A few months ago, I was sitting in my grandmother’s living room with my
sister Leslie, my mother and, of course, Grandma herself. That day, my grandmother told Leslie and me a
family secret that had been buried so deep we’d never heard it before. We’d never even heard whispers about it.
The family secret involved family violence and mental illness. It involved my mother’s siblings being
removed from their parents’ custody, divided up, and temporarily placed in
orphanages, institutions, and a predecessor of the current foster care system.
My mother had never told us she’d been in foster care as a child. If my grandmother hadn’t brought it up that
day, I’m sure Leslie and I would never have found out. As far as my mother was concerned, it was a
memory she’d rather forget. As she put
it, “What happened in the past has no bearing on the present.” She wanted her shame to remain a secret, even
from her own children. Mom was not happy
with Grandma for telling us.
“We’ve gone too long not talking about these things,” my grandmother
said. “It’s been almost sixty years of
pretending these things never happened.”
And then she brought me into the conversation, saying, “Giselle had the
right idea when she saw a therapist in university. She needed to talk to someone, so she
did. That’s the healthy approach.”
My mother was livid. She
shouted, “Don’t you ever mention Giselle’s therapy again!”
I looked around the room. There
were only the four of us, and we all knew I’d been severely depressed as a
young adult. I asked my mother, “Why
don’t you want her talking about my therapy?
It’s not a secret. It’s not
something I’m ashamed of.”
My mother snapped, “Well, you should be!”
The room went silent—that heavy sort of silence that sits on your
chest, making it hard to breathe.
“Why should she be ashamed?” my grandmother asked. “She needed help and she got help. That’s admirable, if you ask me.”
“No, it’s not,” my mother said.
“When you go around saying you’re depressed, you’re in therapy, who’s
everybody going to blame? The
mother! Everyone will think it’s my
fault.”
“Who is everyone?” my sister asked, after keeping quiet for a long
time. “There are only four of us in the
room and we all know.”
My mother said, “I don’t want to talk about this.”
And that pretty much shut down the conversation.
Though I don’t think it’s a healthy attitude, I can understand my
mother’s fearful defensiveness. If anything,
it made me sad for her. Maybe she’ll never be able to stretch her emotional
boundaries wide enough to discuss her past.
But to shut me down so adamantly, and to insist that I muzzle my
experience with depression? It was
jarring, to say the least.
That’s why I’ve decided to write a book about living with
depression. Not to spite my mother,
though I kind of see how it might come across that way. No, she’s welcome to feel ashamed on my
behalf, if she so chooses. Writing this
book is important to me because I don’t want other people to feel ashamed of
their depression. Being depressed is bad
enough without being shamed for it!
My depression peaked when I was in my late teens and early twenties,
but it never went away. I still live with
depression. Though I’m no longer seeking
therapy to cope with day-to-day life, I find that talking to other people helps
tremendously.
I’m sure I’m not the only person in the world who’s been chastised by a
loved one for admitting I’m depressed.
Fortunately, I have a partner who understands depression intimately, because
she’s experienced those lows too. I
can’t overstate how much it helps to have someone in my life who gets it
because she’s been there.
That’s what makes this book so important to me. I’m not a psychologist (I failed out of the
psychology program at the University of Toronto—I was too depressed for success!),
but I am a writer, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from spending time
around other writers, it’s that a lot of us are depressed.
We battle depression. We live with depression. We cope with depression. We all have our own takes on how it interacts
with our lives, and how we interact with it, but with fifteen years of
depression under my belt, I’ve learned that sharing and communication makes a
huge difference.
But I can’t do this on my own.
I
need feedback from other writers—other writers who are now or who have in the
past been depressed.
If you’ve got
experience with depression, I need your opinions.
I’ve written out some questions and included
them in this survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8SQ7RJC
You can fill it out anonymously, or leave me your author name and bio
for attribution. If you fill in your email address, I’ll be only too pleased to
send you a copy of the book when it’s written—though, realistically, this
book’s going to take a while to compile and compose. I can’t write this book
without your input, so I express my humblest gratitude in advance. Thank you for your time and opinions!
(And if you think of any other questions you'd like answered in this book, please put them in the comments and I'll do up another survey. SurveyMonkey only lets me ask 10 questions at a time because I'm cheap and I only have a "basic" account. Basic is code for free. LOL)
Thanks again,
Giselle
