Author and poet Sylvia Plath, known for her relationship with depression
Artists aren’t the only people that battle depression and anxiety, but sometimes they have a way of sharing their experience that helps us understand what many of us, including myself, have gone through. The sheer power of depression hit me recently when a close friend ended her life, abruptly, without any of us realizing the depth of her condition.
The author and poet Sylvia Plath, notorious for her battles with depression, captured a piece of what the experience was like for her in the poem “I Am Vertical.” In it, she writes:
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them-
Thoughts gone dim
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the
flowers have time for me.
While mourning my friend’s death, I’ve been looking at the ebb and flow of depression in my own life. I had an email exchange with an artist friend recently, and she shared some of the strategies she’s come up with to deal with her own depression. She writes:
When you feel stress/frustration/anger/sadness start to take hold, try to:
Isolate the source. Is it Work? Family? Career path?
Acknowledge what you’re feeling i.e. “I feel anxious because I have to spend time with my family and feel responsible for everyone having a good time.”
Decide whether it legitimately deserves your immediate attention: Is it external (i.e. I can’t pay my bills), or is it internal (a pattern of thinking that has evolved over time which isn’t productive?). For instance, “I often feel let down by other people’s behaviour. I work my ass off to produce quality work, and try my best to make other people feel good, why don’t they reciprocate on the same level?” You probably judge yourself critically, and hold other people up to the same standards. Your expectations and standards are just that, yours. Theirs could be totally different. Also, people aren’t perfect. They are at various stages of figuring themselves out. You need to be able to forgive them for not acting the way you would act in a situation. You need to forgive them for not having the focus and determination that you have. If you can do this, you will begin to feel a sense of inner peace.
Having identified the nature of the stress (external stimuli vs. internal), set a timetable for thinking about it. If it’s external, like your own project, decide how many hours a day you will devote to working on/thinking about it. When that time is up, the work/thoughts stop. You have two hours tomorrow, and the day after, etc. The time in between is YOUR time.
If the stress is internal, make the decision to change your thought patterns. For example “I’m not going to assume the worst and imagine possible outcomes for things. I’m going to deal with things as they come. If something bad happens, I’ll deal with it. Until then, I’m going to assume things will go smoothly.” When you become conscious of how certain thinking patterns steer you towards negative conclusions, it becomes easier to control them, and eventually, alleviate them altogether.
And that’s the gospel according to my friend. And I can’t tell you how much it’s helped me. I hope it has the same effect for you.
