I love Therese Borchard’s essay Am I Depressed or Just Deep?

It makes me smile ruefully at myself.

Have you ever faked depression, in order to seem more deep than you really are?

I remember doing this a few times back  in high school. Guys seemed to be fascinated by moodiness, plus they’d behave more respectfully (is it unseemly to hit on the troubled girl?). I developed a certain far-off gaze and I learned to whisper things like Oh, I just feel so empty inside.

(Loved ones of mine reading this know it simply means “I’m hungry”).

I once went too far and told a boy about my “secret, quiet green place,” where I (supposedly) often went to be alone and brood.

Someday … maybe … I’ll take you there … I breathed, in my most mysterious, far-away, deep-and-profound-sounding voice.

He then began writing me ardent love poems about this special locale (which of course didn’t exist!), which made me feel bad enough to quit my depressed schtick.

In the decades since then, I’ve had some life experiences which floored me with the sheer force of shock and grief. Like most adults, I now have my own genuine collection of dark memories, regrets, losses. I’ve known emotional pain that’s knocked me to my knees. I’m actually grateful for that pain, pain so harsh that it did, indeed, feel like madness at the time. I’ll never forget it, and I’ll never take depression or any form of mental illness lightly ever again.

And I did used to worry about my mental health, since there’s some family propensity towards depression. But I’m now old enough and have been through enough potentially harmful experiences; it dawned on me recently that I probably won’t develop a mental illness. (It looks like I’m stuck with being shallow.)

On Easter, my family visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York City. We looked at the Van Goghs for a long time. The colors, the energy, the vision. Peter Kramer says that after his book Listening to Prozac came out, the most common question he’d get was “What if Van Gogh had taken Prozac?”

It’s hard to square the beauty of Van Gogh’s paintings with the disease inside his head.

Yet I do understand that suffering is a well-spring of creativity. Disease is a form of chaos and the human mind wants order and creates order where there is none.

We wandered outside into the warm day and up to the Central Park Reservoir, and as we sat along the edge and talked and laughed it occurred to me that the sun felt good and the water was brilliantly blue, and that I was happy and free of pain and therefore extremely fortunate.

It was a simple and shallow and very grateful thought.

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From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (April 6, 2010)

    Last reviewed: 6 Apr 2010