by Mia Mercado
One of the questions counselors or therapists or general practitioners ask when you say the magic word “depressed” is whether you recognize any patterns in what brings on your depressive episodes. Before I got on medication, long before I admitted to myself and those around me that I have depression, I only had these mismatched scenes of sadness committed to memory.
I remember downing gin and tonics at a townie bar while home for Christmas one year. I remember catching up with friends, mentioning that maybe my birth control was making me depressed. I remember laughing afterward and hoping I said it all in a joking enough way. Later, we all went to this McMansion where my friend was house-sitting. I drunkenly snuck into a basement storage closet with shelves and shelves of these amber glass apothecary bottles. Where does depression hurt? my voiceover asked. There were so many bottles. They were pretty and tiny and all my drunken brain could think about was how much I wanted one. There had to be at least fifty of these bottles. There’s no way anyone would notice if I took one, I justified. I grabbed one and carried it around like a trophy all night. Everywhere, I answered. The bottle has been to two states, through two moves, and lived in two different homes with me. It still sits on my bedside dresser.
I remember, a year or so later, being at a restaurant called Houlihan’s with my boyfriend at the time. I left him to wait for our table in the lobby while I went to a bathroom stall to sob. If you’ve never been to a Houlihan’s, it’s a great place to have a depressive breakdown. It’s similar to a Macaroni Grill or even a Cheesecake Factory in that it’s hard to pin down just how fancy or casual it is. You could see a group of high schoolers in glittery lamé, picking at Caesar salads before the homecoming dance seated next to a two-top with a person dining alone, unshowered and wearing sweats, and none of it would seem out of place. I don’t remember what I was sad about, why my body insisted on letting out a few silent sobs in a public bathroom. I don’t remember if anyone saw me wiping snot on my sleeve as I walked out of the bathroom. I don’t remember if my ex asked what was wrong when I returned to the table. I do remember that the macaroni and cheese had pot roast in it, and it was delicious. I think about it more than I do my ex.
I remember the time I came back to my apartment after having a shitty time at a wedding. They played that “angel is the centerfold” song during the reception. That wasn’t the only reason I had a shitty time, but it’s the one that sums it up the best. When I got home, the guy I was seeing was in the living room, sipping whiskey and working on a screenplay. I was upset. He wanted to keep writing. We didn’t talk. I’d never been so angry to be part of some pseudo-Zach-Braff-directed indie movie in my life. Where was this scene in the Cymbalta montage?
I remember, later that year, getting ready to go to a costume party for an acquaintance’s birthday and all of a sudden panicking that I looked too stupid to go out in public. I remember standing in the living room, half-crying, half-hyperventilating, fully freaking out, and telling this to the guy I was with. Who does depression hurt? the voiceover asks breathlessly. The way he looked at me—with a combination of disgust, exhaustion, embarrassment, and confusion—is something I will remember forever. Everyone, I whisper.
In January of 2018, I started the generic version of Lexapro, my current antidepressant weapon of choice. Because no one told me what the process of getting on an antidepressant would look like, I will impart my specific journey unto you.
Step 1: Feel fine most of the time.
“Fine” may be feeling sad or neutral or nothing or intense happiness in regular-ish cycles. If you were to chart your feelings, they would look like teen acne: bumpy but in a way that you assume comes with the territory of being a person.
Step 2: Have a Bad Day.
You’ll say these sync up with your period starting or your period stopping or the week before your period starts or the third day of your cycle or the week-and-a-half after your cycle ends. I’m just feeling emotional, you might say. This is just a momentary low, you’ll lie. The Bad Day will usually happen at night.
Step 3: Repeat Steps 1 and 2 again and again and again.
Sometimes a Step 1.5 will come into play where you think, See? The Bad Day ended and now I’m fine. Everything is fine!!! The following Step 2 will hit you swiftly. Vengefully, even.
Step 4: Have the first of many Conversations.
My recurring Conversation was with Riley, my then-fiancé, now husband. Riley is a golden retriever of a human being who somehow manifests his self-worth from—and I cannot stress this enough—himself. Once I said, “You know how you have days where you just don’t like yourself.” And he said, “. . . No?” We have very different experiences with mental health. Thus, our Conversation usually went something like this:
RILEY: Do you think you maybe need to talk to someone?
ME: I don’t know.
RILEY: I think you need to talk to someone.
ME: I don’t even know how I would start doing that.
RILEY: We can figure it out.
ME: I’m tired. And the idea of talking to someone makes me even more tired. And, obviously, I’ve thought about talking to someone. I, too, have seen an after-school special once. Allow me to verbally T-shirt-cannon all the reasons why talk therapy may not work and why going on medication is terrifying and how I know all the reasons I’m broken thus making me both perfect and unfixable. I just need to be upset for the next five minutes or ten hours or thirty years, and then I’ll be fine.
Saying “I don’t know” or “I don’t care” were my shorthand for “I can’t even begin to start thinking about this. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to make decisions right now, and anything you suggest will be something I’ve already thought about. Nothing you say can fix this, but, for the love of God, do not stop talking with me.” Eventually, we’d get me back to Step 1.
Step 5: Continue repeating Steps 1 and 2.
Long swaths of time will pass. Sometimes you will have weeks and weeks without a Bad Day. Sometimes your days will be bad with a lowercase “b” and you’ll think, Everyone has bad days. It’s fine to feel bad. Healthy, even. Then, you’ll have One Big Bad Day. Or maybe it will just feel Big because you’d convinced yourself you were fine. Or maybe this one will feel less Big than previous Bads, despite it being equally large and ferocious. This low is fine, you’ll justify. I’ve felt lower than this, you’ll say, pretending to remember a moment other than the one you’re currently experiencing.
In the swirling of Bad and Low, it’s hard not to feel resentful of Riley. (And then, if you’re playing along at home, feel even worse for feeling resentful, and so on and so forth. Big Sadness, no Whammies!) How dare he be mentally stable. How absolutely cruel of him to have never been depressed. How heartless to try to help me through something I pray he will never experience firsthand.
Step X: Actually do something.
This step isn’t assigned a number as these things don’t tend to follow any real chronology. Much to Riley’s dismay, my depression doesn’t progress along any sort of actual time line. It doesn’t come with any sort of manual or follow a framework that says, “If ‘depressed,’ simply say X and do Y. Then, voilà! No more depression.”
During one particularly Low and Bad Day, I let Riley help me find a doctor. It was late. We were both crying in bed. He got out the laptop and googled something groundbreaking like “general practitioners near me.” He showed me a doctor close by, covered by the insurance I’d bought through the marketplace. (Thanks, Obama.) I decided she looked enough like a doctor. So, Riley set up the appointment for me the next month. “Something about how I’m interested in starting antidepressants,” I dictated as Riley typed the reason for my visit. I probably said it sarcastically (saying “interested” and “antidepressants” in the same sentence should automatically revoke my depression card), but Riley typed it with sincerity.
Telling a stranger, even one who is a doctor of medicine, that you are depressed is buck fucking wild. If you get uncomfor
table having a new doctor take your measurements or look up your nose, imagine being asked questions like “Do you feel like you are a failure or that you have let yourself or your family down?” And then, imagine having to say yes!
After asking whether I’d had thoughts of wanting to hurt myself or others (“Not really,” I said—a half-truth), my doctor told me a story about a former colleague whose child died from suicide years ago. Later, after telling her I’m half-Asian (a full truth and not part of the depression screening questions), she told me about another colleague who was Filipino and always invited her to karaoke. “Filipinos love their karaoke,” she said before asking if I had a preferred pharmacy to pick up my prescription. I’d literally just finished telling her how I hate myself to a diagnosable degree, but yeah, sure, Dr. Saunders, let’s talk about karaoke.
Getting medical confirmation that you are, in fact, depressed is both a gift and a curse. Congratulations! You’re right! You DO have depression! Welcome to hell.
Starting antidepressants and getting back into regularly seeing a counselor hasn’t solved my depression altogether, but knowing I’m doing something feels good. I still have Bad Days, but they aren’t as frequent. I can actually count the number I’ve had in the past year on just a few fingers. I still don’t like myself all the time. (Wow, can you believe it: you can’t just take a pill that makes you like yourself.) I’m working on that, or at least I’m working on working on it. I don’t feel like I’m waiting for an inevitable Bad Day, like I’m due for a scheduled breakdown because I’ve been feeling suspiciously okay. When I do have Bad Days, at least they have a ground floor instead of the way they used to feel like I could spiral downward forever into a dense nothingness.
That Cymbalta commercial has stuck with me in part because of how long I denied my own depression. I can’t be depressed, I’d think, because that would mean I’m literally hurting everyone around me.
Perhaps the most terrible way to pull someone out of a depressive episode is to tell them their depression and self-hatred are hurting not only themselves but everyone around them. (This is second only to telling a cute anecdote about suicide and adding a racial microaggression for good measure.) I’d love to see an erectile dysfunction ad that shows a montage of people alone at a dinner table, a dog waiting to play fetch, children with their heads in their hands. Who does ED hurt? Everyone.
It’s strange to have depression but not actively feel depressed. It feels like a lie to feel good, like other people will think I was faking it all. I think I thought an antidepressant would feel like a Band-Aid or an EpiPen. It’d stop the bleeding at the source, counter my allergic reaction to being alive. Honestly, it’s more like a Claritin or some other over-the-counter allergy pill. If I take it regularly, my body won’t sneeze sadness quite as much or with as gross a mucus.
While not doctor prescribed, there are some things that hit me in just the right happiness spot and create a shift in my depressive universe. I can feel a fog lift or a weight lessen, and suddenly I get why people feel happy sometimes. Here is a truncated list of some of the actual things that have helped pull me out of depressive spells:
Jonas Brothers’ 2019 Billboard Music Awards performance
The warm sunny spot on my back deck
Watching a tiny girl in a school uniform hoist herself up on a coffee shop counter to get a cup (I still tear up thinking about this)
Going to Trader Joe’s and buying expensive cheese I eat so quickly it should be illegal
Remembering I love black olives, buying black olives, and eating a whole can of black olives
My dog, Ava, being so small and stinky
Ana waiting, crying, laughing with me until the Low and Bad leaves
Riley being adamant that he will always want to stay
Sometimes I get so mad that there are people who wake up regularly feeling fine. That I have to take a pill that makes my brain not hate its host. That that pill fucks with my sleep as much as my actual depression does. That I’ve started taking nightly doses of melatonin or Target-brand ZzzQuil to get tired at a normal time. That that helps me fall asleep but makes me extra groggy in the morning. That my regular habit of sleeping in and feeling tired adds to feeling unproductive and that the feeling of unproductivity makes me hate myself more. That I can’t just take a bath, sip on some Sleepytime tea, fall asleep easily, and wake up like, “Ahh, blessed morning to you and me.”
Sometimes I’m fine. Such are the pros and cons of having depression. Not to sound like a Cymbalta commercial, but I’ve learned there isn’t just one way to look, act, or be depressed. It took me a long time to get here, and I am, admittedly, still learning. I’d be lying if I said I don’t still loop back to wondering whether I’m sad enough, happy enough, enough enough. Depression looks like everything and nothing, everyone and no one, all of it, all at once, none of the time.
I recently asked Ana where she thought my mom went when she’d leave the house. I’d assumed an empty parking lot. Ana thought she drove to a park near Lake Michigan. For the first time, instead of wondering, I asked my mom where she’d go when she’d leave.
“Can I be honest with you?” she said. “I don’t remember doing that.” This is one of the strange parts of growing to see your parents as whole, entire people. I’d guess my mom would say the same about learning your child is a whole, entire adult.
My mom talked to me about forgetting, about remembering, about whether there is a “normal” amount to feel sad, about her pain not being believed. My mom and I have different languages for our sadness. We map our emotional roads differently, though they both loop repeatedly around exhaustion and occasional hopelessness.
It’d be naive to say the way I process my depression isn’t in some part influenced by the way my parents think about their own brains, their own bodies, their whole entire selves. I also know there are some stories that are not mine to tell. I often wonder whether the parts of myself I identify as “very much my mom” are me mimicking movements I’ve seen my mother perform or my body doing a dance it was always going to do. It’s hard to look at yourself objectively, to not assign meaning or blame or quantify what is “good” or “bad” or “right” or “wrong.”
“I accept myself for all the negatives,” my mom wrote me once. I do, too, I think. At least, I’m trying to.
I recently rewatched that Cymbalta commercial. It’s as melodramatic as I remember, but now it seems more funny than it does sad. Maybe that’s all I can ask of everything, that it’s more funny than sad. That life can be a little bit of everything all at the same time.
Part 2
On Being Professional
These are stories on work, on school, on all things career-oriented. They are about the rituals we adopt when establishing our work routines, the things we make a habit of without really thinking twice about. (Drinking hot bean juice in the morning; staring at one screen during the day for work and another screen at night for fun; owning “dress pants” at all.)
Being female-presenting in the workplace is another onslaught of strangeness. It’s unspoken rules about which men are going to hit on you and how you just need to expect that. It’s the simultaneous, deep-seated fear that no one will flirt with you at this, your place of work, making you feel the truly fucked-up feeling of “Am I . . . not pretty enough to be harassed?” Then, as you’re feeling shitty for feeling that feeling, some guy in middle management who graduated college three decades before you even had your first period is like, “I wish you were around when I was your age,” winks at you, and the whole cycle repeats itself.
I’ve held jobs that, in their description, are objectively strange: greeting card editor, Instagram caption writer for a candy bar, author of this book. But if you think about it, no job makes sense. A team of people designed a Snuggie, and they got money for doing that. That’s a job!
How to Quit Your Job and Change Your Life
My summer of 2016 lasted, roughly, three million lifetimes. Not only wer
e we all deep in the throes of the presidential election, living blissfully unaware of our post–November 8 fate, but I was deeply entrenched in trying to figure out my professional life. Does the outcome of that presidential election have greater long-term cultural significance than me, a singular person, wondering, but what should I do, like, job-wise?!?!? I mean, sure. Is one of the most monumental political events of modern-day history perhaps worth more than a couple of throwaway contextual lines? Yeah, yeah, but I am what’s important here. So, join me, won’t you, as I make this all about me.
I began the summer by quitting a job where I’d just celebrated my five-year work anniversary. I’d never had to quit a job before. Every other job I had prior to that either had a specific end date (like internships and college work-study programs) or was short-term babysitting. You don’t really quit babysitting. Either the kids eventually get old enough to make mac and cheese themselves or one day you just send a text like, “Sorry, Cathy, I’m not free to babysit next weekend because I actually moved to a different state! Give your monster of a six-year-old my regards!”
The decision to leave that job—my first Real Adult Job, which I’d started immediately after graduating from college—wasn’t really a difficult one. The job itself was fine and paid well. For me, it was, at least initially, a literal dream job. I was the humor editor at a greeting card company. (Yes, it’s the greeting card company you’re thinking of.) My job, at its most basic level, was to decide which writers’ jokes were funny enough to be on greeting cards. I was getting paid real, human money to pick a fart joke that was “most appropriate for a Father’s Day card.” (Insider tip: all fart jokes, large and small, wet and dry, are appropriate for a Father’s Day card.)
If you’ve ever wondered who makes those greeting cards you immediately recycle after you take out your grandma’s yearly birthday check, the answer is me. Well, me along with a team of editorial directors, art directors, writers, designers, production artists, marketing people, and business people, and that doesn’t even begin to name the people involved in the process of actually printing and producing a card. There’s a wild number of people who touch a greeting card before Granny seals it up with the dollar equivalent of however old you’re turning. It’s very “We Are the World” but with all our grubby hands encircling your birthday card.