just have to outlast them. It’s been a useful lesson for depression.

Outlasting doesn’t feel very noble, though. It mostly feels like being in bed.

Eventually, my husband comes upstairs and lies beside me.

“Verdict on the exhibit?” he asks.

“Liked the paintings; hated the people,” I offer, and he laughs at my uncharacteristic meanness. Some nights, I can joke about how bad I feel. Humor takes a little power away from depression and migraines. They can hurt me, but I still take potshots, making little dings in their metal exteriors .

From my art expedition, I wanted camaraderie. I hoped to see the specific cross-section of mental illness and pain reflected on canvas. But maybe Van Gogh didn’t even have migraines. Maybe he wasn’t trying to convey his personal life through art at all. Maybe he was just trying to render wheat fields on canvas and get through the day. That’s what I’m often trying to do, in a manner of speaking.