Everything felt fragile and freshly come upon, but for now, at least, my depression had stepped back, giving me room to move forward. I had forgotten what it was like to be without it, and for a moment I floundered, wondering how I would recognize myself. I knew for certain it would return, sneaking up on me when I wasn’t looking, but meanwhile there were bound to be glimpses of light if only I stayed around and held fast to the long perspective. It was a chance that seemed worth taking.
The real question was why no one ever seemed to figure this grim scenario out on her own, just by looking at you. This was enraging in and of itself — the fact that severe depression, much as it might be treated as an illness, didn’t send out clear signals for others to pick up on; it did its deadly dismantling work under cover of normalcy. The psychological pain was agonizing, but there was no way of proving it, no bleeding wounds to point to. How much simpler it would be all around if you could put your mind in a cast, like a broken ankle, and elicit murmurings of sympathy from other people instead of skepticism (“You can’t really be feeling as bad as all that”) and in some cases outright hostility (“Maybe if you stopped thinking about yourself so much. . .”).
But I was conflicted even about so primary an issue as survival. I wasn’t sure I wanted to ambush my own downward spiral, where the light at the end of the tunnel, as the mood-disordered Robert Lowell once said, was just the light of the oncoming train. I saw myself go splat on the pavement with a kind of equanimity, with a sense of a foretold conclusion. Self-inflicted death had always held out a stark allure for me: I was fascinated by people who had the temerity to bring down the curtain on their own suffering — who didn’t hang around, moping, in hopes of a brighter day. I knew all the arguments about the cowardice and selfishness (not to mention anger) involved in committing suicide, but nothing could persuade me that the act didn’t require a perverse sort of courage, some steely embrace of self-extinction. At one and the same time, I have also always believed that suicide victims don’t realize they won’t be coming this way again. If you are depressed enough, it seems to me, you begin to conceive of death as a cradle, rocking you gently back to a fresh life, glistening with newness, unsullied by you.
Although some tiny part of me retained a dim sense of the more functioning person I once was — like a room with a closed door that was never entered anymore — it became increasingly difficult to envision myself ever inhabiting that version of myself again. There had been too many recurrent episodes, too many years of trying to fight off this debilitating demon of a thing. It has been called by different names at different times in history — melancholia, malaise, cafard, brown study, the blues, the black dog, acedia — and has been treated as a spiritual malady, a failure of will, a biochemical malfunctioning, a psychic conundrum, sometimes all at once. Whatever it was, it had come to define me, filling out all the available space, leaving no possibility of a “before” or an “after.” Instead I harbored the hallucinatory conviction that I had stayed around the scene of my own life too long — that I was, in some unyielding sense, ex post facto.
In the end there is no one to intervene on your behalf when you disappear again into what feels like a psychological dungeon — a place that has a familiar musky smell, a familiar lack of light and excess of enclosure — except the people you’ve paid large sums of money to talk to over the years. I have sat in shrinks’ offices going on four decades now and talked about my wish to die the way other people might talk about their wish to find a lover.
My name is Gabrielle and I am twenty-eight years old. I began to self-injure at age fifteen -- so nearly thirteen years -- minus a two year period. This website was made to let self-injurers know that they are not alone and to help their friends and family learn more about self-injury and how it affects their loved one.
