Infinite Sadness

As early as pre-pubescence, if not earlier — before I had even developed the capacity to be able to put a name to such a thing — I can remember feeling this all encompassing, gnawing sadness. By the the time I had started puberty it sat with me like the dull weight of the boring textbooks I had to lug around. It also took on gnarlier, more complex forms. It began to develop a voice. I was useless, it said. Stupid. Unworthy of love and attention. Every interaction was fraught with a million different anxieties. That thing I just said was embarrassing. This person is just pretending to like me. I am literally a hideous monster.

I somehow managed to convince everyone I was okay. I moved easily between the popular kids and the not so popular kids. I was likeable and funny and was never bullied or made to feel like an outcast. No one picked up on how weak and hopeless and lost I felt. No one knew that I had toyed with putting a belt around my neck and over the cupboard door in my bedroom for the first time when I was 14.

I thought that I was just wired this way. It was such a pervasive, all reaching feeling that I figured something must have just been broken or went wrong at some point.

People where I am from did not talk about the kind of hell I was living. You did not hear anyone talking about having Depression. Vague things were said about someone’s aunt being on “them crazy pills” or Steve from dad’s work having a breakdown; jokes about men in white coats coming to get him. In a small, working class industrial town in Northern England in the 90s and early 00s, mental illness was a stigma that people directed a knowing nudge and wink at. Like someone’s cousin being gay. I had no name for the thing I was feeling.

Growing up, I saw my family live through so much painful, toxic and heavy shit — which I will not go into here — but through it all no one ever even flirted with talking about feelings. There was no quarter for openness or tenderness, or the sharing of shared pain. I could not talk to anyone about what I was going through.

I lived like this until I was 22. In that time the sadness had gotten even heavier, the self defeating voice even louder. I had memories of things that I could not deal with. I still could not explain what I was going through. I still thought it was just the way that I was wired. Then a friend from The States sent me a copy of Infinite Jest.

“It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed.”

There are many things that I love about Infinite Jest. It looks at people with addiction and mental health issues with an empathy and tenderness that belies its reputation for being a cold and difficult book. It is both one of the funniest and saddest books I have read. I have said, without hyperbole, that this book saved my life. When I say this I am thinking of the terrifying, lucid descriptions of depression that helped me first understand what I had always been going through.

There are many characters in Infinite Jest who live with Depression and other mental illnesses but it is Wallace’s study of Kate Gompert’s internal terror that gave me — for the first time in my life — a way put a name and shape to my own terror.

I am going to do a big dump of words from the book now because I am not here parse the text. This isn’t an academic essay.

“It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.”

I had never known the level of catharsis I felt when I first read these paragraphs. I was not just wired wrong. I was not beyond hope and help. I was SICK. I had Clinical Depression. In that one commencement speech that people like to quote DFW from, he talks about this “sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.” The only way I can think of describing how I felt in that moment, sat in my bedroom at around 2am, was of having lost and then found some infinite thing. For the first time in my adult life I had hope that things could get better.

A few days after finishing Infinite Jest I made an appointment to see a Doctor. I made it under the ruse of having a pain in my legs being seen to. After talking about the genuine pain in my legs, I looked straight down at the linoleum of my doctor’s office floor and slowly tried to articulate the real reason for my appointment. I don’t remember how I described the problem. Something about just being so very sad almost all of the time. Something about the constant negative self-talk. I wasn’t nearly as coherent as I had hoped to be and every word I said felt like it thudded dully around my chest like a too heavy thing in a tumble drier before it came out of my mouth. My doctor understood what I was trying to say and we talked about my options. I left with a prescription for prozac and an appointment for some CBT sessions.

After a few weeks of taking two green and yellow capsules every morning, I began to feel a gradual but very real shift inside of myself. I was only sad some of the time. The voice that told me I was terrible would only speak up some of the time. A few more weeks passed and I was able to get up and do regular, normal things with an ease that I had never known before. I was now sad what seemed to me to be a regular amount. I was able, at times, to even feel happy. My brain, miraculously, even started telling me things like: you are okay, you are doing fine, you have got this, your friends enjoy your company. It felt like suddenly being given a map to some place I had been lost in for so many years.

I was able to make real plans for the first time. After years of odd jobs and periods of unemployment I registered onto a college course at 22. Just months previously I had found myself at times struggling to do something as basic as get out of bed and brush my teeth but now I was managing to complete work to such a high level that I got myself a place at a University that I would never before have dreamed I would have been able to attend. I had never even imagined that I could go to University at all.

I would love to say at this point that I remained healthy and had an incredible time at University and eventually graduated, being the first person in my family to earn a degree. But like most people who take antidepressants for the first time I stopped taking them when I felt better. I thought that I was cured.

I won’t go into full detail about the horror I lived through that year I moved away from home and tried to start University, it would be pages upon pages in itself. But after two weeks of being genuinely happier than I had ever been, things began to get darker again. By the end of September my clothes were all a size too big. By the end of October I was spending days at a time without leaving my room, not eating and drinking from the sink because I was too afraid to face anyone in the kitchen. It took me until November to tell a friend that something was very wrong.

I was put back on prozac when my friend took me to the doctors. The prozac didn’t work this time, which is a thing that can happen if you stop taking an SSRI and later take the same one again. Things got much, much worse before the new pills could start to work. My friend took me to A & E to try and get me help in December and I was referred to a community mental health crisis team.

I tried to hang myself on January 23rd, 2011. The only thing that saved me was the frantic panic when I begin to feel the pain and my flailing, outstretched leg that somehow found footing on the wheeled chair that hadn’t toppled over or rolled too far to the other side of the room.

None of the help that I was getting was any help at all. I was telling my mental health crisis workers that I still wanted to die and they were telling me that I should take long walks and exercise. I felt like catatonic Hal wailing on the floor in front of the University of Arizona admissions staff. I was in there but nobody could hear.

I tried to hang myself again, drunk, in May 2011. This time the door bracket that I had attached my belt to had ripped off the door and I was found on the floor by my flat-mate. I was first seen by the police and asked questions like why did I do that like I was supposed to know. I was then taken in an ambulance to the hospital. Once I had gotten through triage I was left for about 2 hours in a room with four blank walls and no windows, one light bulb, one chair and no door in the door frame. When the on call mental health nurses finally made it to me, I somehow convinced them that I was okay and it was just a drunken rage and they let me go. They let me walk out of the door, unaccompanied at about 5am, after I had tried to hang myself for the 2nd time of the year.

Something turned in me after that night and I realised I was going to have to fight for myself. I kept my head above water for a few weeks and slowly the new pills seemed to calm things down. By the summer I was steadily and tentatively learning to live again.

I packed up my room at the end of the school year while listening to This Year by the Mountain Goats on repeat.

A few months later I got a tattoo that quotes Hal’s desperate, unheard utterance of “I am in here” at the beginning of Infinite Jest. It is my constant reminder of what I have survived and what I can survive. It is a warning to myself to be vigilant to signs of the illness I will probably have to manage for my whole life.

I have had a few periods of Depression since then, each one easier to navigate and manage than the last. When you go through these things it starts to feel a bit like playing an RPG and levelling up. The monsters are still scary but you have better weapons now and you have developed a sick core. I think I’m about level 69 in not thinking about suicide right now.

If I did not read Infinite Jest when I was 22, I am doubtful I would have sought help when I did. This is why I mean it way I say a book saved my life.

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