When I was growing up, there was no word for what I was experiencing.
Well, there was, actually—depression—but I didn’t know it. This was the eighties, and I was growing up in a lower-income, single-parented home—and what all of that meant in my case was that that kind of language just wasn’t around.
Meanwhile, I don’t know if I even really used the less clinical word moody, but as a teenager, I could see that I had dark moods and that little things—a downcast expression on my mother’s face, an awkward conversation with a peer, a broken slab of sidewalk slate—could bring those moods on without much warning.
By then, I’d started to think of myself as a writer, and I had the idea that maybe my experiences were tied to some kind of artistic temperament. Artistic temperaments, which I had heard of, sounded romantic. And so I used the word sensitive. My girlfriend at the time, on the other hand, did not find any of it romantic, and she preferred to call it low self-esteem (generally exasperatedly).
It wasn’t until college when I more or less fell into a psychology major—which eventually became a graduate degree in psychology—that I started to get the technical terminology: depression, for example. And that was a real comfort: I am a thing! A known thing that has a word! The terminology also pointed toward possible solutions, like therapy and medication. Both of those resources have helped me an awful lot over the years, too.
In a certain kind of essay, that would be the end of it. Give a young man some words to help him label himself and seek help, and that young man is all set.
But this isn’t that kind of essay. Although the word depression got me pretty far, it wasn’t quite enough.
While a shared word like depression helps you connect yourself to a larger narrative involving lots and lots of other people, it does leave out the individual differences.
It misses the details of your unique life. And it doesn’t necessarily answer questions like: How did I end up here? or Now what? How do I live my life going forward?
In order to answer those questions, I had to find more than single words; I had to find enough to tell my story. I had to come back to writing.
And so I did. Even while I was in graduate school, I wrote—a lot. My early short stories, ultimately collected in my first book, Between Camelots, were earnest and intense explorations of the lived experience of depression. (Kirkus Reviews used the word “dejection,” perhaps exasperatedly.)
Over time, however, I learned how to write poetry and fiction in which depression was an element but not the entire story. Not to mention poetry and fiction that was about other important things altogether. Because of course, depression isn’t my entire story—not nearly.
Therapy and medication helped me get to that understanding. But, perhaps equally, so did writing. And writing into my story actually helped the therapy and medication be more effective, too—more effective than any label could.
Most recently, I managed to write my way back to my teenage years in my novel Possible Happiness, which is about a guy a lot like me, growing up in the eighties in a lower-income, single-parented home in which helpful language for mental health just wasn’t around. I revisited those times and made some sense of them and found out the ways in which none of it was reducible to moodiness, sensitivity, low self-esteem, or even depression. A world in which all of those things were only elements within a much richer story, one that was full of truth, humor, kindness, mistakes, complicated relationships, and people trying their limited best. I managed, in sum, to write the novel that I wish I’d had access to at that age.
So, what about you? Now what? I’m not saying that you have to write novels, memoirs, poems, or blog posts—though you absolutely can do any or all of those things. Maybe you’ll do better finding your own words in your journal or in conversations with friends or therapists. But what I am saying is that I think it’s better to uncover and tell your full story (if only to yourself) than to simply rest on labels. Certainly, it’s better than having no language at all.
Words like depression are a great place to start, and I’m really happy that young people today have more access to these kinds of terms than I did growing up. But they’re only a starting point; the rest of the words probably have to be your own.
Depression has a way of making us feel incredibly isolated. We’re here to remind you of the truth that you are not alone. We encourage you to use TWLOHA’s FIND HELP Tool to locate professional help and to read more stories like this one here. If you reside outside of the US, please browse our growing International Resources database. You can also text TWLOHA to 741741 to be connected for free, 24/7 to a trained Crisis Text Line counselor. If it’s encouragement or a listening ear that you need, email our team at info@twloha.com.